This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

Towards Justice and Virtue challenges the rivalry between those who advocate only abstract, universal principles of justice and those who commend only the particularities of virtuous lives. Onora O'Neill traces this impasse to defects in underlying conceptions of reasoning about action. She proposes and vindicates a modest account of ethical reasoning and a reasoned way of answering the question 'who counts?', then uses these to construct linked accounts of principles by which we can move towards just institutions and virtuous lives.

Are new democracies with divided government and volatile parties politically ill fated? The literature suggests so, but cases of emergent democracies such as Taiwan and Brazil that face both conditions defy the prediction. This paper explains why: party volatility follows from pursuing distinct executive and legislature agendas under divided government; the political ambition that underlies these conditions sustains democratic and even political performance. We evaluate the argument through government spending in Taiwan. The results corroborate our expectations: they show more parties (...) composing the legislature as government spending favors an executive agenda and neglects a legislative welfare-spending agenda. The findings make three contributions to the literature: first, they reveal a political divide between executive and legislature rather than ideological parties to undercut concerns regarding performance. Second, they demonstrate that the strategic use of government spending to institutionalize party development along an executive agenda fuels party fragmentation. Third, they show that legislators split, switch, or create alternative routes to office in reaction to strategic spending to underscore that ambition underlies party volatility and divided government. (shrink)

This paper rejoins the debate surrounding Thomas Tymockzko’s paper on the surveyability of proof, first published in the Journal of Philosophy, and makes the claim that by attending to certain broad features of modern conceptions of proof we may understand ways in which the debate surrounding the surveyability of proof has heretofore remained unduly circumscribed. Motivated by these historical reflections, I suggest a distinction between local and global surveyability which I believe has the promise to open up significant new advances (...) in the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

James O. Young seeks to explain why we value music so highly. He draws on the latest psychological research to argue that music is expressive of emotion by resembling human expressive behaviour. The representation of emotion in music gives it the capacity to provide psychological insight--and it is this which explains a good deal of its value.

Economic liberty is best understood in opposition to economic domination. This article develops a radical republican conception of such domination. In particular, I argue that radical republicanism provides a more satisfactory account of individual economic freedom than the market-friendly liberties of working, transacting, holding, and using championed by Nickel and Tomasi. So too, it avoids the pitfalls of other conceptions of economic liberty which emphasize real freedom, alternatives to immiserating work, or unalienated labor. The resulting theory holds that economic domination (...) occurs when someone’s access to civic capabilities is contingent on the arbitrary economic power of others. Socialist institutions—suitably configured—can deliver on this individual economic freedom, allowing the dominating power of proprietors, shareholders, landlords, and managers to be kept in check, and providing an unconditional minimum that allows individual citizens to be less beholden to others in meeting many of their most fundamental civic needs. Thus, I conclude that socialism can be championed as a politics of individual economic liberty. (shrink)

Who ought to do what, and for whom, if global justice is to progress? In this collection of essays on justice beyond borders, Onora O'Neill criticises theoretical approaches that concentrate on rights, yet ignore both the obligations that must be met to realise those rights, and the capacities needed by those who shoulder these obligations. She notes that states are profoundly anti-cosmopolitan institutions, and that even those committed to justice and universal rights often lack the competence and the will to (...) secure them, let alone to secure them beyond their borders. She argues for a wider conception of global justice, in which obligations may be held either by states or by competent non-state actors, and in which borders themselves must meet standards of justice. This rich and wide-ranging collection will appeal to a broad array of academic researchers and advanced students of political philosophy, political theory, international relations and philosophy of law. (shrink)

In this book, Tim O'Keefe reconstructs the theory of freedom of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-271/0 BCE). Epicurus' theory has attracted much interest, but our attempts to understand it have been hampered by reading it anachronistically as the discovery of the modern problem of free will and determinism. O'Keefe argues that the sort of freedom which Epicurus wanted to preserve is significantly different from the 'free will' which philosophers debate today, and that in its emphasis on rational action it (...) has much closer affinities with Aristotle's thought than with current preoccupations. His original and provocative book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in Hellenistic philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophers are accustomed to thinking about human existence as finite and deathbound. Anne O'Byrne focuses instead on birth as a way to make sense of being alive. Building on the work of Heidegger, Dilthey, Arendt, and Nancy, O'Byrne discusses how the world becomes ours and how meaning emerges from our relations to generations past and to come. Themes such as creation, time, inheritance, birth and action, embodiment, biological determinism, and cloning anchor this sensitive and powerful analysis. O'Byrne's thinking advances and (...) deepens important discussions at the intersections of feminism, continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and social and political thought. (shrink)

Anthony O'Hear; VI*—Guilt and Shame as Moral Concepts, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 77, Issue 1, 1 June 1977, Pages 73–86, https://doi.org/10.

