Abrégé de la Thilosophie de Gassendi en VII Tomes (Reprint of the 2nd ed. 1684) S. Murr and G. Stefani, Fayard 1992 Corpus 20/21 (revue de philosophie) Bernier et les Gassendistes. Edited by S. Murr 100F.

This paper offers a novel solution to the Wrong Kind of Reason problem that afflicts Fitting-Attitude analyses of value. I argue that we can distinguish reasons of the right kind from reasons of the wrong kind by being clear about what our reasons are for. In Wrong Kind of Reason cases, our reason to have a certain affective attitude is a reason for an action, and it is this category-mistake that is the source of the problem.

I will offer a defence of Anselm's Ontological Argument, building on some suggestions made by Prior. The defence offered avoids one of the objections commonly levelled against the Ontological Argument. I will not consider whether the use of this objection involves a misinterpretation of the argument as put forward by Anselm. It might, for example, be held that the argument of Proslogion 2 is programmatic, and points forward to Prosiogion 3, and arguments given by Anselm in his Reply to Gaunilo. (...) In particular it might be denied that Anselm holds that what is greater about what exists in reality is just that it exists in reality. While what I have to say will start from points made by Prior, I do not intend to suggest that Prior holds that there is a defence possible for Anselm's argument such as I will offer. What I have to say involves emphasizing modal notions, and treating Anselm's argument as a modal argument. Thus it comes down to defending Anselm's argument in Proslogion 3 in preference to the Proslogion 2 argument. (shrink)

In The Emergent Self, William Hasker joins one of the most heated debates in contemporary analytic philosophy, that over the nature of mind.

Toward theory a homuncular of believing For years and years, philosophers took thoughts and beliefs to be modifications of incorporeal Cartesian egos. ...

Descartes has often been called the 'father of modern philosophy'. His attempts to find foundations for knowledge, and to reconcile the existence of the soul with the emerging science of his time, are among the most influential and widely studied in the history of philosophy. This is a classic and challenging introduction to Descartes by one of the most distinguished modern philosophers. Bernard Williams not only analyzes Descartes' project of founding knowledge on certainty, but uncovers the philosophical motives for his (...) search. With acute insight, he demonstrates how Descartes' _Meditations _are not merely a description but the very enactment of philosophical thought and discovery. Williams covers all of the key areas of Descartes' thought, including God, the will, the possibility of knowledge, and the mind and its place in nature. He also makes profound contributions to the theory of knowledge, metaphysics and philosophy generally. With a new foreword by John Cottingham. (shrink)

For this 1897 publication, the American philosopher William James brought together ten essays, some of which were originally talks given to Ivy League societies. Accessible to a broader audience, these non-technical essays illustrate the author's pragmatic approach to belief and morality, arguing for faith and action in spite of uncertainty. James thought his audiences suffered 'paralysis of their native capacity for faith' while awaiting scientific grounds for belief. His response consisted in an attitude of 'radical empiricism', which deals practically (...) rather than ideologically with real-world phenomena. When facing a 'momentous' decision about belief, he says, we both can and must choose the best hypothesis. The first four essays apply this principle to religious faith, and the rest explore the pragmatic approach to such topics as determinism, ethics and individual achievement. James developed his ideas further in The Varieties of Religious Experience and Pragmatism, both of which are reissued in this series. (shrink)

The Gifford Lectures were established in 1885 at the universities of St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh to promote the discussion of 'Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term - in other words, the knowledge of God', and some of the world's most influential thinkers have delivered them. The 1901–2 lectures given in Edinburgh by American philosopher William James are considered by many to be the greatest in the series. The lectures were published in book form in (...) 1902 and have been reprinted many times. James, who was educated in the United States and Europe, and spent much of his career teaching philosophy at Harvard, was very influential in the development of modern psychology, and in these twenty lectures he explores the personal experience of religion. Some of the topics include religion and neurology, 'the sick soul', saintliness, and mysticism. (shrink)

A lively topic of debate in decision theory over recent years concerns our understanding of the different risk attitudes exhibited by decision makers. There is ample evidence that risk-averse and risk-seeking behaviours are widespread, and a growing consensus that such behaviour is rationally permissible. In the context of clinical medicine, this matter is complicated by the fact that healthcare professionals must often make choices for the benefit of their patients, but the norms of rational choice are conventionally grounded in a (...) decision maker’s own desires, beliefs and actions. The presence of both doctor and patient raises the question of whose risk attitude matters for the choice at hand and what to do when these diverge. Must doctors make risky choices when treating risk-seeking patients? Ought they to be risk averse in general when choosing on behalf of others? In this paper, I will argue that healthcare professionals ought to adopt a deferential approach, whereby it is the risk attitude of the patient that matters in medical decision making. I will show how familiar arguments for widely held anti-paternalistic views about medicine can be straightforwardly extended to include not only patients’ evaluations of possible health states, but also their attitudes to risk. However, I will also show that this deferential view needs further refinement: patients’ higher-order attitudes towards their risk attitudes must be considered in order to avoid some counterexamples and to accommodate different views about what sort of attitudes risk attitudes actually are. (shrink)

"The lectures that follow were delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December, 1906, and in January, 1907, at Columbia University, in New York."-Preface, pg. 3.

