We need urgently to bring about a revolution in universities around the world, wherever possible, so that they take their fundamental task to be, not to acquire and apply knowledge, but rather to help humanity learn how to resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways, so that we may make progress towards a good, genuinely civilized, wise world. The pursuit of knowledge would be a vital but subsidiary task. I have argued for the urgent need for (...) such an academic revolution for nearly 50 years, ever since the publication of two books: What’s Wrong With Science? Towards a People’s Rational Science of Delight and Compassion, 1976, and From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the Humanities, 1984, both available free online. This article, written in preparation for a talk given to Pittsburgh University on the 15th September 2023, gives an outline of my baffled struggles with problems of philosophy, science, literature and life that led up to the discovery of the urgent need for an intellectual and institutional revolution in universities around the world, needed in order to galvanize the social revolution required to enable us to make progress to a world in which peace, justice, democracy, individual freedom, sustainable prosperity, the possibility of a good life, are available to all, insofar as that is attainable. (shrink)

Before Plato there are ample cases in which Greek poets, philosophers, and politicians recognize the possibility that individual and social good can conflict. Nor does Plato think that a full understanding of the notion of one's good must demonstrate that it cannot conflict with standards of justice. On the contrary, Plato holds that such conflicts can occur even in the case of the rulers of his ideal city‐state. This idea is not contradicted by evidence of other works, such as the (...) Meno, the Symposium, and the Philebus. Nevertheless, although Plato's view admits what is normally thought to be a characteristically Kantian conflict of ethical standards with one's good, it still possesses some distinctly eudaimonistic elements that are at variance with the Kantian view. (shrink)

Although Aristotle's ethics is rightly characterized as eudaimonist, in making the happiness of an individual his preeminent aim, it does not adopt the harmonizing eudaimonist position that all constituents of human happiness are consistent with each other. For one thing, he holds that there can be conflicts between friends. In addition, he maintains that conflicts within happiness can break out, between the value of acting in a morally virtuous way and that of pursuing intellectual virtue or contemplation. Aristotle thus admits (...) the possibility of conflict within virtue, and therefore within happiness, which is defined as activity in accordance with virtue. He accordingly does not use the notion of virtue, let alone an ethics of virtue, to construct a harmonizing view of happiness. (shrink)

It is well known that Kant connects judgment and feeling in the third Critique. However, the precise relationship between these two faculties remains virtually unexplored, in large part due to the unpopularity of Kant’s faculty psychology. This paper considers why, for Kant, judgment and feeling go together, arguing that he had good philosophical reasons for forging this connection. The discussion begins by situating these faculties within Kant’s mature faculty psychology. While the ‘power of judgment’ [Urteilskraft] is fundamentally reflective, feeling [Gefühl] (...) reveals itself as essentially non-discursive. Their systematic connection emerges through the principle of purposiveness [Zweckmäßigkeit], which the former legislates for the latter. I claim that we must understand this notion in terms of the suitability of the faculties for each other, as displayed in mere reflection. That is, we can only recognize the fitness of two things for each other through feeling, which, in turn, is the only way that we can engage in the activity of merely reflecting judgment. I conclude by gesturing at an even further way in which judgment and feeling are related, based on their mutual role in orienting all of the faculties of the human mind. (shrink)

Contrary to the hegelian thought that harmonizing eudaimonism was manifested most fully in the Classical period of Greek ethics, it is in fact the Hellenistic period after Aristotle that shows the most forthright attempts to produce ethical views that do not generate conflicts between rational aims. This is partly the result of the Hellenistic attempts to generate positions that, unlike the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, possess a high degree of systematic coherence. Epicurean hedonism is a case in point, as (...) is Stoic ethics, which goes a considerable way toward eliminating the very idea of a distinction between what is good for oneself and what is good in a global, non‐self‐referential way. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Note.

In Reason, Tradition, and the Good, Jeffery L. Nicholas addresses the failure of reason in modernity to bring about a just society, a society in which people can attain fulfillment. Developing the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Nicholas argues that we rely too heavily on a conception of rationality that is divorced from tradition and, therefore, incapable of judging ends. Without the ability to judge ends, we cannot engage in debate about the good life or the proper (...) goods that we as individuals and as a society should pursue. Nicholas claims that the project of enlightenment—defined as the promotion of autonomous reason—failed because it was based on a deformed notion of reason as mere rationality, and that a critical theory of society aimed at human emancipation must turn to substantive reason, a reason constituted by and constitutive of tradition. To find a reason capable of judging ends, Nicholas suggests, we must turn to Alasdair MacIntyre’s Thomistic-Aristotelianism. Substantive reason comprises thinking and acting on the set of standards and beliefs within a particular tradition. It is the impossibility of enlightenment rationality to evaluate ends and the possibility of substantive reason to evaluate ends that makes the one unsuitable and the other suitable for a critical theory of society. Nicholas’s compelling argument, written in accessible language, remains committed to the promise of reason to help individuals achieve a good and just society and a good life. This requires, however, a complete revolution in the way we approach social life. “Jeffery Nicholas has written an important and valuable book that invites its readers to discover the difficulties of late modern Western thought from the perspective of twentieth-century critical theory, and to consider a response to those difficulties drawn from the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor.” —Christopher Stephen Lutz, Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology. (shrink)

