ABSTRACT Sixteenth-century English Protestants struggled with the legacy left them by the Lutheran reformation: a strict disjunction between inward and outward that hindered the development of a robust theology of worship. For Luther, outward forms of worship had more to do with the edification of the neighbour than they did with pleasing God. But what exactly did ‘edification’ mean? On the one hand, English Protestants sought to avoid the Roman Catholic view that certain elements of worship held an intrinsic spiritual (...) value; on the other hand, many did not want to imply that forms of worship were spiritually arbitrary and had a merely civil value. Richard Hooker developed his theology of worship in response to this challenge, seeking to maintain a clear distinction between the inward worship of the heart and the outward forms of public worship, while refusing to disassociate the two. The result was a concept of edification which sought to do justice to both civil and spiritual concerns, without, pace Peter Lake and other scholars, conceding an inch to a Catholic theology of worship. (shrink)

This article assesses Jerome Zanchi’s theory of natural law in relation to that of Richard Hooker’s by arguing three theses. First, Zanchi’s view of natural law is generally Thomistic, but he expands upon it in a manner similar to his contemporaries, thereby providing further evidence against the increasingly discredited narrative of a Protestant voluntarism dominating early Reformed scholastic thought. Second, Zanchi’s commitment to the Reformed doctrine of total depravity does not represent as drastic a departure from Thomas as might (...) first appear. Third, Hooker’s disagreement with Zanchi on this last point does not, as often argued, result from his own diluted commitment to total depravity, but denotes a more coherent and elegant way of reaching the same Reformed Thomistic synthesis. The historical record suggests that Hooker’s approach proved more influential than Zanchi’s. (shrink)

Organized by Richard Kearney and Joseph S. O’Leary, the 1979 Colloquium Heidegger et la question de Dieu was of critical importance for the development of phenomenology of religion in France. This special issue introduces the event and its ensuing publication to the English-speaking world. The editors’ historical and thematic contextualizing essay is followed by contributions from six leading philosophers. Richard Kearney sets the stage by updating his original foreword, while Jean-Yves Lacoste presents the central moments in the history (...) of Heidegger’s complicated relationship to Christian thinking. Paul Ricoeur’s “Introductory Note” delivers a well-known challenge to Heidegger in a piece whose brevity belies its impact. Finally, three participants of the 1979 Colloquium, Joseph S. O’Leary, Jean Greisch, and Jean-Luc Marion, reflect back on the significance of this event and its role in developing their own groundbreaking work. The special issue closes with a brief reflection on where we find ourselves in philosophy today. (shrink)

When is a belief justified? There are three families of arguments we typically use to support different accounts of justification: arguments from our intuitive responses to vignettes that involve the concept; arguments from the theoretical role we would like the concept to play in epistemology; and arguments from the practical, moral, and political uses to which we wish to put the concept. I focus particularly on the third sort, and specifically on arguments of this sort offered by Clayton Littlejohn in (...) Justification and the Truth-Connection and Amia Srinivasan in ‘Radical Externalism’ : 395–431, 2018) in favour of externalism. I counter Srinivasan’s argument in two ways: first, I show that the internalist’s concept of justification might figure just as easily in the sorts of structural explanation Srinivasan thinks our political goals require us to give; and I argue that the internalist’s concept is needed for a particular political task, namely, to help us build more effective defences against what I call epistemic weapons. I conclude that we should adopt an Alstonian pluralism about the concept of justification. (shrink)

