Intellectual servility is a vice opposing proper pride about one's intellectual achievements. Intellectual timidity is also a vice; it is manifested in a lack of proper concern for others’ esteem. This paper offers an account of the nature of these vices and details some of the epistemic harms that flow from them. I argue that servility, which is often the result of suffering humiliation, is a form of damaged self-esteem. It is underpinned by attitudes serving (...) social-adjustive functions and causes ingratiating behaviors. Timidity, which is habituated through self-silencing, is underpinned by negative attitudes toward the intellectual worth of the self, which serve a defensive function. Like servility, timidity is an obstacle to the acquisition and transmission of knowledge and especially knowledge about oneself. (shrink)

Recent scholarship in intellectual humility (IH) has attempted to provide deeper understanding of the virtue as personality trait and its impact on an individual's thoughts, beliefs, and actions. A limitations-owning perspective of IH focuses on a proper recognition of the impact of intellectual limitations and a motivation to overcome them, placing it as the mean between intellectual arrogance and intellectual servility. We developed the Limitations-Owning Intellectual Humility Scale to assess this conception of IH with (...) related personality constructs. In Studies 1 (n= 386) and 2 (n = 296), principal factor and confirmatory factor analyses revealed a three-factor model – owning one's intellectual limitations, appropriate discomfort with intellectual limitations, and love of learning. Study 3 (n = 322) demonstrated strong test-retest reliability of the measure over 5 months, while Study 4 (n = 612) revealed limitations-owning IH correlated negatively with dogmatism, closed-mindedness, and hubristic pride and positively with openness, assertiveness, authentic pride. It also predicted openness and closed-mindedness over and above education, social desirability, and other measures of IH. The limitations-owning understanding of IH and scale allow for a more nuanced, spectrum interpretation and measurement of the virtue, which directs future study inside and outside of psychology. (shrink)

Some of the students in our classrooms doubt their intellectual strengths—their knowledge, abilities, and skills. They may be unaware of the intellectual strengths they have, or may ignore, lack confidence in, or under-estimate them. They may even incorrectly judge themselves to be intellectually inferior to their peers. Students who do such things consistently are deficient in the virtue of intellectual pride—in appropriately ‘owning’ their intellectual strengths—and are on their way to developing a form of intellectual (...) servility. Can the ‘standard approach’ to intellectual character education help these students make progress toward intellectual pride? This article argues that there are two limitations in its ability to help. First, the standard approach isn’t likely to help unless it is combined with classroom strategies for ameliorating servility. Second, even when it is combined with ameliorative strategies, any progress it might make in the classroom is likely to be fleeting when a student’s servility is caused by systemic epistemic injustice. This article suggests that rather than prioritize the standard approach, we prioritize strategies that aim at systemic change and amelioration. (shrink)

This paper will be broken down into four sections. In §1, I try to assuage a worry that intellectual humility is not really an intellectual virtue. In §2, we will consider the two dominant accounts of intellectual humility in the philosophical literature—the low concern for status account the limitations-owing account—and I will argue that both accounts face serious worries. Then in §3, I will unpack my own view, the doxastic account of intellectual humility, as a viable (...) alternative and potentially a better starting place for thinking about this virtue. And I’ll conclude in §4 by trying to defend the doxastic account against some possible objections. (shrink)

We are constantly called upon to evaluate the evidential weight of testimony, and to balance its deliverances against our own independent thinking. ‘Intellectual autonomy’ is the virtue that is supposed to be displayed by those who engage in cognition in this domain well. I argue that this is at best a misleading label for the virtue, because virtuous cognition in this domain consists in thinking with others, and intelligently responding to testimony. I argue that the existing label supports an (...) excessively individualistic conception of good thinking, both within and outside philosophy. I propose replacing ‘intellectual autonomy’ with ‘intellectual interdependence’, which properly emphasises the depth of our reliance on one another, without suggesting we ought ever to be epistemically servile. (shrink)

In this paper I provide an account of two forms of intellectual arrogance which cause the epistemic practices of conversational turn-taking and assertion to malfunction. I detail some of the ethical and epistemic harms generated by intellectual arrogance, and explain its role in fostering the intellectual vices of timidity and servility in other agents. Finally, I show that arrogance produces ignorance by silencing others (both preventing them from speaking and causing their assertions to misfire) and by (...) fostering self-delusion in the arrogant themselves. (shrink)

The Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has traditionally been seen as the leading figure in the group of intellectuals known as the Bakhtin Circle. The writings of other members of the Circle are considered much less important than his work, while Bakhtin's achievement has been exaggerated in proportion to the downgrading of the thinkers with whom he associated in the 1920s. This volume, which includes new translations and studies of the work of the most important members of the (...) Circle, sets out to correct the distortions in the established representations of its activity. The original contributions to literary and linguistic theory made by Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev (but frequently credited to Bakhtin) are assessed, and the distinctiveness of their approaches is highlighted. (shrink)

It is sometimes claimed that faith is a virtue. To what extent faith is a virtue depends on what faith is. One construal of faith, which has been popular in both recent and historical work on faith, is that faith is a matter of taking oneself to have been spoken to by God and of trusting this purported divine testimony. In this paper, I argue that when faith is understood in this way, for faith to be virtuous then it must (...) be accompanied by intellectual humility. I defend this view by showing how someone ought to respond to purported divine testimony if her faith is to be intellectually humble, and how, if it fails in this respect, it will instead be accompanied by the vices of either servility or arrogance. (shrink)