Education – typically and rightly held to be an incontrovertible good – has for some time now been dominated by mass formal schooling systems. These systems routinely harm and oppress many students. I argue that they do so impermissibly, and I call this stance “educational pacifism”. I propose that Maria Montessori’s views on mass formal schooling systems broadly align with educational pacifism and that, therefore, she can be considered an educational pacifist. Finally, I claim that contemporary Montessorians ought to be (...) educational pacifists, firstly because educational pacifism makes a compelling moral argument and secondly because Montessori herself agrees with it. (shrink)

The argument between Jacques Maritain and Charles de Koninck over the primacy of the common good is well known. Yet, even though Mary Keys has carefully arbitrated this debate, it still remains problematic for Alasdair MacIntyre, particularly because of the role rights play in both Maritain and Catholic Social Thought. I examine Keys’ argument and, in addition, Deborah Wallace’s account of MacIntyre’s criticism of rights in Catholic social thought. I argue, in the end, that what Maritain, and in consequence Keys (...) and Wallace, miss about the common good is its relationship to practical reasoning, and that MacIntyre highlights both that relationship and the role of the common good in human dignity. (shrink)

Introduction: the question of reason -- The Frankfurt School critique of reason -- Habermas's communicative rationality -- Macintyre's tradition-constituted reason -- A substantive reason -- Beyond relativism: reasonable progress and learning from -- Conclusion: toward a Thomistic-Aristotelian critical theory of society.

If a speaker selflessly asserts that p, the speaker (1) has good evidence that p is true, (2) asserts that p on the basis of that evidence, but (3) does not believe that p. Selfless assertions are widely thought to be acceptable, and therefore to pose a threat to the Knowledge Norm of Assertion. Advocates for the Knowledge Norm tend to respond to this threat by arguing that there are no such things as selfless assertions. They argue that those who (...) appear to be selfless asserters either: believe what they assert, perform a speech act other than assertion, or assert a proposition other than the one that they seem to. I argue that such counterarguments are unsuccessful. There really are selfless assertions. But I also argue that they are no threat to the Knowledge Norm. There is a good case to be made that knowledge does not require belief. And if it does not, then the fact that some selfless assertions are appropriate does not tell against the Knowledge Norm. Indeed, I argue that selfless asserters know the propositions that they assert to be true. (shrink)

The Gorgias ends with Socrates telling an eschatological myth that he insists is a rational account and no mere tale. Using this story, Socrates reasserts the central lessons of the previous discussion. However, it isn’t clear how this story can persuade any of the characters in the dialogue. Those (such as Socrates) who already believe the underlying philosophical lessons don’t appear to require the myth, and those (such as Callicles) who reject these teachings are unlikely to be moved by this (...) far-fetched tale. This raises the question of who the myth is told for and what function it is meant to serve. This chapter argues that the myth is aimed, not at Callicles, but Socrates and those who aspire to follow him. There are uncertainties about the philosophical life that are due to the nature of embodiment, as well as reasons to doubt the connection between happiness and virtue. The myth assists with the former by presenting an image that draws a philosopher away from the goods of the body toward the goods of the soul. The story assists with the latter by presenting an image of cosmic justice, thereby securing happiness in proportion to virtue. (shrink)

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are one of the first examples of nanotechnology, with a history of promising uses and high expectations. This paper uses the recent debate over their future to explore both ethical and value-laden statements which unsettle the notion of CNTs as a value-free nanotechnology and their regulation as purely a technical affair. A point of departure is made with the inclusion of CNTs on the Substitute-It-Now list by the Swedish NGO ChemSec, an assessment process that anticipates and complements (...) the Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) regulation in Europe. An argument map is constructed to illustrate the core contention in the debate—should CNTs be substituted or not—which follows from a systematic literature review and content analysis of sampled journal articles. Nine arguments are articulated that bolster one of two camps: the pro-substitution camp or the contra-substitution camp. Beneath these arguments are a set of three implicit values that animate these two camps in prescribing competing interventions to resolve the dispute: (i) environmental protection and human safety, (ii) good science, and (iii) technological progress. This leads to a discussion around the regulatory problem of safeguarding conflicting values in decision-making under sustained scientific uncertainty. Finally, the study suggests further empirical work on specific nanomaterials in a pivot away from the abstract, promissory nature of nanotechnology and other emerging technologies in science, technology, and innovation policy. The examination of ethics and values is useful for mapping controversies in science and technology studies of regulation, even amongst experts in cognate research fields like nanomedicine and nanotoxicology. (shrink)

In order to create a good world, we need to learn how to do it - how to resolve our appalling problems and conflicts in more cooperative ways than at present. And in order to do this, we need traditions and institutions of learning rationally devoted to this end. When viewed from this standpoint, what we have at present - academic inquiry devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and technological know-how - is an intellectual and human disaster. We urgently need (...) a new, more rigorous kind of inquiry that gives intellectual priority to the tasks of articulating our problems of living and proposing and critically assessing possible cooperative solutions. This new kind of inquiry would have as its basic aim to improve, not just knowledge, but also personal and global wisdom - wisdom being understood to be the capacity to realize what is of value in life. To develop this new kind of inquiry we will need to change almost every branch and aspect of the academic enterprise. (shrink)