You'd never know Athens was locked in a life-or-death struggle from the tranquil and leisurely philosophical discussion that unfolds through the pages of the Republic...Plato's masterpiece continues to inform our questions and our thinking when it comes to being, truth, beauty, goodness, justice, community, the soul, and more." -From Dr. Littlejohn's Introduction. On the way back from a festival, Socrates is waylaid by some friends who compel him to go home with them. There he and his companions engage in a (...) long discussion about whether it is worse to suffer evil or to commit it. Far from being dry or abstract, Plato's dialogue is full of practical questions about the nature of justice, education, power, and virtue, and it ends with two of the most vivid myths ever devised by man. This Canon Classic is translated clearly by Benjamin Jowett, and unlike all other works of philosophy, it's actually fun to read. The Canon Classics series presents the most definitive works of Western literature in a colorful, well-crafted, and affordable way. Unlike many other thrift editions, our classics are printed on thicker text stock and feature individualized designs that prioritize readability by means of proper margins, leading, characters per line, font, trim size, etc. Each book's materials and layout combine to make the classics a simple and striking addition to classrooms and homes, ideal for introducing the best of literary culture and human experience to the next generation. This Worldview Edition features an introduction divided into sections on The World Around, About the Author, What Other Notables Said, Setting, Characters, & Plot Summary, Worldview Analysis, 21 Significant Questions & Answers, and Further Discussion & Review. (shrink)

Could it be right to convict and punish defendants using only statistical evidence? In this paper, I argue that it is not and explain why it would be wrong. This is difficult to do because there is a powerful argument for thinking that we should convict and punish defendants using statistical evidence. It looks as if the relevant cases are cases of decision under risk and it seems we know what we should do in such cases (i.e., maximize expected value). (...) Given some standard assumptions about the values at stake, the case for convicting and punishing using statistical evidence seems solid. In trying to show where this argument goes wrong, I shall argue (against Lockeans, reliabilists, and others) that beliefs supported only by statistical evidence are epistemically defective and (against Enoch, Fisher, and Spectre) that these epistemic considerations should matter to the law. To solve the puzzle about the role of statistical evidence in the law, we need to revise some commonly held assumptions about epistemic value and defend the relevance of epistemology to this practical question. (shrink)

A selection of speeches and essays from the author's second decade as president of Yale University.

According to moral error theorists, moral claims necessarily represent categorically or robustly normative facts. But since there are no such facts, moral thought and discourse are systematically mistaken. One widely discussed objection to the moral error theory is that it cannot be true because it leads to an epistemic error theory. We argue that this objection is mistaken. Objectors may be right that the epistemic error theory is untenable. We also agree with epistemic realists that our epistemological claims are not (...) systematically in error. However, this is not because there are robustly normative facts, but rather because the truth of our epistemic claims doesn’t turn on whether there are such facts. Epistemic facts, we argue, are not robustly or categorically normative. Moral error theorists should therefore respond to the objection that their view does not commit them to the epistemic error theory. (shrink)

Chinese Philosophy: Overview of Topics If Chinese philosophy may be said to have begun around 2000 B.C.E., then it represents the longest continuous heritage of philosophical reflection. Trying to mention each philosopher or every significant thinker is not possible. This article is highly selective by choosing philosophers according to two basic principles: Those who … Continue reading Chinese Philosophy: Overview of Topics →.

Daoist Philosophy Along with Confucianism, “Daoism” is one of the two great indigenous philosophical traditions of China. As an English term, Daoism corresponds to both Daojia, an early Han dynasty term which describes so-called “philosophical” texts and thinkers such as Laozi and … Continue reading Daoist Philosophy →.

Laozi Laozi is the name of a legendary Daoist philosopher, the alternate title of the early Chinese text better known in the West as the Daodejing, and the moniker of a deity in the pantheon of organized “religious Daoism” that arose during the later Han dynasty. Laozi is … Continue reading Laozi →.

The internalism-externalism debate is one of the oldest debates in epistemology. Internalists assert that the justification of our beliefs can only depend on facts internal to us, while externalists insist that justification can depend on additional, for example environmental, factors. Clayton Littlejohn proposes and defends a new strategy for resolving this debate. Focussing on the connections between practical and theoretical reason, he explores the question of whether the priority of the good to the right might be used to defend an (...) epistemological version of consequentialism, and proceeds to formulate a new 'deontological externalist' view. On this view, the justificatory status of a belief depends upon whether it is fit for the purposes of practical reasoning. Only beliefs that meet externalist standards are fit for such a purpose. If we want to understand how a wide range of norms (e.g., moral norms) apply to rational agents regardless of what their evidence or outlook is like, we have to embrace an externalist account of the justification. (shrink)

