Whether one can decide or choose to believe is a difficult problem, with important consequences for ethics. An appeal to ordinary language is not likely to be decisive. On occasion, “I choose to believe,” “he adopted the belief,” and “do not believe,” find use. Of course, one can decide or choose to pursue belief. Pascal gave a prescription for producing certain religious beliefs. There are other prescriptions for other beliefs. Is there a stronger sense in which I can decide or (...) choose to believe? I do not use a causal recipe in performing many actions. Is there some way of choosing or deciding to believe that does not involve causal recipes. (shrink)

This volume collects a wealth of articles covering a range of topics of practical concern in the field of ethics, including active and passive euthanasia, abortion, organ transplants, capital punishment, the consequences of human actions, slavery, overpopulation, the separate spheres of men and women, animal rights, and game theory and the nuclear arms race. The contributors are Thomas Nagel, David Hume, James Rachels, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Michael Tooley, John Harris, John Stuart Mill, Louis Pascal, Jonathan Glover, Derek Parfit, R.M. Hare, (...) Janet Radcliffe Richards, Peter Singer, and Nicholas Measor. (shrink)

Plato and the Power of Images addresses ways Plato has used images and the ways to understand their status as images, particularly how an image resembles what it represents and how to avoid mistaking that image for what it represents.

From all points of the political compass, from widely different groups, have come indignant outcries against the trade in human organs from live vendors. Opponents contend that such practices constitute a morally outrageous and gross exploitation of the poor, inherently coercive and obviously intolerable in any civilized society. This article examines the arguments typically offered in defense of these claims and finds serious problems with all of them. The prohibition of organ sales is derived not from the principles and argument (...) usually invoked in support of prohibition, but rather, from strong feelings of repugnance which exert an invisible but powerful influence on the debate, distorting the arguments [and working] to the detriment of the [very] people most in need of protection. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors’ IntroductionElizabeth S. Radcliffe and Mark G. SpencerThis issue opens with the winning essay in the Third Annual Hume Studies Essay Prize competition: “Hume beyond Theism and Atheism” by Dr. Ariel Peckel. Dr. Peckel’s essay was chosen as the winner from among papers submitted by emerging scholars from August 2022 through July 2023. Please see the full prize announcement with information about this talented Hume scholar elsewhere in this (...) issue. Our Call for Papers for the Fourth Essay Prize competition is printed in the back of this issue and on-line at the Hume Studies website. The contest is open to authors ten or fewer years from the Ph.D. and closes on August 1, 2024. If you are eligible, please consult our “Call” for further details!In other Hume Studies news, we have once again acquired a new printer. Christensen Printing (Lincoln, Nebraska), whose work for us was excellent, suddenly closed its business when its owner retired this past year and had no one to succeed him. We received the news just when our November issue was ready to go to press. With the assistance of our friends at the Philosophy Documentation Center, we obtained estimates from three printers and have now engaged Bailey Printing in Charlottesville, Virginia. Our November issue was published on-line by November 1 (at the Philosophy Documentation Center website, the Project Muse website, and the Hume Society website), but the print issue took longer to get to subscribers.For a second time, we want to bring to the attention of our readers that Hume Studies will be marking its 50th year of publication in 2025. As we have previously noted, we are planning an anniversary issue for 50:1 (April 2025). We hope to include among the special features of that issue paragraphs or statements from our readers in answer to this query: “Of all of the articles that have been published in [End Page 7] Hume Studies over the past 50 years, which one is most noteworthy to you? Why so?” Please see the “Call for Entries” in the back of this issue or on the Hume Studies website (https://www.humesociety.org/ojs/index.php/hs), which includes details on where to send your response. The due date is October 15, 2024, but we encourage you to send your entries as soon as possible! [End Page 8]Copyright © 2024 Hume Studies... (shrink)

As I write this, in November 1971, people are dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medical caxc. The suffering and death that are occurring there now axe not inevitable, 1101; unavoidable in any fatalistic sense of the term. Constant poverty, a cyclone, and a civil war have turned at least nine million people into destitute refugees; nevertheless, it is not beyond Lhe capacity of the richer nations to give enough assistance to reduce any further suffering to (...) very small proportions. The decisions arid actions of human beings can prevent this kind of suffering. Unfortunately, human beings have not made the necessary decisions. At the individual level, people have, with very few exceptions, not responded to the situation in any signihczmt way. Generally speaking, people have not given large sums to relief funds; they have not written t0 their parliamentaxy representatives demanding increased government assistance; they have not demonstrated in the streets, held symbolic fasts, or done anything else directed toward providing thc refugees with the means to satisfy their essential needs. At thc government level, no govcrmmcnt has given the sort of massive aid that would enable the refugees to survive fm: more than a few days. Britain, for instance, has given rather more than most countries. It has, to date, given £14,750,000. For comparative purposes, B1~itain’s share of thc nonreccverabla development costs of the Anglo-French Concorde project is already in excess of £275,000,000, and on present estimates will reach £440,000,¤00. The implication is that the British government values a supersonic transport more than thirty times as.. (shrink)

Olympiodorus' Commentary on Plato's Phaedo I.3-6 has been the linchpin of the reconstructions of the supposed Orphic doctrine of original sin. While Olympiodorus links the Titans' dismemberment of Dionysus and anthropogony, he does not include any element of inherited guilt, either in his narration of the myth or in his interpretation. Moreover, his telling of the myth, which makes the anthropogony the sequel to the dismemberment of Dionysus, is an innovation made for the purposes of his own argument. Rather than (...) preserving in fossilized form a sacred myth more than a millennium old, Olympiodorus concocts an innovative tale of his own. (shrink)

New Blackfriars, Volume 102, Issue 1101, Page 607-622, September 2021.