Unlike its moral and intellectual counterparts, the virtue of aesthetic humility has been widely neglected. In order to begin filling in this gap, I argue that Kant’s aesthetics is a promising resource for developing a model of aesthetic humility. Initially, however, this may seem like an unpromising starting point as Kant’s aesthetics might appear to promote aesthetic arrogance instead. In spite of this prima facie worry, I claim that Kant’s aesthetics provides an illuminating model of aesthetic humility that sheds (...) light not only on the self- and other-directed attitudes it involves, but also on how aesthetic humility can serve as a corrective to the vices of aesthetic arrogance and aesthetic servility. In addition to revealing the ways in which Kant’s aesthetics prizes humility rather than arrogance, I aim to show that the Kantian model of aesthetic humility can enrich our understanding of humility more generally and contribute to the on-going effort in aesthetics to analyse specific aesthetic virtues and vices. (shrink)

In this paper I offer an original account of intellectual modesty and some of its surrounding vices: intellectual haughtiness, arrogance, servility and self-abasement. I argue that these vices are attitudes as social psychologists understand the notion. I also draw some of the educational implications of the account. In particular, I urge caution about the efficacy of direct instruction about virtue and of stimulating emulation through exposure to positive exemplars.

This article evaluates Alessandra Tanesini’s analyses of the intellectual virtues and vices of self-assessment, as characterized in her book The Mismeasure of the Self (2021 Tanesini, A. 2021. The Mismeasure of the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]). Section 1 explains Tanesini’s rich accounts of the virtues of intellectual humility and pride. Contra Tanesini, section 2 suggests an alternative account according to which the intellectual virtues of humility and pride require reliability about one’s limitations and strengths. (...) This is an externalist version of the limitations-owning analysis, which takes the virtues of intellectual humility and pride to consist in (roughly): dispositions to appropriately attend to and own one’s limitations and strengths (Whitcomb et al. 2017 Whitcomb, D., H. Battaly, J. Baehr, and D. Howard-Snyder. 2017. “Intellectual Humility: Owning Our Limitations.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (3): 509–539. doi:10.1111/phpr.12228.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]). I also explore whether the intellectual vices of self-assessment require unreliability about one’s limitations and strengths. In so doing, I raise a question about Tanesini’s analysis of self-abasement. (shrink)

Unlike its moral and intellectual counterparts, the virtue of aesthetic humility has been widely neglected. In order to begin filling in this gap, I argue that Kant’s aesthetics is a promising resource for developing a model of aesthetic humility. Initially, however, this may seem like an unpromising starting point as Kant’s aesthetics might appear to promote aesthetic arrogance instead. In spite of this prima facie worry, I claim that Kant’s aesthetics provides an illuminating model of aesthetic humility that sheds (...) light not only on the self- and other-directed attitudes it involves, but also on how aesthetic humility can serve as a corrective to the vices of aesthetic arrogance and aesthetic servility. In addition to revealing the ways in which Kant’s aesthetics prizes humility rather than arrogance, I aim to show that the Kantian model of aesthetic humility can enrich our understanding of humility more generally and contribute to the on-going effort in aesthetics to analyse specific aesthetic virtues and vices. (shrink)

Some of the most problematic human behaviors involve vices of the mind such as arrogance, closed-mindedness, dogmatism, gullibility, and intellectual cowardice, as well as wishful or conspiratorial thinking. What sorts of things are epistemic vices? How do we detect and mitigate them? How and why do these vices prevent us from acquiring knowledge, and what is their role in sustaining patterns of ignorance? What is their relation to implicit or unconscious bias? How do epistemic vices and systems of social (...) oppression relate to one another? Do we unwittingly absorb such traits from the process of socialization and communities around us? Are epistemic vices traits for which we can blamed? Can there be institutional and collective epistemic vices? This book seeks to answer these important questions about the vices of the mind and their roles in our social and epistemic lives, and is the first collection of its kind. Organized into three parts, chapters by outstanding scholars explore the nature of epistemic vices, specific examples of these vices, and case studies in applied vice epistemology, including education and politics. Alongside these foundational questions, the volume offers sophisticated accounts of vices both new and familiar. These include epistemic arrogance and servility, epistemic injustice, epistemic snobbishness, conspiratorial thinking, procrastination, and forms of closed-mindedness. Vice Epistemology is essential reading for students of ethics, epistemology, and virtue theory, and various areas of applied, feminist, and social philosophy. It will also be of interest to practitioners, scholars, and activists in politics, law, and education. (shrink)

In a fallen world fraught with evidence against religious beliefs, it is tempting to think that, on the assumption that those beliefs are true, the best way to protect them is to hold them dogmatically. Dogmatic belief, which is highly confident and resistant to counterevidence, may fail to exhibit epistemic virtues such as humility and may instead manifest epistemic vices such as arrogance or servility, but if this is the price of secure belief in religious truths, so be it. (...) I argue, however, that even in a world full of misleading evidence against true religious beliefs, cultivating epistemic humility is the better way to achieve believers’ epistemic aims. The reason is that dogmatic belief courts certain epistemic dangers, including to the true religious beliefs themselves, whereas epistemic humility empowers believers to counter them. (shrink)

