In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:James S. Mullican DETERMINISM, FATALISM, AND FREE WILL IN HAWTHORNE A recurrent theme in Nathaniel Hawthorne's writing is the relationship between fatalism and free will. His tales, romances, and notebooks contain explicit and implied references to man's freedom of choice and his consequent responsibility for his acts, as well as to "fatalities" that impel men to various courses of action. Much of the ambiguity in Hawthorne's fiction rests on (...) this conflict between the notions of human freedom and responsibility on one hand and fatalism on the other. Although there is no question that this theme was important for Hawthorne, there is much disagreement concerning what Hawthorne himself believed. Critics have taken virtually every position on the spectrum between the poles of complete freedom and complete fatalism. That this disagreement exists should not be surprising. Hawthorne was an artist, not a philosopher or theologian; an important element of his technique, perhaps essential to his vision of life, was his ambiguity. His dual vision of the world, of matter and spirit, of evil and good, and his emphasis now of one, now of the other, engender disagreement concerning his view of life. His alternate fascination with and apparent rejection of Puritanism have led some to believe he was a predestinarían, others to hold that he was a "libertarian," and at least one critic to write that Hawthorne believed in a "modified predestination." Turner argued that Hawthorne's attitude toward reform led him to fatalistic thinking. Since reform movements touched only the surface manifestations of vice, such movements were useless, in Hawthorne's view. The logical conclusion of such a position, reasoned Turner, was fatalism. "Hence reform which would stir only the superficial outcroppings and would leave untouched the real causes underneath would be futile at best. And since the true sources of evil, so Hawthorne thought, lie largely beyond the reach of human efforts, fatalism was the certain end of his thinking." Turner saw evidence for fatalism 91 92Philosophy and Literature in Hawthorne's fiction also: "... there is a clear suggestion that the decisions [by Hester, Dimmesdale, Rappaccini, Ethan Brand, and Hollingsworth] have been inevitable, that the agent responsible is fate rather than Hawthorne's character." This critic concluded that Hawthorne was convinced that "the universe, including man and man's soul, is governed by inexorable law." Some critics have linked Hawthorne's beliefs regarding free will and fatalism to his attitude toward Calvinism. Schneider wrote, "... Hawthorne translated into empirical truths the essential doctrines of Calvinism.... From the popular doctrine of reform, he returned to the Puritan doctrine of divine sovereignty." Schneider suggested that Hawthorne purified the doctrines of the Puritans and returned them to their original purpose, salvation of the soul. "He recovered what Puritans professed but seldom practiced—the spirit of piety, humility, and tragedy in the face of the inscrutable ways of God." Cowley wrote that Hawthorne "believed in predestination, as the Calvinists did." Mills was of the opinion that Hawthorne was the most sympathetic to the Puritans of the writers of his day, but that Calvinist dogma was moderated and softened in Hawthorne: "He did not accept completely the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, nor did he emphasize the supreme sovereignty of God which was the driving force of Calvinism." Other critics have granted some measure of freedom to Hawthorne's characters. Arvin wrote, "... freedom of choice exists, but on so narrow a basis that, once exercised in the wrong direction, it is forever resigned." Fairbanks held that Hawthorne reserved to man the initial moral choice which set up the chain of necessity, and from that notion Fairbanks drew the conclusion that, "Though often called a fatalist, Hawthorne believed in free will." Schwartz, in an unpublished doctoral dissertation, argued from Hawthorne's life and from his writings that he rejected fatalism in favor of free will. Wagenknecht noted that Hawthorne refused "to accept foreordination and total depravity." Still other critics have emphasized a paradoxical element in Hawthorne 's writing, his acceptance of both horns of the dilemma. Waggoner wrote: "He saw man as immersed in a mystery in which responsibility is at odds with fate. His own natural tendency was to emphasize causation at the... (shrink)

