The author has a lot to tell about Hobbes. Decades of study work and teaching have provided him with both a penetrating look and a balanced interpretation of the “leading English political philosopher.” This reputation of Hobbes, he finds to be “fully deserved.” There is no reason to fear of being deceived by such a comment, since the more you read Hobbes, “the more impressive he becomes.” Bernard Gert presents Hobbes basically in five chapters, including one on Hobbes’s (...) life and historical situation, as well as his general views. The following chapters include one each on human nature, Hobbes’s moral theory, his political theory, and one entitled “after Hobbes” that focuses on the philosopher’s influences on others, including the present time, and on a critical reflection of some of Hobbes’s positions. The author is generous enough to offer the reader an extended analysis of what he believes is Hobbes’s influence on his own thought. Hobbes’s view on religion could have formed another chapter, but Gert prefers to include this complex topic in the first or introductory chapter. (shrink)

The question of (prima facie) formal moral obligation to obey the law remains a perennial in the garden of philosophy. In this paper I consider two recent attempts to dig it up by the roots. The first attempt to settle the question of formal moral obligation to obey the law I shall consider here appeared in the Yale Law Review almost a decade ago. Its author, M. B. E. Smith, argued that there is no such obligation. The article has (...) since been reprinted in a number of popular philosophical anthologies. Hyman Gross has described it as one of "the two most influential works on the morality of civil disobedience." 2 The argument has, as far as I can tell, not been criticized in print. The other attempt to answer that perennial question appeared in Bernard Gert's The Moral Rules (originally published seven years before Smith's article). Gert argued that there is a formal moral obligation to obey the law. Gert's book seems to have received little attention from philosophers. His argument for obligation to obey the law has, as far as I can tell, received no attention at all. Even Smith said nothing about it. The argument seems to have fallen into that silence all writers fear. Yet, it seems to me, Gert has the better answer. (shrink)

The DSM-III-R definition of mental disorder is inconsistent with the DSM-III-R definition of paraphilias. The former requires the suffering or increased risk of suffering some harm while the latter allows that deviance, by itself, is sufficient to classify a behavioral syndrome as a paraphilia. This inconsistency is particularly clear when examining the DSM-III-R account of a specific paraphilia, Transvestic Fetishism. The author defends the DSM-III-R definition of mental disorder and argues that the DSM-III-R definition of paraphilias should be changed. He (...) recommends that the diagnostic criteria for specific paraphilias, particularly that for Transvestic Fetishism, be changed to make them consistent with the DSM-III-R definition of mental disorder. Keywords: diagnoses, disease, paraphilia, philosophy, psychiatry CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Before I begin my reply to Kurt Baier I want to express my gratitude and indebtedness to him. I regard The Moral Point of View as the book that brought analytic philosophy back from metaethics, that is, an examination of the meaning of moral judgments, to normative ethics, that is, to an attempt to describe and justify our common moral system. I think of my work as building on his and probably impossible without it. Even the title of my first (...) book The Moral Rules: A New Rational Foundation for Morality echoes the title of Baier’s book, The Moral Point of View: A Rational Basis of Ethics. (shrink)

The deepest beliefs’ about personal identity whose consequences Unger seeks to draw out are the beliefs of those who already share his theoretical convictions; and his pain-avoidance’ experiments show nothing unless one already assumes those convictions. If there is a risk’ that I may not survive a brain operation even though I know exactly which chunks of brain will be removed and replaced, that shows that I am a separate thing from my body and brain, about which the latter provide (...) normally reliable, but still fallible evidence. (shrink)