In this paper I remark on Tanesini’s (2021) account of intellectual humility and servility as attitudes, with a focus on how this proposal intersects with the psychology literature on intellectual humility. I begin by discussing the implications this may have for empirical measures of intellectual humility, including concerns that some current measures seem to do a better job of capturing dispositional limitations-owning than virtuous intellectual humility. Additionally, I raise concerns that excluding interpersonal features and a (...) motivation to learn from conceptualizations of intellectual humility risk vicious manifestations of intellectual humility. Finally, I build on Tanesini’s (2021) ameliorative proposal centered on affirming one’s values by offering some specific strategies drawn from several psychology theories. These include Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Social Learning Theory, and the Social Contact Hypothesis. (shrink)

I begin by detailing the semantic range of the English terms ‘work’ and ‘labour’, in comparison with that of their closest Greek equivalents. Narrowing matters down to work in the sense of ‘occupation’, what is striking about Aristotle, I maintain, is his willingness to sort occupations into a hierarchy. This hierarchy is fourfold. At the bottom we have servile work, which is directed at life’s ‘necessities’, and is founded on mere habit. Then we have technē or skilled work, which typically (...) produces material objects, and requires expertise. Further up the hierarchy we have praxis or morally-informed activity, which reaches its apogee in the life of the politikos or ruler. At the summit of Aristotle’s hierarchy is theōria or intellectual contemplation, which supposedly approximates divine activity. After documenting the resilience of this hierarchy in the Western tradition, I outline three grounds for it – social, metaphysical and psychological – which are manifestly weak. I then elaborate other grounds for it – found both within and outside Aristotle’s texts – which, I argue, are manifestly strong, and thus deserve our endorsement even today. (shrink)

The appellation “Western” is, in my view, inappropriate when applied to Ancient Hellas and its greatest product, the Hellenic philosophy. For, as a matter of historical fact, neither the spirit of free inquiry and bold speculation, nor the quest of perfection via autonomous virtuous activity and ethical excellence survived, in the purity of their Hellenic forms, the imposition of inflexible religious doctrines and practices on Christian Europe. The coming of Christianity, with the theocratic proclivity of the Church, especially the hierarchically (...) organized Catholic Church, sealed the fate of Hellenic philosophy in Europe for more than a millennium. Since the Italian Renaissance, several attempts primarily by Platonists to revive the free spirit and other virtues of Hellenic philosophy have been invariably frustrated by violent reactions from religious movements, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and the bloody wars which followed their appearance in Europe. Modern science succeeded to a certain extent, after struggle with the Catholic Church, in freeing itself from the snares of medieval theocratic restrictions. Thus, it managed to reconnect with the scientific spirit of late antiquity and its great achievements, especially in the fields of cosmology, physics, mathematics, and medicine, which enabled modern science to ad-vance further. But it seems that the mainstream European philosophy has failed to follow the example of science and to liberate itself, too. As in the Middle Ages, so in modern and post-modern times the “European philosophy” has continued to play the undignified and servile role of handmaiden of something. In addition to the medieval role of “handmaiden of theology” (ancilla theologiae), since the seventeenth century philosophy in Europe assumed the role of “handmaiden of science” (ancilla scientiae) and, with the coming of the Marxist “scientific socialism,” the extra role of ‘handmaiden of ideology” (ancilla ideologiae). In this respect, the so-called “Western philosophy,” as it has been historically practiced in Christian and partially Islamized Europe, is indeed a very different kind of product from the autonomous intellectual and ethical human activity, which the Ancient Hellenes named philosophia and honored as “the queen of arts and sciences.” In this historical light, Hellenic philosophy would appear to be closer to the Asian philosophies of India, China, Japan, and Korea than to Western or “European philosophy.” So as we stand at the post-cold war era, witnessing the collapse of Soviet-style Socialism and the coming of the post-modern era; as we look at the dawn of a new millennium and dream of a new global order of freedom and democracy, the moment seemspropitious for reflection. We may stop and reflect upon our philosophical past as exemplified in the free spirit of Hellenic philosophy and its misfortunes, its great “passion” in Christian Europe in the last two millennia or so. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 141-160 [Access article in PDF] The Politics of Character in John Milton's Divorce Tracts David Hawkes nunquam privatum esse sapientum --Cicero I. There has recently been a great deal of debate over the relative influence on Milton's politics of two discordant revolutionary ideologies: classical republicanism and radical Protestant theology. 1 In the mid-seventeenth century the search for intellectual precedents and (...) rationalizations of the English revolution brought these two traditions into an uneasy alliance, and Milton, like many other revolutionary apologists, drew on both of them. Of course the two schools of thought are not necessarily incompatible. J. G. A. Pocock notes one point of connection between them: The context in which men attain their final end--or recover their prima forma, though this concept might not have been antinomian enough for the radical saints of the New Model--is that of apocalypse; the "end" of Aristotelian teleology is still united with the eschatological "end" of prophetic time. 2The Aristotelian "end" of man is the good, defined as "an activity of soul in accordance with virtue," and the belief that one can or has fulfilled that end is [End Page 141] certainly amenable to Protestant antinomianism. 3 Furthermore, as Sharon Achinstein points out, Milton's "conception of virtue... melds the religious notion of conscience with a classical sense of civic duty." 4 On the other hand there are significant differences between the classical and the Christian notions of "virtue" and the "good," which dictate that, as Nigel Smith puts it, "[c]lassical republicanism, properly conceived, would in many ways be in conflict with the millenarian, chiliastic and perfectionist Protestantism of the sects." 5 The problem faced by Milton as a Protestant Republican is that the definition of the "good" offered by millennial sanctification and that attainable through Aristotelian virtue are in many ways mutually exclusive and contradictory. They have been characterized as such ever since Augustine's City of God asserted that pagan ethics are incompatible with true, Christian virtue. 6 Millennialism relies on faith; civic humanist virtue relies on works. Antinomianism abolishes the law; republicanism institutes the rule of law. The saints are sanctified by grace; the virtuous are distinguished by their own strength of character. Radical Protestant freedom is negative and private--it is the ability to speak and worship according to the dictates of conscience; civic humanist liberty is positive and public, the ability to participate fully in the government of the res publica. While daunting, however, these contradictions are not quite insuperable. I believe that Milton finds a common denominator in the accounts given by these two traditions of psychological objectification and that the agreement of Roman and Christian morality on this point leads him to make the tendency to objectification (or rather the ability to resist that tendency) the central issue of his mature political theory.The political ideas of the classical republicans and their descendants, the Renaissance civic humanists, were based upon Aristotle's Politics and Nico-machean Ethics, while the intellectual sources of radical Protestantism can be traced to Luther's commentaries on Paul's epistles. During the English revolution the Pauline exegesis of the relationship between the old and the new covenants provided intellectual ammunition against custom and tradition, as well as inspiring the antinomianism of the radical fringe to which Milton was falsely accused of adhering during the divorce controversy. In the divorce tracts Milton points out that Aristotle and Paul share one fundamental tenet: they argue that interior and exterior slavery are of the same nature and therefore concomitant [End Page 142] and inseparable. Furthermore, Milton notes, Aristotle and Paul both claim that exterior and interior slavery consist in "carnality," the subjection of the spirit to the flesh. This identification of carnality with servility becomes a constant strain which runs throughout Milton's career and provides the consistent element in his apparently vacillating theories of politics and religion.II. Although this argument recurs throughout Milton's career, it is first hammered into shape during the divorce controversy... (shrink)