This Guide is designed to restore the theological background that informs Kant’s treatment of grace in Religion to its rightful place. This background is essential not only to understand the nature of Kant’s overall project in this book, namely, to determine the “association” or “union” between Christianity (as a historical faith) and rational religion, but also to dispel the impression of “internal contradictions” and conundrums” that contemporary interpreters associate with Kant’s treatment of grace and moral regeneration. That impression, we argue, (...) is the result of entrenched interpretative habits that can be traced back to Karl Barth’s reading of the text. Once we realize that such a reading rests on a mistake, much of the anxiety and confusion that plague current discussions on these issues can be put to rest. (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)

This article presents a theodicy based on a revision of the popular concept of God’s benevolence. If we follow the Protestant tradition by assuming that God is the exclusive source of virtue, the benevolence of God has to be radically different from the benevolence of a human being. A benevolent and almighty God who wishes to reward virtue and punish evil would design the world order similar to that in the allegory of the long spoons. Divine punishment is unforgiving, merciless, (...) individually non-retributive, holistically retributive, and quantitatively unpredictable. All sufferings are divine punishment. Several popular arguments from evil, including animal suffering, victims of evil deeds, natural disasters, and children’s diseases, can be resolved within this framework. (shrink)

This book undertakes a twofold task: a theoretical examination of the foundations of human rights and an attempt to draw the practical implications of the resultant theory for contemporary society. There are, the author contends, three main traditions regarding human rights: The radical—humanistic tradition deduces rights from an uncritical veneration of man; its ground is a romantic view of man, its end, freedom, its regulatory principle, equality. The utilitarian tradition regards rights as pragmatic fictions; its ground is a hedonistic view (...) of man, its end, quantitative happiness, its regulatory principle, expediency. The metaphysical tradition derives rights from man’s place in a purposive order; its ground is a view of man related to something higher than himself, its end, a cosmic purpose, its regulatory principle, function. The first two traditions ultimately lack coherence. The metaphysical tradition has two subtypes: self-realization and theonomy. The author argues for a Calvinist version of the latter. Such a theory affirms man’s utter depravity, but affirms at the same time God’s righteous will as maintaining the destiny and, therefore, the rights of the elect. The ultimate ground of value and right is the gracious will of God. God owes nothing to man, but he does demand of man justice toward himself and toward other men. This is the foundation of values and of rights, which are claims that value be respected. Worth is the capacity of an entity to fulfill its proper end. The vocation of man has four dimensions: the unity of his moral will with God, creative perception, personal integration, and social communion. Empirically man is free, but totally depraved, and therefore unable to fulfill his function. By the atonement, God imputes to sinful man a value not inherent in him and makes man capable of fulfilling in principle the end for which he was created. This makes possible active love of neighbor, which, however, is a duty owed not to neighbors, but toward neighbor and to God. The practical conclusions drawn from this theory rest upon the fact that love of neighbor requires a universal context of impersonal justice and of freedom under law. Freedom is not an end in itself, but the political body has no higher purpose than assuring negative freedom—"reciprocal freedom from external constraint." From this basis the author proceeds to spell out in considerable detail "the implications of reciprocal freedom for particular areas of human conduct,... guided only by the evidence of social data and the rules of logical consistency." The general tenor of his conclusions is a fairly severe restriction on the scope of governmental action.—H. F. (shrink)