One of the most influential men of his time, philosopher, psychologist, educator, and author William James (1842-1910) helped lead the transition from a predominantly European-centered nineteenth-century philosophy to a new "pragmatic" American philosophy. Helping to pave the way was his seminal book Pragmatism (1907), in which he included a chapter on "Truth," an essay which provoked severe criticism. In response, he wrote the present work, an attempt to bring together all he had ever written on the theory of knowledge, (...) including an article on the function of cognition, later polemic and expository contributions, and some replies to previous criticism. The result was a full and definitive expression of the pragmatist "epistemology" from James' point of view. In the book, he urges the reader to "turn away from abstractions, verbal solutions, fixed principles, and pretended absolutes and look for concreteness and facts, action and power," arguing that "the ultimate test for us of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires." For students, scholars--anyone interested in William James or the history of American philosophical thought--this book offers an in-depth exposition of the influential ideas of one of the greatest American thinkers. Unabridged republication of the edition originally published by Longmans, Green and Co., New York and London, 1909. (shrink)

Descartes has often been called the 'father of modern philosophy'. His attempts to find foundations for knowledge, and to reconcile the existence of the soul with the emerging science of his time, are among the most influential and widely studied in the history of philosophy. This is a classic and challenging introduction to Descartes by one of the most distinguished modern philosophers. Bernard Williams not only analyzes Descartes' project of founding knowledge on certainty, but uncovers the philosophical motives for his (...) search. With acute insight, he demonstrates how Descartes' _Meditations _are not merely a description but the very enactment of philosophical thought and discovery. Williams covers all of the key areas of Descartes' thought, including God, the will, the possibility of knowledge, and the mind and its place in nature. He also makes profound contributions to the theory of knowledge, metaphysics and philosophy generally. With a new foreword by John Cottingham. (shrink)

In many situations, people are unsure in their moral judgements. In much recent philosophical literature, this kind of moral doubt has been analysed in terms of uncertainty in one’s moral beliefs. Non-cognitivists, however, argue that moral judgements express a kind of conative attitude, more akin to a desire than a belief. This paper presents a scientifically informed reconciliation of non-cognitivism and moral doubt. The central claim is that attitudinal ambivalence—the degree to which one holds conflicting attitudes towards the same object—can (...) play the role of moral doubt for non-cognitivists. I will demonstrate that ambivalence has all of the features that we would expect it to have in order to play the role of moral doubt. It is gradable, can vary through time, covaries with strength of motivation, and is suitably distinct from the other features of our moral judgements. As well as providing a defence of non-cognitivism, this insight poses a new challenge for the view: deciding how to act under moral ambivalence. (shrink)

" In a book that seeks to shift the ground of debate within theory of knowledge, William P. Alston finds that the century-lo.

Complexity, agency, and time -- The vicissitudes of experience -- Belief, spirituality, and time -- The human predicament -- Capital flows, sovereign decisions, and world resonance machines -- The theorist and the seer.

Two books bound together, from the religious period of one of the most renowned and representative thinkers. Written for laymen, thus easy to understand, it is penetrating and brilliant as well. Illuminations of age-old religious questions from a pragmatic perspective, written in a luminous style.

This book analyzes the support that should be given to minority views, reconsidering classic debates in Science and Technology Studies and examining numerous case studies.

Metaphysicians of Meaning is the first book to challenge the accepted understanding of Russell's On Denoting and Frege's On Sense and Reference . Makin compares the work Russell did shortly before his famous essay "On Denoting" with the essay itself and argues that this comparison shows that the traditional view of the problem Russell was trying to solve is untenable. He then examines Frege's classic essay and argues that some of the less well-known views that Frege held have radical (...) implications for our understanding of this essay. (shrink)

In this lucid and insightful study, Stephen Makin investigates a form of argument widespread in ancient Greek philosophy, where the absence of a reason for one alternative to be the case rather than another is used to establish substantive conclusions—where the alternatives are “indifferent”. Examples abound: Anaximander engages in such reasoning to show that the Earth does not move; Zeno of Elea to show that what is cannot be divided; Democritus to argue for finite divisibility, on the one hand, (...) and the infinite variety of atoms and worlds, on the other; not to mention the extensive use of such arguments in ancient skepticism. (shrink)