Moral principles or the rules of conduct are based in the society. If the purpose of ethics in research is to take into consideration the needs and the rights of the experimental subject, his social milieu must then largely determine the ethical considerations of a projected study. The inability to comprehend such rights may often be due to ignorance, disease and his societal values. Blood letting, biopsy and post-mortem examinations may so conflict with local beliefs that so called 'consent' to (...) these is much more than a surrender of the rights of the individual. It is difficult to conform with the highest principles of ethics in research in any uniform society. It is more so when the many variables are further complicated by cultural demands and social taboos. The best custodians of ethical standards must relate intimately with the norms of the local population. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Wilfrid Sellars argued that Kant’s account of the conceptual structures involved in experience can be given a linguistic turn so as to provide an analytic account of the resources a language must have in order to be the bearer of empirical knowledge. In this paper I examine the methodological aspects of Kant’s transcendental philosophy that Sellars took to be fundamental to influential themes in his own philosophy. My first aim here is to clarify and argue for the plausibility of (...) what I claim is Sellars’ interpretation of Kant’s ‘analytic’ transcendental method in the first Critique, based ultimately on non-trivial analytic truths concerning the concept of an object of our possible experience. Kant’s ‘transcendental proofs’ thereby avoid a certain methodological trilemma confronting the candidate premises of any such proof, taken from Sellars’ 1970s undergraduate exam question on Kant. In part II of the essay I conclude by highlighting in general terms how Kant’s method, as interpreted in the analytic manner explained in part I, was adapted by Sellars to produce some of the more influential aspects of his own philosophy, expressed in terms of what he contends is their sustainable reformulation in light of the so-called linguistic turn in twentieth-century philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide an easy road to nominalism which does not rely on a Field-type nominalization strategy for mathematics. According to this proposal, applications of mathematics to science, and alleged mathematical explanations of physical phenomena, only emerge when suitable physical interpretations of the mathematical formalism are advanced. And since these interpretations are rarely distinguished from the mathematical formalism, the impression arises that mathematical explanations derive from the mathematical formalism alone. I correct this misimpression by pointing out, in the (...) cases recently discussed by Mark Colyvan, exactly where the interpretations of the formalism were invoked and the function they played in the resulting explanations. A viable form of easy - road nominalism, which is also sensitive to scientific practice, then arises. (shrink)

Combating homophobia, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination and violence in our society requires more than just focusing on the overt acts of prejudiced and abusive individuals. The very intelligibility of such acts, in fact, depends upon a background of shared beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that together form the context of social practices in which these acts come to have the meaning they do. This book, inspired by Wittgenstein as well as feminist and critical race theory, shines a critical (...) light on this background in order to show that we all share more responsibility for the persistence of oppressive social practices than we commonly suppose—or than traditional moral theories that connect responsibility just with the actions, rights, and liberties of individuals would lead us to believe. First sketching a nonessentialist view of rationality, and emphasizing the role of power relations, Peg O’Connor then examines in subsequent chapters the relationship between a variety of "foreground" actions and "background" practices: burnings of African American churches, hate speech, child sexual abuse, coming out as a gay or lesbian teenager, and racial integration of public and private spaces. These examples serve to illuminate when our "language games" reinforce oppression and when they allow possibilities for resistance. Attending to the background, O’Connor argues, can give us insight into ways of transforming the nature and meaning of foreground actions. (shrink)

Harrison Frye claims that socialist republicanism may be unable to reduce domination due to efficiency costs and accountability deficits imposed by public ownership. I argue that the empirical and theoretical grounds for expecting such a decline in economic efficiency are weak. Moreover, the egalitarian distributive effects of public ownership are likely to be more important for insulating people from domination. So too, workers, consumers, and citizens are not well-protected from domination by the accountability of managers to profit-seeking shareholders. I conclude (...) that the investor-owned firm will do far more to exacerbate dominating power than to constrain it. (shrink)