Collected for the first time in a single volume are essays which examine the developments in three fundamental biological disciplines - embryology, evolutionary biology, and genetics. These disciplines were in conflict for much of the twentieth century and the essays in this collection examine key methodological problems within these disciplines and the difficulties faced in overcoming the conflicts between them. Burian skilfully weaves together historical appreciation of the settings within which scientists work, substantial knowledge of the biological problems at stake (...) and the methodological and philosophical issues faced in integrating biological knowledge drawn from disparate sources. The final chapter describes what recent findings in development biology and genetics can tell us about the history and development of animals. Written in a clear, accessible style this collection should appeal to students and professionals in philosophy of science, and the philosophy and history of biology. (shrink)

As the modern West struggles with a rolling crisis of political legitimacy and our persistent inability to keep religion out of politics, intellectual historians remain busy with efforts to uncover...

Many philosophers think that given the choice between saving the life of an innocent person and averting any number of minor ailments or inconveniences, it would be better to save the life. How, then, should one compare the risk of an innocent person’s life to such minor ailments and inconveniences? If lives are infinitely more important than insignificant factors then any risk cannot be outweighed, and that is untenable. An alternative approach seems more promising: let the values of such insignificant (...) factors be bounded, as then there will be well-behaved tradeoffs between insignificant things and the risk to an innocent life. We argue, however, that bounding the values of insignificant factors poses myriad problems. (shrink)

While it is generally believed that justification is a fallible guide to the truth, there might be interesting exceptions to this general rule. In recent work on bridge-principles, an increasing number of authors have argued that truths about what a subject ought to do are truths we stand in some privileged epistemic relation to and that our justified normative beliefs are beliefs that will not lead us astray. If these bridge-principles hold, it suggests that justification might play an interesting role (...) in our normative theories. In turn, this might help us understand the value of justification, a value that's notoriously difficult to understand if we think of justification as but a fallible means to a desired end. We will argue that these bridge-principles will be incredibly difficult to defend. While we do not think that normative facts necessarily stand in any interesting relationship to our justified beliefs about them, there might well be a way of defending the idea that our justified beliefs about what to do won't lead us astray. In turn, this might help us understand the value of justification, but this way of thinking about justification and its value comes with costs few would be willing to pay. (shrink)

In this interview, Jean-Luc Marion recalls the intellectual world of Paris in 1970s, reflecting on how his engagement with the ubiquitous “death of God” question led to the sketches of God without Being first presented at this 1979 Colloquium, and discusses the criticism it provoked not only from Heideggerians but also from Thomists. He discusses the reception history of phenomenology in France the reasons for the particular power it gained among thinkers of his generation. Finally, he recounts how his work (...) has led from the 1979 Colloquium through the “Theological Turn” and up to his forthcoming D’ ailleurs, la révélation, which he briefly previews here. Marion closes with words on originality, criticism, and the particular challenges of the contemporary world that await philosophical thinking today. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a puzzle about epistemic rationality. It seems plausible that it should be rational to believe a proposition if you have sufficient evidential support for it. It seems plausible that it rationality requires you to conform to the categorical requirements of rationality. It also seems plausible that our first-order attitudes ought to mesh with our higher-order attitudes. It seems unfortunate that we cannot accept all three claims about rationality. I will present three ways of trying to (...) resolve this tension and argue that the best way to do this is to reject the idea that strong evidential support is the stuff rationality is made of. In the course of doing this, I shall argue that there is a special class of propositions about the requirements of rationality that we cannot make rational mistakes about and explain how this can be. (shrink)

Belief does aim at the truth. When our beliefs do not fit the facts, they cannot do what they are supposed to do, because they cannot provide us with reasons. We cannot plausibly deny that a truth norm is among the norms that govern belief. What we should not say is that the truth norm is the fundamental epistemic norm. In this paper, I shall argue that knowledge is the norm of belief and that the truth norm has a derivative (...) status. Only a knowledge‐first approach to epistemic normativity can explain why epistemic assessment has its inward‐looking focus. (shrink)