Centring on human perception, attunement to others, and a transcendent conception of the good, Iris Murdoch's intervention in moral philosophy remains an insightful and evocative source for ethical theory. Discerning some pervasive dualisms that hamper its coherence and development, I suggest that her work finds a generative conversation partner in the contemporary metaphysician, William Desmond. Desmond's thought offers promising avenues to overcome these dualisms by repositioning the source and nature of value and by theorising an anti-reductive, relational ontology. Staging a (...) constructive encounter between these two thinkers that preserves Murdoch's distinct prioritisation of attention and individuality within a Desmond-inspired metaphysics, I present a synthetic ethical approach that promotes the ideal of attending to an other—in the givenness of its particularity, manifold surplus, and constitutive relationality—as good in itself. (shrink)

A basic deep neural network (DNN) is trained to exhibit a large set of input–output dispositions. While being a good model of the way humans perform some tasks automatically, without deliberative reasoning, more is needed to approach human‐like artificial intelligence. Analysing recent additions brings to light a distinction between two fundamentally different styles of computation: content‐specific and non‐content‐specific computation (as first defined here). For example, deep episodic RL networks draw on both. So does human conceptual reasoning. Combining the two takes (...) advantage of the complementary costs and benefits of each. It also offers a better model of human cognitive competence. (shrink)

Anna Smajdor and Joona Räsänen argue that we have good reason to classify pregnancy as a disease. They discuss five accounts of disease and argue that each account either implies that pregnancy is a disease or, if it does not, it faces problems. This strategy allows Smajdor and Räsänen to avoid articulating their own account of disease. Consequently, they cannot establish that pregnancy is a disease, only that plausible accounts of disease suggest this. Some readers will dismiss Smajdor and Räsänen’s (...) claims as counterintuitive. By analogy, if a mathematical proof concludes ‘2+2=5’, readers will know—without investigation—that an error occurred. Rather than dismiss Smajdor and Räsänen’s work, however, the easiest way to undermine their argument is to describe at least one plausible account of disease that (i) excludes pregnancy and (ii) avoids the problems they raise for it. This is our strategy. We focus on dysfunction accounts of disease. After outlining Smajdor and Räsänen’s main arguments against dysfunction accounts, we explain why pregnancy is not a disease on these accounts. Next, we defend dysfunction accounts against the three problems that Smajdor and Räsänen raise. If successful, then contra Smajdor and Räsänen, at least one plausible account of disease does not imply that pregnancy is a disease. We suspect that defenders of other accounts can respond similarly. Yet, we note that insofar as dysfunction accounts align with the commonsense intuition that pregnancy is not a disease, this, all else being equal, seems like a point in their favour. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper I argue that beauty and goodness are at least coextensive for Plato. That means that at least with respect to concrete particulars, everything that is good is beautiful and everything that is beautiful is good. Though the good and the beautiful are coextensive, there is evidence that they are not identical. In the second part of the paper I show significance of this relation. In ethics it implies that the good is the right. (...) It also allows one to see how platonists can believe that goodness exists in mathematics. And it explains the usefulness of mathematics in moral education. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:On the Inconvenience of Other People by Lauren BerlantNicholas AdlerBerlant, Lauren. On the Inconvenience of Other People. Duke University Press, 2022. 256pp.An Ambivalent TriumphAttachment is a double-edged sword. This idea is the scaffolding of the late Lauren Berlant's pivotal work, Cruel Optimism (2011), which explores the idea that attachment to a collectively invested fantasy of "the good life" acts in disservice of personal growth and lasting fulfillment. The (...) Inconvenience of Other People ostensibly repeats this structure while reattributing the role of fantasy. The premise here is that attachments to other people act in disservice to the fantasy of personal sovereignty. Of course, both texts argue for collectivity and for a recasting of the ordinary that structures current fantasies. But while Cruel Optimism builds around the unavoidable condition of fantasy, Inconvenience takes relations within the present as its fundamentally unavoidable condition, specifically the drive to be in relation even though such relations are inconvenient. "People" in the work's title stands for any attachment, any person or thing to which we exist in relation. To be part of the world is to be constantly taking in and living with the objects around us. This constant process of adjustment generates constant friction with our fantasy of sovereignty, or control, over ourselves. In Berlant's words, "inconvenience is another way of pointing to the experience of nonsovereign relationality," making our inconvenience drive the urge to maintain and explore those nonsovereign relations despite the uncomfortable friction they produce (18). Berlant's final monograph investigates the complexities of living with that inconvenience as well the potential for "loosening [those inconvenient objects] and becoming loose with them" in order to make that inconvenience generative of new perspectives and approaches (150).The prospect of overhauling our relationship with inconvenience takes place on multiple registers, both in terms of the affective states that guide the experience of inconvenience and the frameworks that determine its expression in the world. Refiguring ambivalence and dissociation, [End Page 123] the traditional affective responses to inconvenience, as well as offering a more dynamic structure for engaging with inconvenience than that of the institution, Berlant demonstrates—in a contained and structured way—the very object-loosening for which the text advocates. Although the book is presented as a collection of "assays...clusters of actions that become forms of life that shift the pressures of being in relation," it is nonetheless broken into three distinct chapters that focus on the role of the inconvenient in political relations, sexual relations, and relations with the self (11). These chapters, respectively, take up the inconvenient with regard to infrastructure, ambivalence, and dissociation.To productively engage with inconvenience, it must be accommodated within a social infrastructure. The term infrastructure positions the material of lived relationality as more flexible than that of institutions and more legible than that of expressive causality. For Berlant, "infrastructures are productive, durationally extensive spaces for the pliable forms of life that people use to make rules and norms and other means of extending the world" (23). In Chapter 2, they invoke the concept of the commons, "an orientation toward life and value unbound by concepts of property as constituted by division and ownership," using it as a way to illustrate infrastructuralism in effect (82). The commons can refer to as concrete a physical space as the Boston Common, as explored through Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Nature," or as abstract an inheritance as shared language, as explored through Juliana Spahr's lyrical autobiography, The Transformation (2007).The commons of both Emerson and Spahr make use of the concept of analogy. For Emerson, it stands for "the separation within the nonsovereign relation [of the commons] that makes linking possible" (Berlant 94). Spahr takes a more critical approach, continuing Emerson's use of the term while shining light on the glitches that emerge when any analogy is examined too closely. Acknowledging the rhetorical gymnastics required to "figure equally valued social being" within "imperialist capitalist infrastructures" reveals every possible analogy as both grossly oversimplifying and only temporarily comprehensible (105). Objects within these commons are constantly adjusting and generating new relations. The sense of an ongoing dynamic is what Berlant hopes this... (shrink)