This book undertakes a twofold task: a theoretical examination of the foundations of human rights and an attempt to draw the practical implications of the resultant theory for contemporary society. There are, the author contends, three main traditions regarding human rights: The radical—humanistic tradition deduces rights from an uncritical veneration of man; its ground is a romantic view of man, its end, freedom, its regulatory principle, equality. The utilitarian tradition regards rights as pragmatic fictions; its ground is a hedonistic view (...) of man, its end, quantitative happiness, its regulatory principle, expediency. The metaphysical tradition derives rights from man’s place in a purposive order; its ground is a view of man related to something higher than himself, its end, a cosmic purpose, its regulatory principle, function. The first two traditions ultimately lack coherence. The metaphysical tradition has two subtypes: self-realization and theonomy. The author argues for a Calvinist version of the latter. Such a theory affirms man’s utter depravity, but affirms at the same time God’s righteous will as maintaining the destiny and, therefore, the rights of the elect. The ultimate ground of value and right is the gracious will of God. God owes nothing to man, but he does demand of man justice toward himself and toward other men. This is the foundation of values and of rights, which are claims that value be respected. Worth is the capacity of an entity to fulfill its proper end. The vocation of man has four dimensions: the unity of his moral will with God, creative perception, personal integration, and social communion. Empirically man is free, but totally depraved, and therefore unable to fulfill his function. By the atonement, God imputes to sinful man a value not inherent in him and makes man capable of fulfilling in principle the end for which he was created. This makes possible active love of neighbor, which, however, is a duty owed not to neighbors, but toward neighbor and to God. The practical conclusions drawn from this theory rest upon the fact that love of neighbor requires a universal context of impersonal justice and of freedom under law. Freedom is not an end in itself, but the political body has no higher purpose than assuring negative freedom—"reciprocal freedom from external constraint." From this basis the author proceeds to spell out in considerable detail "the implications of reciprocal freedom for particular areas of human conduct,... guided only by the evidence of social data and the rules of logical consistency." The general tenor of his conclusions is a fairly severe restriction on the scope of governmental action.—H. F. (shrink)

Published in Studi Kantiani, XXXV: 27-48, 2022. The lack of due attention to the environment in the (Kantian) Western analytic philosophical canon is, this paper starts by arguing, puzzling and disturbing. Exploring reasons why and how philosophy lost its way regarding the environment, as well as the question of how to envision better ideals within a Kantian framework, is the topic of Part 1. I set the stage by drawing on relevant ideas from the work of Hannah Arendt before turning (...) to Kantian scholarship and Kant’s practical philosophy explicitly. Part 2 pushes the analysis further by proposing that, contrary to what many think, modern environmental disasters and modern oppression are not independent phenomena; they are, rather, interrelated. Hence, not only has modernity driven the destruction of the environment (biological life and natural earthly phenomena), but it has also resulted in the subjection of any group of people whose way of life is existentially deeply influenced by, appreciative of, or admiring of earthly being to new levels of suffering, the worst of which are best described as totalizing living death. To bring the existential suffering, especially of oppressed people, attendant to modern environmental destruction into the purview of Kantian philosophy, I propose we revisit and redeploy Kant’s account of depravity. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga's free will defense is based on the idea of transworld depravity. Plantinga claims that if every essence suffers from transworld depravity, then it is not possible for God to actualize a world in which there is moral good but no moral evil. I describe possible worlds that imply it is impossible for every essence to suffer from transworld depravity. I then show how to modify the concept of transworld depravity to avoid this problem, and (...) formulate an alternative free will defense that is based on the concept of unobtainable worlds instead of transworld depravity. (shrink)

This paper argues against the sufficiency of Alvin Plantinga’s free will defense, as presented in God, freedom, and evil as a response to the logical problem of evil. I begin by introducing the fundamental issues present in the problem of evil and proceed to present Plantinga’s response. Next, I argue that, despite the argument’s wide acceptance in the field, a central notion to the defense, transworld depravity, is internally inconsistent and that attempts to resolve the problem would result in (...) an abandonment of the original terms of the discussion. Finally, I consider some potential alternatives for a free will defense beyond the one presented by Plantinga and conclude that the logical problem of evil may have more worth as a philosophical topic than has been thought in recent years. (shrink)