The typical epistemology course begins with a discussion of the distinction between justification and knowledge and ends without any discussion of the distinction between justification and excuse. This is unfortunate. If we had a better understanding of the justification-excuse distinction, we would have a better understanding of the intuitions that shape the internalism-externalism debate. My aims in this paper are these. First, I will explain how the kinds of excuses that should interest epistemologists exculpate. Second, I will explain why the (...) intuitions that underwrite the new evil demon argument don't provide support for the internalist claim that justification is just in the head. The positive response that Cohen's example elicits is an indication that the subject should be excused if she violates an epistemic norm, not an indication that no norm has been violated. For just about any conceivable norm we can think of we can imagine situations in which someone violates that norm because they're moved by evidence that misleadingly suggests that they'd conform to it. When that happens, we'll respond positively in just the way we do when we consider Cohen's deceived subjects. When that happens, we cannot say that the subjects' responses were justified because we've stipulated that the subjects' responses contravene the relevant norms. Regardless of whether you think of norms along internalist or externalist lines, you should see that the intuitions that underwrite the new evil demon objection tell us nothing at all about whether a subject conforms to a norm. They tell us nothing about justification. (shrink)

There is much to like about the idea that justification should be understood in terms of normality or normic support (Smith 2016, Goodman and Salow 2018). The view does a nice job explaining why we should think that lottery beliefs differ in justificatory status from mundane perceptual or testimonial beliefs. And it seems to do that in a way that is friendly to a broadly internalist approach to justification. In spite of its attractions, we think that the normic support view (...) faces two serious challenges. The first is that it delivers the wrong result in preface cases. These cases suggest that the view is either too sceptical or too externalist. The second is that the view struggles with certain kinds of Moorean absurdities. It turns out that these problems can easily be avoided. If we think of normality as a condition on *knowledge*, we can characterise justification in terms of its connection to knowledge and thereby avoid the difficulties discussed here. The resulting view does an equally good job explaining why we should think that our perceptual and testimonial beliefs are justified when lottery beliefs cannot be. Thus, it seems that little could be lost and much could be gained by revising the proposal and adopting a view on which it is knowledge, not justification, that depends directly upon normality. (shrink)

Evidence is one of the most fundamental notions in the field of epistemology and is emerging as a major topic across academic disciplines. The practice of every academic discipline consists largely in providing evidence for key theses and The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Philosophy of Evidence, the first collection of its kind, is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject. Comprising over forty chapters by a team of international contributors the (...) Handbook is divided into six parts: Ontology of evidence Sources of evidence Evidence and normativity Evidence and probability Social epistemology of evidence Evidence in the disciplines. Within these sections central issues, debates and problems are examined. Questions covered include: What is evidence? What is the relationship between knowledge and evidence? Is a pluralism of evidence possible? What other sources of evidence are there in addition to perception? Is what a person ought to believe completely fixed by the totality of evidence they have, or does it also depend on other factors like practical interests? Can evidential force be measured in any well-behaved way? How do socially created biases - for instance, gender biases - affect evidence-gathering? How is evidence relevant within different academic disciplines? The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Philosophy of Evidence is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of science and epistemology and related disciplines such as law, religion, history and the social sciences. (shrink)

The central thesis of robust virtue epistemology (RVE) is that the difference between knowledge and mere true belief is that knowledge involves success that is attributable to a subject's abilities. An influential objection to this approach is that RVE delivers the wrong verdicts in cases of environmental luck. Critics of RVE argue that the view needs to be supplemented with modal anti-luck condition. This particular criticism rests on a number of mistakes about the nature of ability that I shall try (...) to rectify here. (shrink)