The privation theory of evil (PTE) states that evil is the absence of some good that is supposed to be present. For example, if vision is an intrinsic good, and if human beings are supposed to have vision, then PTE implies that a human being’s lacking vision is an evil, or a bad state of affairs. The mere-difference view of disability (MDD) states that disabilities like blindness are not inherently bad. Therefore, it would seem that lacking sight is not a (...) bad state of affairs. Thus PTE and MDD seem to be in tension. This essay discusses that apparent tension and explains how it might be resolved without doing violence to either view. Given the prominence of PTE in the history of Christian theology, and the wide support for MDD among disability theorists, it is worth finding a way to harmonize these two views. (shrink)

Concepts are our tools for thinking. They enable us to engage in explicit reasoning about things in the world. Like physical tools, they can be more or less good, given the ways we use them – more or less dependable for categorisation, learning, induction, action-planning, and so on. Do concept users appreciate, explicitly or implicitly, that concepts vary in dependability? Do they feel that some concepts are in some way defective? If so, we metacognize our concepts. One example that has (...) been studied is a person’s judgement about how well they have learnt a new category. There are many other forms that concept-metacognition could take. This paper offers a preliminary taxonomy of different forms of metacognition directed at concepts. It suggests that concept-metacognition may affect the way one concept from a range of candidates is selected for use, and the way a concept is relied on in reasoning. Concept-metacognition may also play a pivotal role in the social process of constructing concepts, in replacing the old and constructing the new tools for thinking. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Final Reflection Notes.

Nicholas Rescher tackles the major questions of philosophical inquiry, pondering the nature of truth and existence. In the authoritative voice and calculated manner that we’ve come to expect from this distinguished philosopher, Rescher argues that the development of knowledge is a practice, pursued by humans because we have a need for its products. This pragmatic approach satisfies our innate urge as humans to make sense of our surroundings. Taking his discussion down to the level of particular details, and addressing (...) such topics as inductive validation, hypostatization fallacies, and counterfactual reasoning, Rescher abandons abstract generalities in favor of concrete specifics. For example, philosophers usually insist that to reason logically from a counterfactual, we must imagine a possible world in which the statement is fact. But Rescher argues that there’s no need to attempt to accept the facts of a world outside our cognition in order to reason from them. He shows us how we can use our own natural system of prioritizing, our own understanding of the fundamental, to resolve the inconsistencies in such statements as, “If the Eiffel Tower were in Manhattan, then it would be in New York State.” In using dozens of real-world examples such as these, and in arguing in his characteristically succinct style, Rescher casts light on a wide variety of concrete issues in the classical theory of knowledge, and reassures us along the way that the inherent limitations on our knowledge are no cause for distress. In pragmatic theory and inquiry, we must accept that the best we can do is good enough, because we only have a certain set of tools and conceptualizations available to us. A unique synthesis, this endeavor into pragmatic epistemology will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy and cognitive science. (shrink)

Best known as a political philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre is also a critic of the modern university. The paper examines the grounds of MacIntyre's criticism of modern universities; it offers an assessment of the philosophical debate occasioned by MacIntyre's writings on the topic; and it proposes a way of taking this debate forward. The debate is shown to be centred around three objections to MacIntyre's normative idea of the university: that it is overly intellectualist, parochial, and moralizing. The merits of these (...) objections are considered and a different interpretation of the normative core of MacIntyre's conception of the university is presented: realization and promotion of the common good. An analysis is offered of the kinds of common good universities may serve to realize, including practices internal to the institution, education of a public, and flourishing relationships in various social roles. The implications of this neo-Aristotelian analysis of the normative core of universities is also shown to be at odds with some of MacIntyre's explicitly stated views on the role of universities in forming an educated pubic and educating students for work. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky pursues a methodology in linguistics that abstracts from substantial amounts of data about actual language use in a way that has met considerable resistance from many other linguists. This chapter argues that Chomsky's observation in fact accords with good explanatory practice elsewhere in science, but it does conflict with a traditional methodology in linguistics. It's striking that the main features of Chomsky's Galilean style are independently taken to be rather obvious features of scientific method in contemporary philosophy of (...) science. The chapter first looks in more detail at the roles that idealization plays in contemporary generative grammar. It then proceeds to explore the congruence between the Galilean style in linguistics and aspects of good scientific methodology. Finally, the chapter sets out and responds briefly to some of the arguments that have been raised against the Galilean style. (shrink)