From the very outset of his literary and intellectual career Rousseau saw himself as an uncompromising critic of contemporary society. As he has vividly related in his personal writings, the famous moment of ‘illumination’ when he was on the way to visit his friend Diderot imprisoned in the Chateau de Vincennes not only gave him a vision of ‘another universe’ but transformed him into ‘another man’. An overwhelming ‘enthusiasm for truth, freedom and virtue’ made him henceforth reject the corrupt (...) values of the society he saw around him; ‘to be free and virtuous and above fortune and opinion’ seemed a greater and nobler attitude than servile acquiescence in the ‘maxims of his age’. (shrink)

From the very outset of his literary and intellectual career Rousseau saw himself as an uncompromising critic of contemporary society. As he has vividly related in his personal writings, the famous moment of ‘illumination’ when he was on the way to visit his friend Diderot imprisoned in the Chateau de Vincennes not only gave him a vision of ‘another universe’ but transformed him into ‘another man’. An overwhelming ‘enthusiasm for truth, freedom and virtue’ made him henceforth reject the corrupt (...) values of the society he saw around him; ‘to be free and virtuous and above fortune and opinion’ seemed a greater and nobler attitude than servile acquiescence in the ‘maxims of his age’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 415-431 [Access article in PDF] The Humanities at Home with Themselves Mark Bauerlein The Crafty Reader, by Robert Scholes; 272 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, $24.95. WHEN I STARTED GRADUATE SCHOOL in English in the early Eight ies, a typical thing happened. Those few students with a background in philosophy drifted together, shared influences, and developed a hierarchy of critical works. A (...) few pushed analytic philosophy and pragmatism, but overall Continental theory took first place, especially Derrida. "Structure, Sign, and Play" and "White Mythology," de Man's "Rhetoric of Temporality," Shoshana Felman's "Turning the Screw of Interpretation," and other weighty essays had the status of cutting-edge wisdom, and the hostility deconstruction drew from traditionalists and Marxists in the department only sharpened our commitment. Having no other professional standing, we savored the stigma, the roguishness. It complemented our poverty, and eased our transition from hot-shot undergraduates to first-year, prequalifying Ph.D aspirants. In the evenings, after instructing freshmen in comma splices, we gathered to trade Nietszchean epigrams and mock professors who looked befuddled at the mention of a priori and aporia.Other students found us insufferable, and doubtless we were, but not in a partisan way. We panned each other just as hard as we did the uninformed. This was UCLA, not Yale or Johns Hopkins, and personalities mattered less than arguments. If in discussion I backed a point with [End Page 415] "As Derrida says...," someone always answered, "So what?" We frowned on arguments from authority. Popularizations such as Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction earned our scorn. They were one step up from Cliff's Notes, packed with servile observations like "Jean Baudrillard wants to take us further, into a world where everything is so textualized that there is no space left for the real." We preferred to understand deconstruction through laborious readings of Being and Time and Beyond Good and Evil, not in watery effusions about textuality or the mechanical pairing of binary oppositions. The latter we placed among the scribes, those well-intentioned professionals canny enough to recognize the broad import of deconstruction, but not acute enough to discern the real meaning of différance or the radical disclosure of the ontic-ontological difference. The genius of philosophy, we thought, lay in plumbing the fundamental habits of cognition, like Hegel breaking down sense certainty and Heidegger questioning the determination of Being as substance. Exegesis of other texts was a lesser activity, though we acknowledged exceptions such as Starobinski's book on Rousseau and Kojève's lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit.Lower in our rankings were the quasi-Leftist attacks just emerging, such as Frank Lentricchia's Criticism and Social Change, which cast theorists as mandarin functionaries treating interpretation as an apolitical game. They filled the page with spiteful terms like "the mask of pure reason" and righteous declarations like "it is wrong to claim that you are above politics," spurning argument for the rhetoric of the reformer. We diagnosed them as puny reactions to the Reagan Revolution, carried out on the irrelevant ground of literary theory. Philosophically, Lentricchia was a hack, and we rejected the imputation that theory nullified activism and justified the status quo. Not that we thought theory bred activism. We just considered them separate activities, and saw no determinate connection between hermeneutical stance and party affiliation. However, we accepted the elitist charge. How could ambitious academics avoid elitism? It wasn't hard for graduate students struggling on $900 a month to see that populist attitudes didn't suit the tenured Ivy Leaguer. Professors were paid by exclusive institutions to teach poetry, to write letters for the best and brightest, to run recondite journals and jet to prestigious symposia. We wanted to join them, but not with phony expressions of social injustice that targeted theory as the problem.Allied with the political attacks on theory, and esteemed even lower, were critiques of the humanities as a bastion of high culture. Polemics [End Page 416] such as Andrew Ross's No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture treated... (shrink)