This paper looks at whether it is possible to unify the requirements of rationality with the demands of normative reasons. It might seem impossible to do because one depends upon the agent’s perspective and the other upon features of the situation. Enter Reasons Perspectivism. Reasons perspectivists think they can show that rationality does consist in responding correctly to reasons by placing epistemic constraints on these reasons. They think that if normative reasons are subject to the right epistemic constraints, rational requirements (...) will correspond to the demands generated by normative reasons. While this proposal is prima facie plausible, it cannot ultimately unify reasons and rationality. There is no epistemic constraint that can do what reasons perspectivists would need it to do. Some constraints are too strict. The rest are too slack. This points to a general problem with the reasons-first program. Once we recognize that the agent’s epistemic position helps determine what she should do, we have to reject the idea that the features of the agent’s situation can help determine what we should do. Either rationality crowds out reasons and their demands or the reasons will make unreasonable demands. (shrink)

A defense of the idea that knowledge is first in the sense that there is nothing prior to knowledge that puts reasons or evidence in your possession. Includes a critical discussion of the idea that perception or perceptual experience might provide reasons and a defense of a knowledge-first approach to justified belief.

This is a critical discussion of the accuracy-first approach to epistemic norms. If you think of accuracy (gradational or categorical) as the fundamental epistemic good and think of epistemic goods as things that call for promotion, you might think that we should use broadly consequentialist reasoning to determine which norms govern partial and full belief. After presenting consequentialist arguments for probabilism and the normative Lockean view, I shall argue that the consequentialist framework isn't nearly as promising as it might first (...) appear. (shrink)

Cases of reasonable, mistaken belief figure prominently in discussions of the knowledge norm of assertion and practical reason as putative counterexamples to these norms. These cases are supposed to show that the knowledge norm is too demanding and that some weaker norm ought to put in its place. These cases don't show what they're intended to. When you assert something false or treat some falsehood as if it's a reason for action, you might deserve an excuse. You often don't deserve (...) even that. (shrink)

There has been considerable discussion recently of consequentialist justifications of epistemic norms. In this paper, I shall argue that these justifications are not justifications. The consequentialist needs a value theory, a theory of the epistemic good. The standard theory treats accuracy as the fundamental epistemic good and assumes that it is a good that calls for promotion. Both claims are mistaken. The fundamental epistemic good involves accuracy, but it involves more than just that. The fundamental epistemic good is knowledge, not (...) mere true belief, because the goodness of an epistemic state is connected to that state's ability to give us reasons. If I'm right about the value theory, this has a number of significant implications for the consequentialist project. First, the good-making features that attach to valuable full beliefs are not features of partial belief. The resulting value theory does not give us the values we need to give consequentialist justifications of credal norms. Second, the relevant kind of good does not call for promotion. It is good to know, but the rational standing of a belief is not determined by the belief's location in a ranked set of options. In the paper's final section, I explain why the present view is a kind of teleological non-consequentialism. There is a kind of good that is prior to the right, but as the relevant kind of good does not call for promotion the value theory shows us what is wrong with the consequentialist project. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend externalist accounts of justified belief from Cohen's new evil demon objection. While I think that Cohen might be right that the person is justified in believing what she does, I argue that this is because we can defend the person from criticism and that defending a person is a very different thing from defending a person's attitudes or actions. To defend a person's attitudes or actions, we need to show that they met standards or did (...) not violate norms. Intuitions about whether we can defend a person from criticism are a poor guide when it comes to determining whether norms were violated or standards were met. It turns out that even radical forms of externalism about justification are compatible with the intuitions that Cohen's example elicits. Properly understood, those intuitions show that the believer should be excused from criticism (and excused for failing to believe with adequate justification). (shrink)

A familiar complaint about conciliatory approaches to disagreement is that they are self-defeating or incoherent because they ‘call for their own rejection’. This complaint seems to be influential but it isn’t clear whether conciliatory views call for their own rejection or what, if anything, this tells us about the coherence of such views. We shall look at two ways of developing this self-defeat objection and we shall see that conciliatory views emerge unscathed. A simple version of the self-defeat objection leaves (...) conciliatory views untouched. A subtle version of the objection contains a subtle but overlooked flaw. If the conciliatory view is right, it might be right to be dogmatically conciliatory (i.e., to continue to be conciliatory however objectionable this might seem to ourselves and to others). (shrink)