Abstract:Throughout the Zhanguo period, wei 偽 referred to "inauthenticity" or "falseness." However, such interpretations are difficult to apply to Xunzi's use of the term, in which wei becomes a key component of ethical cultivation. Since the Tang, Xunzi's use of wei has served as a focal point of debates regarding how to evaluate his teachings. These debates largely concluded during the Qing, when exegetes argued that the graphs for wei 偽 (inauthenticity) and wei 為 (efforts) were interchangeable in pre-Han texts, (...) and that Xunzi intended the latter meaning. Guiding their arguments is the assumption that Xunzi would not endorse a term that was commonly pejorative in his time. This assumption neglects the possibility that wei's rhetorical value for Xunzi derived from his conscious revaluation and redefinition of this pejorative term, through which he challenged authenticity's ethical import and thereby defended ritual practices that were commonly criticized as inauthentic displays. (shrink)

In this book I show that science suffers from a damaging but rarely noticed methodological disease, which I call rationalistic neurosis. It is not just the natural sciences which suffer from this condition. The contagion has spread to the social sciences, to philosophy, to the humanities more generally, and to education. The whole academic enterprise, indeed, suffers from versions of the disease. It has extraordinarily damaging long-term consequences. For it has the effect of preventing us from developing traditions and institutions (...) of learning rationally devoted to helping us learn how to make progress towards a wiser, more civilized world. On our fragile earth, overcrowded, fraught with injustice, inequality and conflict, menaced by unprecedented and terrifying technological and industrial means for change and destruction, we urgently need to acquire a little more wisdom and civilization if we are to avoid repeating horrors of the kind suffered by so many during the 20th century (and already suffered by many in the first few years of the 21st century). We can ill afford to have in our hands instruments of learning botched and bungled from the standpoint of helping us learn how to live more wisely. It may seem scarcely credible that something as important as our institutions of learning can suffer from wholesale, structural defects. Why has this not been noticed before? Why have not armies of scientists and scholars appreciated the point and, long ago, put the matter right? The answer will emerge as my argument unfolds. I will show that one of the most damaging features of rationalistic neurosis is that it has built-in methodological and institutional mechanisms which effectively conceal that anything is wrong. But there is also an immediately obvious reason: specialization, and the resulting fragmentation of academia, has resulted in a situation in which hardly anyone takes responsibility for the overall ideals, the overall aims and methods, of academic inquiry. Academics, these days, are specialists, furiously trying to keep abreast of developments in their own specialist fields. They have no time, and no inducement, to lift their eyes from their particular disciplines, and look at the whole endeavour. Science has long been under attack, at least since the Romantic movement. Blake objected to “Single vision & Newton’s sleep” and declared that “Art is the Tree of Life... Science is the Tree of Death”. Keats lamented that science will “clip an Angel’s wings” and “unweave a rainbow”. Whereas the Enlightenment had valued science and reason as tools for the liberation of humanity, Romanticism found science and reason oppressive and destructive, and instead valued art, imagination, inspiration, individual genius, emotional and motivational honesty rather than careful attention to objective fact. Much subsequent opposition to science stems from, or echoes, the Romantic opposition of Blake, Wordsworth, Keats and many others. There is the movement Isaiah Berlin has described as the “Counter-Enlightenment” (Berlin, 1979, ch. 1). There is existentialism, with its denunciation of the tyranny of reason, its passionate affirmation of the value and centrality of irrationality in human life, from Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Heidegger and Sartre (see, for example, Barrett, 1962). There is the attack on Enlightenment ideals concerning science and reason undertaken by the Frankfurt school, by postmodernists and others, from Horkheimer and Adorno to Lyotard, Foucault, Habermas, Derrida, MacIntyre and Rorty (see Gascardi, 1999). The soul-destroying consequences of valuing science and reason too highly is a persistent theme in literature: it is to be found in the works of writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Doris Lessing, Max Frisch, Y. Zamyatin. There is persistent opposition to modern science and technology, and to scientific rationality, often associated with the Romantic wing of the green movement, and given expression in such popular books as Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends, Berman’s The Reenchantment of the World and Appleyard’s Understanding the Present. There is the feminist critique of science and conceptions of science: see, for example, Fox Keller (1984) and Harding (1986). And there are the corrosive implications of the so-called “strong programme” in the sociology of knowledge, and of the work of social constructivist historians of science, which depict scientific knowledge as a belief system alongside many other such conflicting systems, having no more right to claim to constitute knowledge of the truth than these rivals, the scientific view of the world being no more than an elaborate myth, a social construct (see Barnes and Bloor, 1981; Bloor, 1991; Barnes, Bloor and Henry, 1996; Shapin and Schaffer, 1985; Shapin, 1994; Pickering, 1984; Latour, 1987). This latter literature has provoked a counter-attack by scientists, historians and philosophers of science seeking to defend science and traditional conceptions of scientific rationality: see Gross and Levitt (1994), Gross, Levitt and Lewis (1996), and Koertge (1998). This debate between critics and defenders of science came abruptly to public attention with the publication of Alan Sokal’s brilliant hoax article ‘Transgressing the boundaries’ in a special issue of the cultural studies journal Social Text in 1996 entitled Science Wars: see Sokal and Bricmont (1998). What does this book have to contribute, given the above avalanche of criticism of science? The criticisms of science developed in this book are diametrically opposed to the above, in so far as the above criticisms oppose scientific rationality, seek to diminish or restrict its influence, or hold that it is unattainable. My central point is that we suffer, not from too much scientific rationality, but from not enough. What is generally taken to constitute scientific rationality is actually nothing of the kind. It is rationalistic neurosis, a characteristic, influential and damaging kind of irrationality masquerading as rationality. Science is damaged by being trapped within a widely upheld but severely defective philosophy of science; free science from this defective philosophy, provide it with a more intellectually rigorous philosophy, and it will flourish in both intellectual and humanitarian terms. And more generally, as we shall see, academic inquiry as a whole is damaged by being trapped within an intellectually defective philosophy of inquiry; free it from this defective philosophy, from its