The contributions in the current issue of Ethical Perspectives mainly derive from a conference on Catholic Intellectual Traditions organized jointly by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame, and held at Leuven from November 10th to the 11th, 2000. As the reader can see from a quick perusal of the table of contents, the contributions cover a diverse range of topics. The reader might well ask what such contributions have to do with a journal (...) concerned with ethical perspectives. What do contributions bearing on religious themes from literature, or reflections on mystical love, or on Catholicism and modern scholarship, have to do with a journal devoted to ethics? Surely we have all learned to our benefit from Kant that ethics is entirely autonomous with respect to religion. If there is a relation, it is one that must respect that autonomy, and not muddy the waters by bringing back the outmoded promiscuity of religion and ethics, and especially it must guard against religion trying to sly its way back to dominion over ethics once again.A reply to this line of reflection would be that Ethical Perspectives is concerned not only with perspectives, not only with what happens within perspectives, but with ethical perspectives as themselves coming to articulation within contexts that contain all the richness of human life as lived. Such contexts cannot be considered apart from serious reflection on religion as expressing the sense of ultimate worth that humans understand and try to live diversely. Contexts have to do with the ethos within which ethical perspectives, and our determinate address to specific ethical dilemmas occur. The practice of a religion, or the absence of it, or indeed the rejection of such practice, communicates something of our sense of the most ultimate ethos of being, and its goodness.Clearly this communication will also be effected in a diversity of ways: for instance, in the understanding we have of the economy and the state as serving, or despoiling, the worth of human life; or in the art and literature that offer us images of significant human possibility set forth for imaginative contemplation with a forthrightness more integral than the confused flux of everyday life allows; or in the secret love of prayer that draws the human soul towards its most extreme abandonment and adoration. Ethical perspectives do not make full sense in the determinate terms they overtly set forth, but draw from sources of value that more often than not remain implicit and intimate to the perspectives themselves. Full ethical reflection requires mindfulness of these more intimate sources, and an honest address towards our religious being is demanded by such reflection. Such honesty is asked of a non-believer as of a believer. Both indeed may be differently called into question by that honesty.If the conference was organized with reference to Catholic Traditions, does this indicate a kind of sectarian narrowness for the intellectual, despite what the word `catholic' might betoken? It will be evident from the contributions that no such narrowness is here at work. Quite the opposite: it is the rich diversity that is striking. One does hear reference to the `ghetto' of Catholic ways, perhaps Church ways, perhaps Christian ways generally. This is a very interesting word: `ghetto'. The discerning reader will note in some of the contributions a strong sympathy for Judaism. But in some instances we will be urged to get out of our `ghetto'. It might seem that as `Catholics' or `Christians' we are already `Jews'. Who put us into the `ghetto'? Is this self-incurred? It seems there are some who have consigned themselves to their own `ghetto', but while this may be true, are there not `ghettos' of religion that are the afterlives of certain Enlightenment ways of thinking about religion, afterlives internalized by those religious who would get out of this now self-imposed ghetto, and make their accommodation with more enlightened ways. How delightfully tangled it all is! We preach repentance and wonder at the end who it is that needs to repent, perhaps we the preachers! One thinks of Lear telling the judge to bring the lash to himself. I don't believe Lear was a Catholic, but he certainly was not an Enlightenment intellectual.There is a question worth asking here, in that for not a few the notion of a `Catholic intellectual' or `Christian intellectual' is an oxymoron. To be a real intellectual is not to be affiliated to an organization that already knows in advance what the truth is. One is reminded of those debates earlier in the 20th century between Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston. Russell: You are a Catholic, ergo you already know the answer, ergo you cannot honestly ask the question, ergo what you do cannot be philosophy, that is, free thinking.Very clever, of course, and not without some truth. Do we have to agree with Heidegger that a Christian philosophy is a round square? The problem