No Abstract Alvin Plantinga's free will defense is based on the idea of transworld depravity. Plantinga claims that if an essence suffers from transworld depravity, then it is not possible for God to actualize a world in which the instantiation of that essence only does what is right. If every essence suffers from transworld depravity, then it is not possible for God to actualize a world in which there is moral good but no moral evil. I begin (...) by describing possible worlds that imply it is impossible for every essence to suffer from transworld depravity. I then show how to modify the concept of transworld depravity to avoid this problem, and to allow for the possibility that every essence suffers from transworld depravity. This new formulation of transworld depravity has an interesting consequence, and this leads to an alternative free will defense that is not based on the concept of transworld depravity. I introduce the concept of an unobtainable world, and use this to develop an alternative version of the free will defense that is preferable to one based on the concept of transworld depravity. (shrink)

One of the most vexing problems in the philosophy of religion is the existence of moral evil in light of an omnipotent and wholly good deity. A popular mode of diffusing the argument from evil lies in the appeal to free will. Traditionally it is argued that there is a strong connection, even a necessary one, between the ability to exercise free will and the occurrence of wrong-doing. Transworld depravity, as characterized by Alvin Plantinga, is a concept which has (...) gone far to explain this relationship. Essentially, the notion of transworld depravity involves the claim that in any world where a person is significantly free that person would, on some occasion, act morally wrongly, or as Plantinga phrases it: ‘If S' were actual, P would go wrong with respect to A’ (where S' is a possible world, P is a person and A is an action). Not only, Plantinga claims, is it possible that there are persons who suffer from transworld depravity, but ‘it is possible that everybody suffers from it’. If transworld depravity obtains, Plantinga notes, God ‘might have been able to create worlds in which moral evil is very considerably outweighed by moral good; but it was not within His power to create worlds containing moral good but no moral evil – and this despite the fact that He is omnipotent’. On this view, God could not instantiate perfect-person essences who would not ever sin. Although Plantinga argues that these instantiated beings are significantly free in that they could have done otherwise (i.e. not sinned), it does seem that his claim about transworld depravity amounts to a claim about transworld depravity amounts to a claim about the existence of a necessary connection obtaining between freedom and evil. For even though it makes sense to claim that an individual may have unactualized dispositions, to claim that everyone, past, present and future, has unactualized dispositions seems to be a significantly different claim. It is therefore difficult to see how this latter claim differs in substance from the claim of a necessary connection obtaining between the capacity for free will and the commission of evil acts. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to supply a justification in moral philosophy for considering the grossly depraved criminal to be less than a normally responsible agent. Decisions concerning the responsibility of a person depend upon our ability to act and react morally with that person. The argument is that when we reflect on the implications of (1) the moral role that desires play in excusing or condemning actions and (2) the minimum moral requirements of punishment, we realise that (...) a moral community does not exist between us and the grossly depraved. That is, we cannot apply key moral categories simpliciter, including the notion of guilt. (shrink)

Totalism is the view that one distribution of well-being is better than another just in case the one contains a greater sum of well-being than the other. Many philosophers, following Parfit, reject totalism on the grounds that it entails the repugnant conclusion: that, for any number of excellent lives, there is some number of lives that are barely worth living whose existence would be better. This paper develops a theory of welfare aggregation—the lexical-threshold view—that allows totalism to avoid the repugnant (...) conclusion, as well as its analogues involving suffering populations and the lengths of individual lives. The theory is grounded in some independently plausible views about the structure of well-being, identifies a new source of incommensurability in population ethics, and avoids some of the implausibly extreme consequences of other lexical views, without violating the intuitive separability of lives. (shrink)

In this paper, I restrict discussion to cases of psychopathy in which it is assumed that psychopaths who satisfy epistemic requirements of responsibility, including the requirement that one is culpable for an action only if one performs it in light of the belief that one is doing wrong, can and do perform actions they take to be immoral or illegal. I argue that in such cases, the well-documented emotional impairment of psychopaths fails to subvert moral culpability. In particular, it does (...) not undermine the sort of control required for moral blameworthiness and, hence, assuming all other conditions of responsibility have been met, the psychopaths of concern are indeed culpable for their behavior. Drawing, however, from certain lessons regarding the effects of coercion on responsibility, I propose that emotional impairment is a factor that should abate, perhaps even significantly, negative reaction to or treatment of such agents. (shrink)

Essays by 14 Levinas scholars provide a fresh acount of the argument and purpose of Emmanuel Levinas's major work, Totality and Infinity, drawing parallels between Levinas and other thinkers; considering Levinas's relationship to other disciplines such as nursing, psychotherapy, and law; and bringing this seminal text to bear on specific, concrete issues of present-day concern"--Provided by publisher.