rationalistic neurosis, and it will flourish in intellectual and human terms. It is not reason that is damaging, but defective pretensions to reason — rationalistic neurosis —masquerading as reason. Thus what I seek to do here is the exact opposite of what all those who oppose science and scientific rationality do. I shall argue that Reason, the authentic article, arrived at by generalizing the progress-achieving methods of science, can have profoundly liberating and enriching consequences for all worthwhile, problematic aspects of life, and thus deserves to enter into every aspect of life. The bare bones of the argument of this book can be stated quite simply like this. Science cannot proceed without making the substantial metaphysical assumption that the universe is physically comprehensible (to some extent at least). But this conflicts with the orthodox view that in science everything is assessed impartially with respect to evidence, nothing being permanently assumed independently of evidence. So the metaphysical assumption of comprehensibility is repressed. Science pretends that no such assumption is made. But this damages science. For the assumption is substantial, influential and highly problematic. It needs to be made explicit within science so that it can be critically scrutinized, so that alternatives can be developed and considered. Pretending the assumption is not being made undermines the intellectual rigour of science, its intellectual value and success. And it does not stop there. For science also makes value assumptions. Quite properly, science is concerned to discover that which is of value. New factual knowledge devoid of all value (whether intellectual or practical) does not contribute to science. But the orthodox view of science holds that values have no place within science. As in the case of metaphysics, here too, science pretends that values have no role to play within the intellectual domain of science. And this damages science. For values are, if anything, even more influential and problematic than metaphysics (in influencing the direction of research). Here too, values need to be made explicit within science so that they can be scrutinized, so that alternatives can be developed and assessed. Pretending that values play no role within the intellectual domain damages science; both the intellectual and the practical aspects of science are adversely affected. Science fails to pursue those avenues of research that lie in the best interests of humanity. And it goes further. Science is pursued in a social, cultural, economic and political context. It is a part of various social, economic and political projects which seek to achieve diverse human objectives. But the idea that science is an integral part of humanitarian or political enterprises with political ends clashes, once again, with the official view of science that the aim of science is to improve factual knowledge. The political objectives of science are repressed. And, once again, this damages science. For, of course, the political objectives of science, like all our political objectives, are profoundly problematic. These need to be made explicit so that they can be scrutinized, so that alternatives can be developed and considered. The pretence that science does not have this political dimension once again undermines the intellectual rigour of science, and its human value. It lays science open to becoming a part of economic, corporate and political enterprises that are not in the best interests of humanity. The upshot of the line of argument just indicated is that we need to bring about a revolution in the aims and methods of science, and of academic inquiry more generally. Natural science needs to change; its relationship with the rest of academic inquiry, with social inquiry and the humanities, needs to change; and most importantly and dramatically, academic inquiry as a whole needs to change. The basic task of the academic enterprise needs to become to help humanity learn how to tackle its problems of living in more cooperatively rational ways than at present. We need to put the intellectual tasks of articulating our problems of living, and proposing and critically assessing possible solutions, possible and actual actions, at the heart of academic inquiry. The basic task needs to be to help humanity learn a bit more wisdom – wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, wisdom including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides. Natural science, despite its flaws, has massively increased our knowledge and technological know-how. This in turn has led to a massive and sometimes terrifying increase in our power to act. Often this unprecedented power to act is used for human good, as in medicine or agriculture. But it is also used to cause harm, whether unintentionally (initially at least) as when industrialization and modern agriculture lead to global warming, destruction of natural habitats and rapid extinction of species, or intentionally, as when the technology of war is used by governments and terrorists to maim and kill. Before the advent of modern science, when we lacked the means to do too much damage to ourselves and the planet, lack of wisdom did not matter too much. Now, with our unprecedented powers to act, bequeathed to us by science, lack of wisdom has become a menace. This is the crisis behind all the other current global crises: science without wisdom. In these circumstances, to continue to pursue knowledge and technological know-how dissociated from a more fundamental quest for wisdom can only deepen the crisis. As a matter of urgency, we need to free science and academia of their neuroses; we need to bring about a revolution in the academic enterprise so that the basic aim becomes to promote wisdom by intellectual and educational means. At present science and the humanities betray both reason and humanity. The argument of this book, which I have just summarized, begins with a discussion of the philosophical and methodological problems that beset theoretical physics. At once, many of those who are concerned about moral, political and environmental issues that plague our world today, will feel impatient. What have the methodological problems of theoretical physics to do with third world poverty, war and the threat of war, pollution, extinction of species, the menace of conventional, chemical, biological and nuclear armaments? I can only plead with such a reader: patience. The root cause of the sickness of our times does indeed lie, I claim, with a methodological sickness of natural science or, even more specifically, of physical science. What makes the modern world so utterly different from all previous ages is our possession of modern science and technology. This is the instrument that has changed the conditions of human life almost beyond all recognition, and put unprecedented, and sometimes terrifying, powers into our hands. One should not dismiss out of hand the suggestion that a part of our problem may lie with this instrument, this engine, of rapid change. We see, here, too, the way in which intellectual specialization, referred to above, has effectively concealed from view the nature and extent of the problem that confronts us. The argument that I shall develop in what follows begins with physics, with problems concerning the aims and methods of physics. But it then leaps to social science, to philosophy, to the humanities, to education, to psychotherapy, and to politics: in the end there is scarcely an aspect of modern life that is not touched