Lycan (1985, 1988) defended a “Principle of Credulity”: “Accept at the outset each of those things that seem to be true” (1988, p. 165). Though that takes the form of a rule rather than a thesis, it does not seem very different from Huemer’s (2001, 2006, 2007) doctrine of phenomenal conservatism (PC): “If it seems to S that p , then, in the absence of defeaters, S thereby has at least some degree of justification for believing that p ” (2007, (...) p. 30). My Principle was differently motivated and put to uses different from Huemer’s. In this paper I shall explore some of the differences. (shrink)

Supervaluationism is often described as the most popular semantic treatment of indeterminacy. There’s little consensus, however, about how to fill out the bare-bones idea to include a characterization of logical consequence. The paper explores one methodology for choosing between the logics: pick a logic thatnorms beliefas classical consequence is standardly thought to do. The main focus of the paper considers a variant of standard supervaluational, on which we can characterizedegrees of determinacy. It applies the methodology above to focus ondegree logic. (...) This is developed first in a basic, single-premise case; and then extended to the multipremise case, and to allowdegreesof consequence. The metatheoretic properties of degree logic are set out. On the positive side, the logic is supraclassical—all classical valid sequents are degree logic valid. Strikingly, metarules such as cut and conjunction introduction fail. (shrink)

I argue that a common philosophical approach to the interpretation of physical theories—particularly quantum field theories—has led philosophers astray. It has driven many to declare the quantum field theories employed by practicing physicists, so-called ‘effective field theories’, to be unfit for philosophical interpretation. In particular, such theories have been deemed unable to support a realist interpretation. I argue that these claims are mistaken: attending to the manner in which these theories are employed in physical practice, I show that interpreting effective (...) field theories yields a robust foundation for a more refined approach to scientific realism in the context of quantum field theory. The paper concludes by briefly sketching some general morals for interpretive practice in the philosophy of physics. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a detailed characterisation of some ways in which our preferences reflect our reasons. I will argue that practical reasons can be characterised along two dimensions that influence our preferences: their balance and their weight. This is analogous to a similar characterisation of the way in which probabilities reflect the balance and weight of evidence in epistemology. In this paper, I will illustrate the distinction between the balance and weight of reasons, and show (...) how this is crucial for an adequate account of preference and choice. The upshot is a more complete picture of a particular kind of decision, labelled by Isaac Levi and, more recently, Ruth Chang as ‘hard choices’. These are choices in which one option is better than another in some ways, the other is better than the first in some ways, but neither seems better overall. The distinction between the balance and weight of reasons presents a new way of understanding how hard choices vary by degree and what it is that makes them so hard. (shrink)

In Morality Bernard Williams confronts the problems of writing moral philosophy, and offers a stimulating alternative to more systematic accounts which seem nevertheless to have left all the important issues somewhere off the page.

Noted psychologist and philosopher develops his own brand of pragmatism, based on theories of C. S. Peirce. Emphasis on "radical empiricism," versus the transcendental and rationalist tradition. One of the most important books in American philosophy. Note.

In Part One Leiss traces the idea of the domination of nature from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century.

ABSTRACTWhile extant replies to Jonathan Schaffer’s putative counterexamples to the transitivity of grounding have made significant strides against the charge of transitivity failure, the replies pay insufficient attention to the common structure of the counterexamples, overlooking a deeper structural feature that contributes to their prima facie plausibility. Putative counterexamples to the transitivity of grounding, I argue, trade on the distinction between what I call ‘rigid’ and ‘non-rigid’ grounding, and confusion over how rigid and non-rigid grounding react when combined pumps the (...) intuition that the counterexamples’ chained conclusions are false. The rigid/non-rigid grounding distinction also reveals plausible weakening inference rules that have been overlooked in treatments of the logic of grounding. (shrink)

In 2018, William Lane Craig and Erik J. Wielenberg participated in a debate at North Carolina State University, addressing the question: "God and Morality: What is the best account of objective moral values and duties?" Craig argued that theism provides a sound foundation for objective morality whereas atheism does not. Wielenberg countered that morality can be objective even if there is no God. This book includes the full debate, as well as endnotes with extended discussions that were not included (...) in the debate. It also includes five chapters by other philosophers who have written substantive responses to the debate - J. P. Moreland, David Baggett, Mark Linville, Wes Morriston, and Michael Huemer. The book provides crucial resources for better understanding moral realism and its dependence on, or independence from, theistic foundations. Key Features A valuable debate about whether or not God is the best explanation for objective morality, bringing together theists and atheists working on the same subject who normally are not in conversation with each other. Includes clear coverage of ontological and epistemological issues in metaethical theories, focusing on Divine Command Theory and Non-natural Robust Moral Realism. Engaging and accessible throughout, making the book well suited for undergraduate and seminary classrooms. (shrink)

This new critical edition is an examination of William James's Essays in Radical Empiricism in light of the scientific naturalism prominent in James's Principles of Psychology (1890) and the subsequent development of Darwinian, functional psychology and functionalism in psychology, the philosophy psychology and the philosophy of mind.