Berger, U., Total sets and objects in domain theory, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 60 91-117. Total sets and objects generalizing total functions are introduced into the theory of effective domains of Scott and Ersov. Using these notions Kreisel's Density Theorem and the Theorem of Kreisel-Lacombe-Shoenfield are generalized. As an immediate consequence we obtain the well-known continuity of computable functions on the constructive reals as well as a domain-theoretic characterization of the Heriditarily Effective Operations.

Total work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction -- Total stage: Wagner's festspielhaus -- Total machine: the Bauhaus theatre -- Total montage: Brecht's reply to Wagner -- Total state: Riefenstahl's triumph of the will -- Total world: Disney's theme parks -- Total vacuum: Warhol's performances -- Total immersion: cyberspace.

INTRODUCTION Ever since the beginning of the modern phenomenological movement disciplined attention has been paid to various patterns of human experience as ...

: This essay expresses ambivalence about the use of the term "evil" in analyses of terrorism in light of the association of the two in speeches intended to justify the United States' "war on terrorism." At the same time, the essay suggests that terrorism can be regarded as "evil" but only when considered among a multiplicity of "evils" comparable to it, for example: rape, war crimes, and repression.

Individuals of lower socioeconomic status display increased attentiveness to others and greater prosocial behavior compared to individuals of higher SES. We situate these effects within Pepper & Nettle's contextually appropriate response framework of SES. We argue that increased prosocial behavior is a contextually adaptive response for lower-SES individuals that serves to increase control over their more threatening social environments.

This article explores the relationship between pragmatic encroachment and epistemic permissiveness. If the suggestion that all epistemic notions are interest-relative is viable , then it seems that a certain species of epistemic permissivism must be viable as well. For, if all epistemic notions are interest relative then, sometimes, parties in paradigmatic cases of shared evidence can be maximally rational in forming competing basic doxastic attitudes towards the same proposition. However, I argue that this total pragmatic encroachment is not tenable, (...) and, thus, epistemic permissivism cannot be vindicated in this way. (shrink)

Totality and Infinity , the title of a well-known work by Emmanuel Levinas, takes up a word which readers of Poetic Intention and of many other texts of Édouard Glissant’s will easily recognize: a term sometimes used in a sense that is clearly positive, sometimes in a sense that is not quite as positive, such as when, for instance, he compares “totalizing Reason” to the “Montaigne’s tolerant relativism.” In his final collection of essays, Traité du tout-monde, Poétique IV , Glissant (...) attempts one more time to clarify the sense in which the reader will have to understand his use of the word “totality,” thinking, and rightfully so, that this word might lead to some confusion: “To write is to say the world. The world as totality, which is so dangerously close to the totalitarian.” Of course, here, it will be necessary to try to ascertain whether or not Levinas’s totality and Glissant’s can peacefully coexist, or, rather, whether this word might, in Glissant, have opposite meanings. Where the second word is concerned, “infinity,” any reader of Glissant will know that he locates its source in those societies he calls atavistic, which are grounded in foundational texts that are the bearers of stories of filiation, of legitimacy, societies whose arrogance and whose errors the author never ceases to decry and whose decomposition, in the very times in which we live, he never ceases to announce (even as Glissant recognizes that there was a time when atavistic cultures undoubtedly must have experienced their own period of creolization, and that, conversely, composite cultures undoubtedly often tend to become atavistic). On this level, “totality” and “infinity,” for him, seem to belong to the same world. Thus, and still in Traité du tout-monde , he proposes that "Hebraism, Christianity, Islam are grounded in the same spirituality of the One and to the same belief in a revealed Truth… The thought of the One that has done so much to magnify, as well as to denature. How can one consent to this thought, which transfigures while neither offending nor de-routing the Diverse?" Moreover, it would be interesting, I think, to know how Levinas might react to these words of Glissant’s: “Totality is not that which has often been called the universal. It is the finite and realized quantity of the infinite detail of the real.” This word, “infinite,” is decidedly dangerous: what is an “infinite detail?” Does this word, “infinite,” not always lead to the unknown, to the non-totalizable, to what Levinas would call an “enigma,” to what Glissant would call an “opacity?&rdquo. (shrink)