and, potentially, affected by the argument. How many academic experts are prepared to follow, to take seriously, an argument that ranges so recklessly across such a wide range of academic disciplines? How many non-academic non-experts? But just this is what the argument and message of this book requires. I hope that the reader will endure with patience the somewhat esoteric discussion concerning the aims and methods of physics pursued in chapter one. This may not seem to have anything much to do with the urgent problems of our times, but it does. This is in part how the intellectual disaster I seek to expose in this book conceals itself from view: it buries itself in the obscure, recondite field of the philosophy of physics. Those who devote their lives to the philosophy of physics are, by and large, too myopic to see how their specialized field of study has anything to do with the great and dreadful humanitarian problems and disasters of our age; and those who are above all concerned with these humanitarian disasters have no time at all for abstruse issues concerning the aims and methods of physics. And so the connection is never made. As it happens, the methodological neurosis of physics, with which we begin in chapter one, is actually a quite simple matter to grasp. It does not require any real knowledge of physics to understand. Indeed, physicists and philosophers of physics are much more likely to find the argument difficult to follow than are non-experts. We non-scientists can stand back and see the whole wood; scientists, trained to think in terms of the current orthodox conception of science, trapped in the thickets of research, will find this much harder to do. In an attempt to take this peculiar circumstance into account, I have arranged the exposition as follows. In chapter one I give a simple exposition of the case for declaring natural science to suffer from what I call "rationalistic neurosis"; this avoids all technicalities, and goes straight to the heart of the matter. In the appendix I tackle a host of more technical objections that may be made to the elementary argument of chapter one. So, those experts in the fields of the philosophy of physics and philosophy of science who find the argument of chapter one naïve and unconvincing, should consult the appendix before tossing the book away in disgust. I write in the hope that there will be a few who will not dismiss out of hand the suggestion that the question of how we are to go about learning how to live in wiser and more civilized ways might have something to learn from scientific learning, and will take the trouble to pursue the line of argument traced out in this book. I write in the hope that these few will grasp just how desperate our situation is, how urgent the need to change the status quo, and will do everything in their power to alert others to the need to heal the methodological sickness from which our institutions and traditions of learning at present suffer. To begin with, we need a campaigning organization, modelled perhaps on "Friends of the Earth", which might be called something like "Friends of Wisdom". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:542 BOOK REVIEWS sires. Rather, the Subjects need to want to do those things that bring about the Bosses' satisfaction. And this raises the question of the control of the imagination. explores the subtle power relations between controllers and the controlled, to the end of exploring ways that imagination offers control over power relationships. Yet Rorty ends with a bleak vision: we are a basically conservative species, whose capacities (...) for imagining new forms of power relationships tend to be dominated by the archetypes gleaned from our collective and individual experience, often reflecting malign structures. Even benign experiences, Rorty argues, tend to reinforce our inclination to seek refuge in submission to authority. What are we to make of this collection which stretches from philosophy of mind through Freudian analyses to a chastened Hobbesian vision of our social and moral order? There is much here to interest philosophers of mind and those who are concerned with the frontier between that field and empirical psychology. While she does not supply a theory of mind, Rorty shows clearly how much heterogeneous material such a theory must encompass. JOHN CHURCHILL Hendrix College Conway, Arkansas Faith and Reason From Plato to Plantinga: An Introduction to Reformed Epistemology. DEWEY J. HOITENGA, JR. S.U.N.Y. Press, 1991. Pp. 263. $18.95. This is an excellent and important book. Most of those who have written about the ' Reformed ' epistemology of religious belief have done so with either polemical or systematic interests in mind. That is not inappropriate, since the interests of those who have propounded Reformed epistemology have also been mainly polemical and systematic. Though here and there they have pointed to historical antecedents, they have not traced those antecedents in any detail. Hoitenga's contribution is to do exactly that. For the most part, his understanding of Reformed epistemology is accurate. He himself crisply summarizes his understanding in these words: "Its central claim is the immediacy of our knowledge of God. We do not, in the first instance, know God by inference or testimony but by direct acquaintance with him. A closely related claim fa that we cannot easily remain indifferent to the God whom we know by such direct acquaintance. Thus our knowledge of God is like our knowl- BOOK REVIEWS 543 edge of every other fundamental kind of reality-physical objects, their properties and relationships, others persons, right and wrong, good and evil, and the elementary objects of logic and mathematics. Furthermore, the claim is that everyone knows God in this way, not just the Christian believer. If someone does not believe in God, that is, does not trust in God as Christians do, this is not because one does not know God. All human beings by nature have what Calvin calls an awareness of divinity.... Although the fall has clouded over this natural awareness of God and led to the loss of faith in him, it has not eradicated this awareness. Christian faith does not alter this direct awareness of God but rather presupposes it, rejuvenates it, and enlarges it " {235). Hoitenga discusses in detail three precursors of this view: Plato, Augustine, and Calvin, thus showing that the contemporary Reformed epistemology of religious belief stands in a long intellectual tradition. Though shortly I will offer a few critical comments about his interpretations, his discussion of the three thinkers is, in each case, extremely helpful. The full view of each of these thinkers, on the matters under consideration, must be constructed from passages scattered around in a large number of different texts. Hoitenga conducts this recovery of the relevant sources and the construction of his interpretation with wide knowledge of the primary texts, with apt use of the secondary literature, and with the judiciousness and balance which such interpretation requires. Though I shall now make critical comments on three points, I view these criticisms as entirely compatible with my judgment that Hoitenga has made a very important contribution with this historical introduction to Reformed epistemology. I begin with one point in his exposition of contemporary Reformed epistemology. Plantinga observes that there are perhaps some cases in which, though a person has a prima facie right to believe some theistic proposition immediately, that right is... (shrink)