Abstract: This paper traces a Kantian and pragmatist line of thinking that connects the ideas of conceptual content, object cognition, and modal constraints in the form of counterfactual sustaining causal laws. It is an idea that extends from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason through C. I. Lewis’s Mind and the World-Order to the Kantian naturalism of Wilfrid Sellars and the analytic pragmatism of Robert Brandom. Kant put forward what I characterize as a modal conception of objectivity, which he developed as (...) an extended argument stretching from the transcendental deduction through the analogies of experience to the regulative maxims of reason and reflective judgment. In related ways in Lewis and Sellars, the very idea of an object of knowledge (and of intentionality more generally) is connected with a certain lawfulness or modal constraint the necessary representation of which, they argue, is an achievement of conceptualization. While Sellars agreed with the spirit of Lewis’s famous pragmatic conception of the a priori, Sellars’s conception of meaning and conceptual content differed in crucial ways with important consequences for this issue. I argue furthermore that a certain phenomenalist temptation threatens to spoil this insight both among some of Kant’s interpreters and in Lewis’s thought. Finally, I point out that Brandom’s “Kant-Sellars thesis” provides new support for this line of thought. Although questions concerning idealism continue to raise controversies for neo-Kantians and pragmatists, the line of thought itself represents a distinctive and still promising approach to questions concerning intentionality and conceptual content. (shrink)

Many modern conservatives and feminists trace the roots of their ideologies, respectively, to Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft, and a proper understanding of these two thinkers is therefore important as a framework for political debates today. According to Daniel O’Neill, Burke is misconstrued if viewed as mainly providing a warning about the dangers of attempting to turn utopian visions into political reality, while Wollstonecraft is far more than just a proponent of extending the public sphere rights of man to include (...) women. Rather, at the heart of their differences lies a dispute over democracy as a force tending toward savagery or toward civilization. Their debate over the meaning of the French Revolution is the place where these differences are elucidated, but the real key to understanding what this debate is about is its relation to the intellectual tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, whose language of politics provided the discursive framework within and against which Burke and Wollstonecraft developed their own unique ideas about what was involved in the civilizing process. (shrink)

In this book Anthony O’Hear examines the reasons that are given for religious faith. His approach is firmly within the classical tradition of natural theology, but an underlying theme is the differences between the personal Creator of the Bible or the Koran and a God conceived of as the indeterminate ground of everything determinate. Drawing on several religious traditions and on the resources of contemporary philosophy, specific chapters analyse the nature of religious faith and of religious experience. They examine connections (...) between religion and morality, and religion and human knowledge – the cosmological, teleological and ontological arguments, process thought, and the problem that evil presents for religion. The final chapter returns to the inherently dogmatic nature of religious faith and concludes that rational people should look beyond religion for the fulfilment of their spiritual needs. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: It is a familiar story that Kant’s defence of our synthetic a priori cognition in the Critique of Pure Reason suffered sharp criticism throughout the extended philosophical revolutions that established analytic philosophy, the pragmatist tradition, and the phenomenological tradition as dominant philosophical movements in the first half of the twentieth century. One of the most important positive adaptations of Kant’s outlook, however, was the combined analytic and pragmatist conceptions of the a priori that were developed by the American philosophers (...) C. I. Lewis (1883–1964) and Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989), most notably in Lewis’s 1929 classic, Mind and the World Order, followed by Sellars’ critical reworking of Lewis’s outlook in ‘Is There a Synthetic A Priori?’ (1953) and other mid-century articles. Both Lewis and Sellars defended central aspects of Kant’s analysis of our a priori knowledge of mind-independent physical objects and necessary causal connections. But both also radically transformed Kant’s view by defending the idea that there are alternative a priori conceptual frameworks that are subject to an ongoing process of reassessment and replacement on overall pragmatic and explanatory grounds. Furthermore, while Sellars’ answer to his question, ‘Is There a Synthetic A Priori?’ thus represented a partial endorsement of Lewis’s pragmatic relativization of the a priori, I argue that Sellars’ account of meaning diverged from Lewis in ways that constituted a significant improvement upon the previous ‘analytic’ defenses of the a priori, not only in Lewis but in general. This arguably has implications for wider disputes concerning the nature and possibility of a priori knowledge in non-formal domains. (shrink)