Taking its clues from Popperian philosophy of science, cladistics adopted a number of assumptions of the empiricist tradition. These include the identification of a dichotomy between observation reports and theoretical statements and its subsequent abandonment on the basis of the insight that all observation reports are theory-laden. The neglect of the ‘context of discovery’, which is the step of theory (hypothesis) generation. The emphasis on coherentism in the ‘context of justification’, which is the step of evaluation of the relative merits (...) of alternative theories. The appeal to a total evidence approach in phylogenetic inference. And finally, a silence about causation, which results in an instrumentalist approach to phylogeny reconstruction. This paper explores how these empiricist assumptions are embedded in phylogenetic systematics, and why these assumptions are problematic for cladists (or any taxonomists). (shrink)

In the context of non-classical logics, many philosophers have been particularly interested in the paraconsistent logics. In addition to traditional definitions, in recent years, new ways of characterizing the notion of paraconsistency have been proposed. In all of these definitions the rule or the meta-rule of explosion is abandoned. In this article, I present those definitions and evaluate the role that the negation and the transitivity play in each of them. Finally, I propose a new definition of paraconsistency which I (...) call total paraconsistency and show that the rule of weakening plays a crucial role in all of the characterizations of such a concept. (shrink)

The development and international diffusion of total quality management as a normative theory are examined. It is shown that the main concepts associated with TQM contain an implicit Darwinist view of society made up only of institutions struggling to survive against increasingly ruthless competition. It is also shown that their development was the result of a process in which universities, large corporations, and government interacted to develop a response to the increasingly serious economic challenge that Japan presented to the (...) United States from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. The TQM paradigm was taken up by U.S. multinational corporations and the leading business and management schools of the United States and disseminated throughout the world. It is concluded that TQM has an ideological dimension designed to help diffuse to private and public service institutions throughout the world the dominant U.S. view of society and economy at the end of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This paper aims to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Adorno’s thought for business ethicists working in the critical tradition by showing how his critique of modern social life anticipated, and ofers continuing illumination of, recent technological transformations of capitalism. It develops and extrapolates Adorno’s thought regarding three central spheres of modern society, which have seen radical changes in light of recent technological developments: work, in which employee monitoring has become ever more sophisticated and intrusive; leisure consumption, in which the algorithmic (...) developments of the culture industry have paved the way for entertainment products to dominate us; and political discourse, in which social media has exacerbated the anti-democratic tendencies Adorno warned of in the mid-twentieth century. We conclude by presenting, as a rejoinder to these developments, the contours of an Adornian ethics of resistance to the reifcation and dehumanisation of such developments. (shrink)

This essay expresses ambivalence about the use of the term "evil" in analyses of terrorism in light of the association of the two in speeches intended to justify the United States' "war on terrorism." At the same time, the essay suggests that terrorism can be regarded as "evil" but only when considered among a multiplicity of "evils" comparable to it, for example: rape, war crimes, and repression.