The use of multiple means of determination to “triangulate” on the existence and character of a common phenomenon, object, or result has had a long tradition in science but has seldom been a matter of primary focus. As with many traditions, it is traceable to Aristotle, who valued having multiple explanations of a phenomenon, and it may also be involved in his distinction between special objects of sense and common sensibles. It is implicit though not emphasized in the distinction between (...) primary and secondary qualities from Galileo onward. It is arguably one of several conceptions involved in Whewell’s method of the “consilience of inductions” (Laudan 1971) and is to be found in several places in Peirce. (From M. Brewer and B. Collins, eds., (1981); Scientific Inquiry in the Social Sciences (a festschrift for Donald T. Campbell), San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 123–162.). (shrink)

Science should tell us what the world is like. However, realist interpretations of physics face many problems, chief among them the pessimistic meta induction. This book seeks to develop a realist position based on process ontology that avoids the traditional problems of realism. Primarily, the core claim is that in order for a scientific model to be minimally empirically adequate, that model must describe real experimental processes and dynamics. Any additional inferences from processes to things, substances or objects are not (...) warranted, and so these inferences are shown to represent the locus of the problems of realism. The book then examines the history of physics to show that the progress of physical research is one of successive eliminations of thing interpretations of models in favor of more explanatory and experimentally verified process interpretations. This culminates in collections of models that cannot coherently allow for thing interpretations, but still successfully describe processes. (shrink)

Science can reveal or conceal the breathtaking wonders of creation. On one hand, knowledge of the natural world can open us up to greater love for the Creator, give us the means of more neighborly care, and fill us with ever-deepening astonishment. On the other hand, knowledge feeding an insatiable hunger for epistemic mastery can become a means of idolatry, hubris, and damage. Crucial to world-respecting science is the role of wonder: curiosity, perplexity, and astonishment. In this volume, philosopher (...) class='Hi'>William Desmond explores the relation of the different modes of wonder to modern science. Responding to his thought are twelve thinkers across the domains of science, theology, philosophy, law, poetry, medicine, sociology, and art restoration. (shrink)

This paper presents a unifying diagnosis of a number of important problems facing existing models of rational choice under moral uncertainty and proposes a remedy. I argue that the problems of (i) severely limited scope, (ii) intertheoretic comparisons, and (iii) 'swamping’ all stem from the way in which values are assigned to options in decision rules such as Maximisation of Expected Choiceworthiness. By assigning values to options under a given moral theory by asking something like ‘how much do I desire (...) this option, supposing this theory is true?’ rather than ‘how much value does this theory assign to this option?’ these problems can be avoided, while the appealing features of these accounts can be preserved. This amendment provides a role for the preferences, desires, or goals of rational agents that is curiously absent from the existing discussion of what individuals rationally ought to do when they are uncertain about what they morally ought to do. (shrink)

Neuroscience can relate to ethics and normative issues via the brain’s cognitive control network. This network accomplishes several executive processes, such as planning, task-switching, monitoring, and inhibiting. These processes allow us to increase the accuracy of our perceptions and our memory recall. They also allow us to plan much farther into the future, and with much more detail than any of our fellow mammals. These abilities also make us fitting subjects for responsibility claims. Their activity, or lack thereof, is at (...) the heart of culpability. For instance, planning to kill someone is strong evidence of what the law calls mens rea—a guilty mind. Claims about norms, or ethical “should” claims, express two-level propositions, directed at the behaving person at one level, and at that person’s mind and cognitive control network at another level. Thus, “People should stop themselves from hurting others,” is a claim about how people should behave and also a claim about how their cognitive control networks should behave—i.e., they should inhibit harmful behavior, or the intentions leading up to it. Planning is both an ability of the full person, and of that person’s mind. Neuroscience affirms the common notion, seen both in law and folk psychology, that what makes us guilty or culpable are certain events and states that exist in our minds. Overt behavior, including speech, is fallible evidence of these states and processes. Cases of negligence still involve the executive processes, but “negatively,” in that negligence results when certain types of executive activity fail to take place. (shrink)