At present universities are devoted to the acquisition of specialized knowledge and technological know-how. They fail to do what they most need to do: help the public acquire a good understanding of what our problems are, what needs to be done to solve them. Universities do not even conceive of their task in that way. The result is that the public, by and large, fails to appreciate just how serious the problems that face us are, and so fails to put (...) pressure on governments to act in the ways that are required. -/- Modern science and technology make possible modern industry and agriculture, modern power production and travel, modern hygiene and medicine, modern armaments: these in turn have led to much that is of great benefit, but also to the global problems that threaten our future. Science divorced from the capacity to solve problems of living wisely is a disaster. It is that disaster that academia, as at present constituted, is designed to produce – and has produced: the modern world. We have to learn how to solve the grave global problems that confront us. That in turn requires that our institutions of learning – our schools and universities – are designed and devoted to the job. At present they are not. In giving priority to the pursuit of knowledge, they fail to do what most needs to be done and, even worse, are the source of our problems. It is absolutely vital, for the future of humanity, that universities are transformed radically so that they give absolute priority to the all-important task of helping the public come to understand what our problems are, and what we need to do about them. And as a result get governments to act. -/- The book demonstrates that universities as at present constituted violate reason and, as a result, betray humanity. Cure universities of their structural irrationality, and they would come actively to promote actions required to solve global problems, and help humanity make progress toward a better world. The book spells out in detail the changes that need to be made to academic inquiry, why they need to be made, and how they would enable universities to empower humanity to solve current global problems. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper I want to consider the relation between two familiar philosophical views that have not to my knowledge been considered in any depth together, even by philosophers who are well known for defending each separately. These views have a certain natural affinity, in that each has been attractive to philosophers of a generally naturalistic bent. Thus, since I intend to argue that there is a difficulty in reconciling them, I will be pointing out a (...) difficulty, not, I think, in philosophical naturalism, but nevertheless in one package often accepted by naturalists. One of the views is that the problem of evil is, at the very least, a serious theoretical difficulty for theism. The other is nihilism about value, the thesis that there are no real values in the world and that statements ascribing values to things are never true. I hope it is obvious why there is at least aprima faciedifficulty in combining these views: how can someone who thinks that nothing is really good or evil also think that we find in the world more evil than we would expect if theism were correct? (shrink)

A common theme in the historiography of Greek ethics says that modern ethics is characterized by imperative notions such as ‘duty’—and with a Judeo‐Christian notion of imperatives or commands issued by god—whereas ancient ethics supposedly deals mainly with ‘attractive notions such as ‘good’ and ‘virtue’. This thought is often juxtaposed with the idea that imperative notions betoken a conflict between one's duty and one's good, because an imperative seems to be required only to command people to do what they do (...) not wish to do, which is felt to be inappropriate to the supposed eudaimonism of Greek ethics. In fact Greek ethics makes substantial use of imperative notions, and does not attempt to show that attractive notions are more basic or preferable in ethics. (shrink)