There have been calls for mandatory vaccination legislation to be introduced into the UK in order to tackle the national and international rise of vaccine-preventable disease. While some countries have had some success associated with mandatory vaccination programmes, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health insist this is not a suitable option for the UK, a country which has seen historical opposition to vaccine mandates. There is a lack of comprehensive data to demonstrate a direct link between mandatory vaccination (...) legislation and increased uptake. While there are examples whereby there has been an improvement, some studies suggest that comparable results can be obtained by strongly recommending vaccinations instead. The RCPCH insist that healthcare workers are ideally placed to engage and inform parents to make every interaction a ‘vaccine opportunity’. This paper calls for a principled, rational approach to interpretations of autonomy which underpin parental informed consent. MacLean’s concept of mutual persuasion could be a vehicle to ensuring parents are suitably informed of both the material risks associated with vaccine choices and to consider the rationality of their decisions, while ultimately upholding parental autonomy. It is argued that this, alongside infrastructural improvement, could create a more sustainable, long-term improvement in childhood vaccination rates in the UK than mandatory vaccination. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: I contend that Sellars defends a uniquely Kantian naturalist outlook both in general and more particularly in relation to the nature and status of what he calls ‘epistemic principles’; and I attempt to show that this remains a plausible and distinctive position even when detached from Sellars’s quasi-Kantian transcendental idealist contention that the perceptible objects of the manifest image strictly speaking do not exist, i.e., as conceived within that common sense framework. I first explain the complex Kant-inspired sense in (...) which Sellars did not take the latter thesis concerning the objects of the manifest image to apply, at least in certain fundamental respects, to persons. In this primary Kantian sense, I suggest, persons as thinkers and agents exist univocally across both the manifest and scientific images, and this in principle would enable an integration of persons within a multi-leveled naturalistic ontology, one that is independent of Sellars’s quasi-Kantian transcendental idealist thesis. Finally, I examine in some detail how this defensible blend of Kantian and naturalist themes turns out to be what is fundamental in Sellars’s complex and controversial views on the nature and status of epistemic principles. (shrink)

The concept of an appearance is bona fide and rule‐governed. It is such that appearances can be shared, which suggests that a visual appearance is a complex universal, compounded out of colour and spatial appearance. The only appearance material objects have is their look, because uniquely in the case of sight when the Attention lands upon its colour it lands upon the object, and it lands upon the object through landing upon its secondary quality. We experience the visual appearance when (...) we perceive the bearer to be endowed with those visible qualities that visually individuate it for us. Now the primary appearance in Physical Reality is the look of a material object, a ‘look in the round’, upon which aspect‐appearance is dependent. The relation between the two is charted, together with the vital role of the understanding in experiencing ‘looks in the round’, an experience that depends upon knowledge of the objective physical situation in which it occurs. Finally, the criteria of visibility are spelt out. (shrink)

What is implicit in a typically human perception of a material object? First, perceivability is a contingent property of its bearer, relative to perceiver and conditions. Typically, human perception is special in involving the use of concepts and an awareness of object‐structures. When we visually recognize a material object, an almost limitless array of properties and procedures are by implication condensed into an instant: one entertains multiple beliefs, and posits at a distance, multiple properties. Then the experiential integration of the (...) almost limitless visual evidence of a material object is dubbed ‘constituting the material object out of experience’. Central concepts in doing so are those of side, outside, surface, interior, and part. The most important of these experiential syntheses is the spatial, whose unit is the 3D‐seeing of object‐sides, a concept that depends upon those of 2D/3D and 2D/2D seeing. Two vitally important elements in this procedure are, first, the work of the understanding, second, an awareness of the objective physical situation of perceiver and object. (shrink)