here, of course, is philosophical. I would say: to be a philosopher is to be able to ask about anything, including religion. But the how of the asking is very important. The asking about religion might well seek a confirmation for what is held beforehand. But this holds true of the critics of religion as much as the sympathizers. The shoe is sometimes on the other foot. It is not only the apologetic Catholics who bring presuppositions to bear on the asking of a question, but so also do those critics who, mirabile dictu, strangely often find their own presuppositions confirmed once again. How easy to accuse the other of not being a `real' intellectual; how galling when it turns out that one's own practice of the free intellect mirrors one's chained opponent.The lesson I take: we inevitably bring fundamental presuppositions to bear in the asking of determinate questions. And it is these presuppositions we need to understand as much as the determinate questions and determinate answers. We are all put to the test. This is more catholic than the offensive critic or the defensive apologist. But you must have trust in mind to be willing to let one's thought be thus open. Such trust cannot be accounted for fully in the determinate ideas one explores or defends. It is interesting also that this trust, in the how of asking questions, mirrors the trust in the how of a person's faith or hope in God. This trust bears on this and that situation or difficulty, but it is in excess of this or that determinate situation or difficulty. It concerns sources of expectation in truth and goodness that are more than we can determine in advance. They are more than we can ever determine completely, since they make our determining possible. We are given to be in this expectation which we cannot completely determine through ourselves alone. And one might say that religion is the way we are given to keep open our communication to these sources of ultimate trust. Russell's cleverness is admirable, but that cleverness will not do to deal with the issue. If the issue concerns ethos or context in the sense implied above, cleverness will never do justice to that. While religion has the power to make us more discerning here, there is a cleverness that tends to make us obtuse.Of course, we intellectuals and academics love cleverness, since we think we are very clever ourselves. Here is one of our sources of difficulty with religion. People who are not clever like us also seem to be religious. If so, one might be tempted to say: being religious then cannot be the same as being clever; it might not even be clever to be religious; ergo to be a truly clever intellectual and academic, I must leave religion in my youth, and put on adult ways of thinking. One might even add to the clinching argument: for ethical reasons we must leave that behind, for just as our thinking must be autonomous, so we must our being ethical become entirely autonomous. Adieu religion!There is an argument here, but one wonders if there are also hints of the operation of a sly process of shaming. We now live in a time where processes of embarrassment are often at work in the initiation of young academics and intellectuals. I hear it said, or rather I hear the significant silence saying this: “It is not that we argue against religion, it's just that well, we real intellectuals don't talk about such things anymore”. We may speak at the top of our heads as post-modernists who have robustly deconstructed the Enlightenment ideal, but at the level of the more elusive and intimate embarrassment we are unself-conscious children of the Enlightenment. But did not the Enlightenment tell us no longer to be children. But now, with our heads we postmoderns tell ourselves we no longer want to be children of the Enlightenment, but in our hearts with regard to religion we are still such children — I mean children of the Enlightenment. Is it not time for that child also to grow up. If I were allowed to prophesy — and of course I am not allowed, since prophecy is now said not only to be inadmissible but impossible — I would inadmissibly and impossibly have to say that at the end of that growing up being religious might again wait gently for this stout child. How galling this will be, I do not prophesy, since we will then have to make our peace with all those people there who are not as clever as we are.We all know Kant's remarks about Enlightenment freeing us from self-incurred tutelage. And of course, our servility to spiritual despots and priestly powers was part of that tutelage. And so we have become autonomous thinkers. What if this autonomy comes to mean that we substitute for self-incurred tutelage a kind of self-incurred spiritual mutilation? If God is the distinguished thing, this may be so; and no amount of self-exculpation, not even ethical self-exculpation, in terms of our being denizens of the epoch of the death of God, will quite exonerate our blasé lack of urgency about divine ultimacy. (shrink)