D. Alan Shewmon has advanced a well-documented challenge to the widely accepted total brain death criterion for death of the human being. We show that Shewmon's argument against this criterion is unsound, though he does refute the standard argument for that criterion. We advance a distinct argument for the total brain death criterion and answer likely objections. Since human beings are rational animals – sentient organisms of a specific type – the loss of the radical capacity for sentience (...) involves a substantial change, the passing away of the human organism. In human beings total brain death involves the complete loss of the radical capacity for sentience, and so in human beings total brain death is death. (shrink)

Contemporary Kant-scholarship has a tendency to allign Kant’s understanding of depravity closer to Erasmus than Luther in their famous debate on the freedom of the will (1520–1527). While, at face value, some paragraphs do warrant such a claim, I will argue that Kant’s understanding of the radical evil will draws closer to Luther than Erasmus in a number of elements. These elements are (1) the intervention of the Wille for progress towards the good, (2) a positive choice for evil, (...) (3) the inscrutability of moral progress, (4) the rejection of prudence as a means for salvation and (5) the rejection of moral sentimentalism. I believe that Kant-scholarship mistakenly pegs Kant’s rational Enlightenment optimism for an existential optimism while Kant’s view of fallen nature draws closer to Lutheran than Erasmusian depravity. A tacit Lutheran influence pervades Kant’s moral philosophy which could explain the influence Kant’s has had on some more pessimistic 19th century philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. (shrink)

In Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey offers a razor-sharp analysis of the split between public and private, fact and feelings.

I develop and refine an argument for the total brain death criterion of death previously advanced by Germain Grisez and me: A human being is essentially a rational animal, and so must have a radical capacity for rational operations. For rational animals, conscious sensation is a pre-requisite for rational operation. But total brain death results in the loss of the radical capacity for conscious sensation, and so also for rational operations. Hence, total brain death constitutes a substantial (...) change—the ceasing to be of the human being. Objections are considered, including the objection that total brain death need not result in the loss of capacity for sensation, and that damage to the brain less than total brain death can result in loss of capacity for rational operations. (shrink)

This paper defends a novel account of how to determine the intrinsic value of possible worlds. Section 1 argues that a highly intuitive and widely accepted account leads to undesirable consequences. Section 2 takes the first of two steps towards a novel account by clarifying and defending a view about value-contribution that is based on some of W. D. Ross’ claims about the value of pleasure. Section 3 takes the second step by clarifying and defending a view about value-suppression that (...) is based on Ross’ claims about the interplay between prima-facie duties. Section 4 states and defends the account that I call Rossian Totalism. According to this account, the atoms of intrinsic value within a world only sometimes contribute their intrinsic value to the value of that world. (shrink)

It is shown that all the provably total functions of Basic Arithmetic BA, a theory introduced by Ruitenburg based on Predicate Basic Calculus, are primitive recursive. Along the proof a new kind of primitive recursive realizability to which BA is sound, is introduced. This realizability is similar to Kleene's recursive realizability, except that recursive functions are restricted to primitive recursives.

We consider the classical concept of time of permanence and observe that its quantum equivalent is described by a bona fide self-adjoint operator. Its interpretation, by means of the spectral theorem, reveals that we have to abandon not only the idea that quantum entities would be characterizable in terms of spatial trajectories but, more generally, that they would possess the very attribute of spatiality. Consequently, a permanence time shouldn’t be interpreted as a “time” in quantum mechanics, but as a measure (...) of the total availability of a quantum entity in participating to a process of creation of a spatial localization. (shrink)

In Preference, Value, Choice, and Welfare, I argued, among other things, that preferences in economics are and ought to be total subjective comparative evaluations, that the theory of rational choice is a reformulation of everyday folk-psychological explanations and predictions of behaviour, and that revealed preference theory is completely untenable. All three of these theses have been challenged in essays by Erik Angner (2018), Francesco Guala (2019) and Johanna Thoma (2021a, 2021b). This essay responds to these criticisms and defends these (...) three theses. (shrink)