Edited by Marthe Chandler and Ronnie Littlejohn, this work is a collection of expository and critical essays on the work of Henry Rosemont, Jr., a prominent and influential contemporary philosopher, activist, translator, and educator in the field of Asian and Comparative Philosophy. The essays in this collection take up three major themes in Rosemont's work: his work in Chinese linguistics, his contribution to the theory of human rights, and his interest in East Asian religion. Contributions include works by the leading (...) scholars in Chinese philosophy in the Western world and Rosemont's close associates: Roger T. Ames, Bao Zhiming, Mary Bockover, Marthe Chandler, Ewing Y. Chinn, Erin M. Cline, Fred Dallmayr, Jeffrey Dippmann, Herbert Fingarette, Harrison Huang, Eric Hutton, Philip J. Ivanhoe, David Jones, William La Fleur, Ronnie Littlejohn, Ni Peimin, Michael Nylan, Harold Roth, Sumner Twiss, Tu Weiming, David Wong, with responses from Henry Rosemont, Jr. and a brief Reminiscence by Noam Chomsky. (shrink)

In this interview, Jean Greisch discusses the 1979 Colloquium Heidegger et la Question de Dieu, his original contribution to the published volume, and its impact on his later work. Greisch first situates the conference within the reception history of Heidegger as well as the critical advancements of Levinas and Derrida that made such a questioning of God palatable within the French philosophical context. He argues that theological thinking delivers an important challenge to philosophical thinking, and reflects on what such a (...) meeting point could mean. Finally he voices a double challenge to Heidegger, not only in his forgetting of the Hebraic tradition, but his complicity with Nazi antisemitism, while yet advising against a wholesale rejection of Heidegger’s insights. (shrink)

A theory of rational belief should get the cases right. It should also reach its verdicts using the right theoretical assumptions. Leading theories seem to predict the wrong things. With only one exception, they don't accommodate principles that we should use to explain these verdicts. We offer a theory of rational belief that combines an attractive picture of epistemic desirability with plausible principles connecting desirability to rationality. On our view, it's rational to believe when it's sufficiently likely that you'd know (...) because believing when it's sufficiently likely that you'd know minimises expected objective epistemic undesirability. (shrink)

What relation is there between knowledge and action? According to Hawthorne and Stanley, where your choice is p-dependent, it is appropriate to treat the proposition that p as a reason for acting iff you know that p (RKP). In this paper, I shall argue that it is permissible to treat something as a reason for action even if it isn't known to be true and address Hawthorne and Stanley's arguments for RKP.

According to the phenomenal conservatives, beliefs are justified by non-doxastic states we might speak of as ‘appearances’ or ‘seemings’. Those who defend the view say that there is something self-defeating about believing that phenomenal conservatism is mistaken. They also claim that the view captures an important internalist insight about justification. I shall argue that phenomenal conservatism is indefensible. The considerations that seem to support the view commit the phenomenal conservatives to condoning morally abhorrent behavior. They can deny that their view (...) forces them to condone morally abhorrent behavior, but then they undercut the defenses of their own view. (shrink)

If evidence is propositional, is one’s evidence limited to true propositions or might false propositions constitute evidence? In this paper, I consider three recent attempts to show that there can be ‘false evidence,’ and argue that each of these attempts fails. The evidence for the thesis that evidence consists of truths is much stronger than the evidence offered in support of the theoretical assumptions that people have relied on to argue against this thesis. While I shall not defend the view (...) that evidence is propositional, I shall defend the view that any propositional evidence must be true. (shrink)

A discussion of epistemic reasons, theoretical rationality, and the relationship between them. Discusses the ontology of reasons and evidence, the relationship between reasons (motivating, normative, possessed, apparent, genuine, etc.) and rationality, the relationship between epistemic reasons and evidence, the relationship between rationality, justification, and knowledge, and many other related topics.