The contributions in the current issue of Ethical Perspectives mainly derive from a conference on Catholic Intellectual Traditions organized jointly by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame, and held at Leuven from November 10th to the 11th, 2000. As the reader can see from a quick perusal of the table of contents, the contributions cover a diverse range of topics. The reader might well ask what such contributions have to do with a journal (...) concerned with ethical perspectives. What do contributions bearing on religious themes from literature, or reflections on mystical love, or on Catholicism and modern scholarship, have to do with a journal devoted to ethics? Surely we have all learned to our benefit from Kant that ethics is entirely autonomous with respect to religion. If there is a relation, it is one that must respect that autonomy, and not muddy the waters by bringing back the outmoded promiscuity of religion and ethics, and especially it must guard against religion trying to sly its way back to dominion over ethics once again.A reply to this line of reflection would be that Ethical Perspectives is concerned not only with perspectives, not only with what happens within perspectives, but with ethical perspectives as themselves coming to articulation within contexts that contain all the richness of human life as lived. Such contexts cannot be considered apart from serious reflection on religion as expressing the sense of ultimate worth that humans understand and try to live diversely. Contexts have to do with the ethos within which ethical perspectives, and our determinate address to specific ethical dilemmas occur. The practice of a religion, or the absence of it, or indeed the rejection of such practice, communicates something of our sense of the most ultimate ethos of being, and its goodness.Clearly this communication will also be effected in a diversity of ways: for instance, in the understanding we have of the economy and the state as serving, or despoiling, the worth of human life; or in the art and literature that offer us images of significant human possibility set forth for imaginative contemplation with a forthrightness more integral than the confused flux of everyday life allows; or in the secret love of prayer that draws the human soul towards its most extreme abandonment and adoration. Ethical perspectives do not make full sense in the determinate terms they overtly set forth, but draw from sources of value that more often than not remain implicit and intimate to the perspectives themselves. Full ethical reflection requires mindfulness of these more intimate sources, and an honest address towards our religious being is demanded by such reflection. Such honesty is asked of a non-believer as of a believer. Both indeed may be differently called into question by that honesty.If the conference was organized with reference to Catholic Traditions, does this indicate a kind of sectarian narrowness for the intellectual, despite what the word `catholic' might betoken? It will be evident from the contributions that no such narrowness is here at work. Quite the opposite: it is the rich diversity that is striking. One does hear reference to the `ghetto' of Catholic ways, perhaps Church ways, perhaps Christian ways generally. This is a very interesting word: `ghetto'. The discerning reader will note in some of the contributions a strong sympathy for Judaism. But in some instances we will be urged to get out of our `ghetto'. It might seem that as `Catholics' or `Christians' we are already `Jews'. Who put us into the `ghetto'? Is this self-incurred? It seems there are some who have consigned themselves to their own `ghetto', but while this may be true, are there not `ghettos' of religion that are the afterlives of certain Enlightenment ways of thinking about religion, afterlives internalized by those religious who would get out of this now self-imposed ghetto, and make their accommodation with more enlightened ways. How delightfully tangled it all is! We preach repentance and wonder at the end who it is that needs to repent, perhaps we the preachers! One thinks of Lear telling the judge to bring the lash to himself. I don't believe Lear was a Catholic, but he certainly was not an Enlightenment intellectual.There is a question worth asking here, in that for not a few the notion of a `Catholic intellectual' or `Christian intellectual' is an oxymoron. To be a real intellectual is not to be affiliated to an organization that already knows in advance what the truth is. One is reminded of those debates earlier in the 20th century between Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston. Russell: You are a Catholic, ergo you already know the answer, ergo you cannot honestly ask the question, ergo what you do cannot be philosophy, that is, free thinking.Very clever, of course, and not without some truth. Do we have to agree with Heidegger that a Christian philosophy is a round square? The problem here, of course, is philosophical. I would say: to be a philosopher is to be able to ask about anything, including religion. But the how of the asking is very important. The asking about religion might well seek a confirmation for what is held beforehand. But this holds true of the critics of religion as much as the sympathizers. The shoe is sometimes on the other foot. It is not only the apologetic Catholics who bring presuppositions to bear on the asking of a question, but so also do those critics who, mirabile dictu, strangely often find their own presuppositions confirmed once again. How easy to accuse the other of not being a `real' intellectual; how galling when it turns out that one's own practice of the free intellect mirrors one's chained opponent.The lesson I take: we inevitably bring fundamental presuppositions to bear in the asking of determinate questions. And it is these presuppositions we need to understand as much as the determinate questions and determinate answers. We are all put to the test. This is more catholic than the offensive critic or the defensive apologist. But you must have trust in mind to be willing to let one's thought be thus open. Such trust cannot be accounted for fully in the determinate ideas one explores or defends. It is interesting also that this trust, in the how of asking questions, mirrors the trust in the how of a person's faith or hope in God. This trust bears on this and that situation or difficulty, but it is in excess of this or that determinate situation or difficulty. It concerns sources of expectation in truth and goodness that are more than we can determine in advance. They are more than we can ever determine completely, since they make our determining possible. We are given to be in this expectation which we cannot completely determine through ourselves alone. And one might say that religion is the way we are given to keep open our communication to these sources of ultimate trust. Russell's cleverness is admirable, but that cleverness will not do to deal with the issue. If the issue concerns ethos or context in the sense implied above, cleverness will never do justice to that. While religion has the power to make us more discerning here, there is a cleverness that tends to make us obtuse.Of course, we intellectuals and academics love cleverness, since we think we are very clever ourselves. Here is one of our sources of difficulty with religion. People who are not clever like us also seem to be religious. If so, one might be tempted to say: being religious then cannot be the same as being clever; it might not even be clever to be religious; ergo to be a truly clever intellectual and academic, I must leave religion in my youth, and put on adult ways of thinking. One might even add to the clinching argument: for ethical reasons we must leave that behind, for just as our thinking must be autonomous, so we must our being ethical become entirely autonomous. Adieu religion!There is an argument here, but one wonders if there are also hints of the operation of a sly process of shaming. We now live in a time where processes of embarrassment are often at work in the initiation of young academics and intellectuals. I hear it said, or rather I hear the significant silence saying this: “It is not that we argue against religion, it's just that well, we real intellectuals don't talk about such things anymore”. We may speak at the top of our heads as post-modernists who have robustly deconstructed the Enlightenment ideal, but at the level of the more elusive and intimate embarrassment we are unself-conscious children of the Enlightenment. But did not the Enlightenment tell us no longer to be children. But now, with our heads we postmoderns tell ourselves we no longer want to be children of the Enlightenment, but in our hearts with regard to religion we are still such children — I mean children of the Enlightenment. Is it not time for that child also to grow up. If I were allowed to prophesy — and of course I am not allowed, since prophecy is now said not only to be inadmissible but impossible — I would inadmissibly and impossibly have to say that at the end of that growing up being religious might again wait gently for this stout child. How galling this will be, I do not prophesy, since we will then have to make our peace with all those people there who are not as clever as we are.We all know Kant's remarks about Enlightenment freeing us from self-incurred tutelage. And of course, our servility to spiritual despots and priestly powers was part of that tutelage. And so we have become autonomous thinkers. What if this autonomy comes to mean that we substitute for self-incurred tutelage a kind of self-incurred spiritual mutilation? If God is the distinguished thing , this may be so; and no amount of self-exculpation, not even ethical self-exculpation, in terms of our being denizens of the epoch of the death of God, will quite exonerate our blasé lack of urgency about divine ultimacy. (shrink)