Secondary qualities are essential to sight, hearing, smell, and taste, and correspond to the sensations definitive of each sense. They are relative, first to which beings they appear to, secondly to the conditions under which they do so. Dispositionist analyses are examined, along with materialist, and rejected: the former because colour is predicable of after‐images, the latter because a disjunct of material properties in principle ‘found’ any secondary quality. While attributions to physical objects are relative, attribution to sensations are absolute: (...) sensations of red are absolutely, intrinsically, essentially red. ‘Red’ names the look predicable necessarily of the sensation of red and contingently and derivatively of much else. What is of central importance to the secondary quality, indeed the rationale behind the very concept, is that it is the only psychological phenomenon that can be an immediate material or external object of noticing. From this unique property, compounded with the psycho‐physical nomic situation governing its objectification, flows the special utility of the secondary quality. Namely, to take its place as material object for the Attention in an experience in which it simultaneously qualifies a whole string of causally interrelated items: sensation, light, surface, side, and object. (shrink)

In perception, objects come to the attention. Accordingly, one might come to believe that ‘The Attention’ names the capacity to harbour events of the specific idiosyncratic type, noticing. In fact it signifies an experiential mental space to which objects can come in perception and, which can contain experiences. After all, many mental phenomena other than perception require awareness if they are to so much as exist, e.g. emotion and thought, thanks to being experiences. That experiential space is of limited extent, (...) for at any moment the mind can experience so much and no more. Indeed, the space is no more than the existence of such a limit, and has no autonomous existence other than the fact of that limit, and it is a dangerous illusion to hypostatize the limit as a real space, leading one to misunderstand what it is to experience an experience. Then there is reason for supposing that the experiences of the moment constitute a system. This circle or centre of awareness is the Attention. And it is to this Attention that perceived existents come—as object. This happens when a noticing or perceiving occurs. (shrink)

The definition of perception is defended by piecemeal assembling of the concept of perception. We begin with the assumption that some event is an intentionally directed experience; add that it is of a type that aspires to ‘success’‐status, as seem‐see and try‐act aspire to status see and act ; and add that the object actually exists, and that the ‘aspiration’ is successful. Now this complex property fits both action and perception. Then to define action we have the need of a (...) further and indefinable concept, that of will, whereas to define perception we have all the conceptual material we need, for we need no more than the concepts, experience, and object. Perception is unique in being the only experience that finds its identity under the concept of experience, for it is merely awareness or experience taking an extensional object. Then since consciousness and experience are universal to any account of mind, perception likewise must have a position of centrality in the mind. It is an a priori‐given a priori‐definable concept, built out of a priori‐given concepts.. (shrink)

Modern ethico-philosophical literature treats spirituality as a value characteristic of moral consciousness, although spirituality is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. Therefore, this one-sided approach is wrong. In considering this problem, two approaches were identified: theological and purely philosophical. In philosophical thought, the understanding of spirituality as a qualitative characteristic of consciousness, actions and actions of a person, its ability to do good for the benefit of society, its people, and the state, was affirmed. And if so, any person, regardless of (...) his or her outlook, is spiritual. (shrink)

Onora O'Neill; IV*—The Most Extensive Liberty, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 80, Issue 1, 1 June 1980, Pages 45–60, https://doi.org/10.1093/ar.

ABSTRACT Popper's attitude to traditions is fundamentally rationalistic. He analyses traditions, along with other institutions and practices, in terms of their efficiency in promoting goals which can be specified independently of the traditions themselves. Hayek, by contrast, looks at traditions in terms of their contributions to the survival of the culture in which they are embedded, something whose evaluation may be opaque even to people within the culture. Both these approaches are flawed compared to Oakeshott's insistence that traditions are not (...) goal‐oriented, and that goals cannot be specified independently of agents’forms of life. Oakeshott's views constitute a via media between Popperian rationalism and Hayekian anti‐rationalism. (shrink)

Brian O'Shaughnessy; XII*—Processes, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 72, Issue 1, 1 June 1972, Pages 215–240, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristoteli.

The phenomenon of action in which the mind moves the body has puzzled philosophers over the centuries. In this new edition of a classic work of analytical philosophy, Brian O'Shaughnessy investigates bodily action and attempts to resolve some of the main problems. His expanded and updated discussion examines the scope of the will and the conditions in which it makes contact with the body, and investigates the epistemology of the body. He sheds light upon the strangely intimate relation of awareness (...) in which we stand to our own bodies, doing so partly through appeal to the concept of the body-image. The result is a new and strengthened emphasis on the vitally important function of the bodily will as a transparently intelligible bridge between mind and body, and the proposal of a dual aspect theory of the will. (shrink)