In The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, Kenneth Minogue explores the intelligentsia’s love affair with social perfection and reveals how ...

Thomas E. Hill, Jr.; Servility and Self-Respect, The Monist, Volume 57, Issue 1, 1 January 1973, Pages 87–104, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist197357135.

This article argues that an interlocutor’s deference and open-mindedness can indicate servility rather than virtuous humility. Section 1 evaluates an influential philosophical analysis of the virtue of humility and two psychological measures, all of which emphasize the contrast between humility and arrogance. Section 2 develops a philosophical analysis of servility, building on the limitations-owning view. It argues that servility is an unwillingness or inability to be attentive to and own one’s strengths, and a disposition to be overly (...) attentive to and over-own one’s limitations. Section 3 sketches a picture of servility in political discourse, suggesting that we can expect servility to be positively correlated with deferring to others, open-mindedness, and belief-revision, and negatively correlated with anger. Section 4 sketches a picture of countering servility in political discourse through the virtues of pride and humility. By comparison with servility, we can expect virtuously proud and virtuously humble people to exhibit higher correlations with refusals to defer, to be open, to engage, and to revise beliefs. It points us toward psychological measures that aim to distinguish the virtue of humility from the vice of servility. (shrink)

In the last two books of the Politics, Aristotle articulates an education program for his best regime in contrast to what he takes to be the goal and practices of Sparta’s educational system. Although Aristotle never refers to his program as liberal education, clearly he takes its goal to be the production of free male and female citizens. By contrast, he characterizes the results of the Spartan system as ‘crude’, ‘slavish’, and ‘servile’. I argue that Aristotle’s criticisms of Spartan education (...) elucidate his general understanding of Sparta and provide an interpretative key to understanding Politics 7–8. But although Aristotle contrasts the goals and methods of Spartan education with that of his own best regime, the citizens of his best regime are more like Spartan citizen-soldiers than Athenian participatory-citizens. (shrink)

Intuition is sometimes derided as an abstruse or esoteric phenomenon akin to crystal-ball gazing. Such derision appears to be fuelled primarily by the suggestion, evidently endorsed by traditional rationalists such as Plato and Descartes, that intuition is a kind of direct, immediate apprehension akin to perception. This paper suggests that although the perceptual analogy has often been dismissed as encouraging a theoretically useless metaphor, a quasi-perceptualist view of intuition may enable rationalists to begin to meet the challenge of supplying a (...) theoretically satisfying treatment of their favoured epistemic source. It is argued, first, that intuitions and perceptual experiences are at a certain level of abstraction the same type of mental state, presentations, which are distinct from beliefs, hunches, inclinations, attractions, and seemings. The notion of a presentation is given a positive explication, which identifies its characteristic features, accounts for several of its substantive psychological roles, and systematically locates it in a threefold division among types of contentful states. Subsequently, it is argued that presentations, intuitive no less than sensory, are by their nature poised to play a distinctive epistemic role. Specifically, in the case of intuition, we encounter an intellectual state that is so structured as to provide justification without requiring justification in turn—something which may, thus, be thought of as ‘given’. (shrink)

Scholars often turn to Livy’s famous digression on Aulus Cossus and the spolia opima (4.17–20) to shed light on his larger political inclinations. These readings generally regard Livy as either an Augustan (or at least a patriotic Roman) or an apolitical skeptic. Yet neither view, I argue, fully explains the Cossus affair. What is needed is an interpretation that recognizes the political nature of the Cossus digression and its skepticism toward Augustus. Attending to Livy’s rhetorical strategy in the digression allows (...) us to see it as an instance of oblique criticism of Augustus and his control over Roman life. The explanatory power of this reading extends to episodes from the life of Romulus as well. I argue Livy uses these stories to make a theoretical argument about the nature of despotism, namely, that it seeks to control narratives of the past just as much as it aims for political domination. (shrink)

While there are many competing accounts and scales of intellectual humility, philosophers and psychologists are generally united in treating it as an epistemically _beneficial_ disposition of _individual_ agents. I call the research guided by this supposition the _traditional approach_ to studying intellectual humility. The traditional approach is entirely understandable in light of recent findings that individual differences in intellectual humility are associated with various deleterious epistemic tendencies. Nonetheless, I argue that its near monopoly has resulted in an (...) underestimation of important limitations of human cognition. In particular, it neglects the fact that intellectual arrogance can be both deeply recalcitrant and significantly beneficial for bounded cognitive agents whose reliance on one another is profound. I propose to integrate these insights into the study of intellectual humility by treating it as a _collective virtue_ that gets manifested in the structure of epistemic environments. More specifically, it is an interactive virtue that harnesses and constrains intellectual arrogance to yield benefits for both individuals and collectives. I claim that this can happen only within _humbling environments_, such as forecasting tournaments and open institutional science. (shrink)