This paper argues that a set of questioning attitudes are among the foundations of human and animal minds. While both verbal questioning and states of curiosity are generally explained in terms of metacognitive desires for knowledge or true belief, I argue that each is better explained by a prelinguistic sui generis type of mental attitude of questioning. I review a range of considerations in support of such a proposal and improve on previous characterizations of the nature of these attitudes. I (...) then broaden their explanatory scope to include a number of forms of exploratory search. The paper has three main goals: to characterize the nature of the questioning attitudes, outlining their causal role and type of content; to argue that they are fundamental components of the mind, being widespread among animals and not constructed during ontogeny out of other attitudes; and to suggest that they explain a great deal more behavior than one might think. (shrink)

Since its original publication in 1975, this groundbreaking work has awakened millions of people to the existence of "speciesism"—our systematic disregard of nonhuman animals—inspiring a worldwide movement to transform our attitudes to animals and eliminate the cruelty we inflict on them. In Animal Liberation, author Peter Singer exposes the chilling realities of today’s "factory farms" and product-testing procedures—destroying the spurious justifications behind them, and offering alternatives to what has become a profound environmental and social as well as moral issue. (...) An important and persuasive appeal to conscience, fairness, decency, and justice, it is essential reading for the supporter and the skeptic alike. (shrink)

We propose a solution to the problem of logical omniscience in what we take to be its fundamental version: as concerning arbitrary agents and the knowledge attitude per se. Our logic of knowledge is a spin-off from a general theory of thick content, whereby the content of a sentence has two components: an intension, taking care of truth conditions; and a topic, taking care of subject matter. We present a list of plausible logical validities and invalidities for the logic of (...) knowledge per se for arbitrary agents, and isolate three explanatory factors for them: the topic-sensitivity of content; the fragmentation of knowledge states; the defeasibility of knowledge acquisition. We then present a novel dynamic epistemic logic that yields precisely the desired validities and invalidities, for which we provide expressivity and completeness results. We contrast this with related systems and address possible objections. (shrink)

Single-premise epistemic closure is the principle that: if one is in an evidential position to know that P where P entails Q, then one is in an evidential position to know that Q. In this paper, I defend the viability of opposition to closure. A key task for such an opponent is to precisely formulate a restricted closure principle that remains true to the motivations for abandoning unrestricted closure but does not endorse particularly egregious instances of closure violation. I focus (...) on two brands of epistemic theory that naturally incorporate closure restrictions. The first type holds that the truth value of a knowledge ascription is relative to a relevant question. The second holds that the truth value of a knowledge ascription is relative to a relevant topic. For each approach, I offer a formalization of a leading theory from the literature and use this formalization to evaluate the theory’s adequacy in terms of a precise set of desiderata. I conclude that neither theory succeeds in meeting these desiderata, casting doubt on the viability of the underlying approaches. Finally, I offer a novel variant of the topic-sensitive approach that fares better. (shrink)

Introduction These essays have been written over a period of about ten years and have already been published separately in various places. ...

I lay out the framework for my theory of sensory imagination in “Imagining as a guide to possibility.” Sensory imagining involves mental imagery , and crucially, in describing the content of imagining, I distinguish between qualitative content and assigned content. Qualitative content derives from the mental image itself; for visual imaginings, it is what is “pictured.” For example, visually imagine the Philadelphia Eagles defeating the Pittsburgh Steelers to win their first Super Bowl. You picture the greenness of the field and (...) the football’s brown oblong shape. Some of what you imagine isn’t explicitly pictured, however. That it is Sunday, that it is the Super Bowl: these facts are assigned. (shrink)

Political decisions have the potential to greatly impact our lives. Think of decisions in relation to abortion or climate change, for example. This makes political legitimacy an important normative concern. But what makes political decisions legitimate? Are they legitimate in virtue of having support from the citizens? Democratic conceptions of political legitimacy answer in the affirmative. Such conceptions righly highlight that legitimate political decision-making must be sensitive to disagreements among the citizens. But what if democratic decisions fail to track what (...) there is most reason to do? What if a democratically elected government fails to take measures necessary to protect its population from threats related to climate change? Peter argues that the legitimacy of political decisions doesn't just depend on respect for the citizens' will; and defends a novel hybrid conception of political legitimacy, called the Epistemic Accountability conception. According to this conception, political legitimacy also depends on how political decision-making responds to evidence for what there is most reason to do. Grounds for Political Legitmacy starts with an overview of the main ways in which philosophers have thought about political legitimacy, and identifies the epistemic accountability conception as an overlooked alternative. It then develops the epistemic accountability conception of political legitimacy and discusses its implications for legitimate political decision-making. Considering the norms that should govern political debate, it examines the role of experts in politics, and probes the responsibilities of democratically elected political leaders and as well as of citizens. (shrink)

For much of the last 50 years, a key platform animating public sector reform in Canada and elsewhere has been that efficiency and effectiveness can be achieved by adapting private sector financial management methods and practices. We argue that the recent re-establishment of the Office of the Comptroller General (OCG) of Canada represents a key element of a program of strengthening financial accountability that has emerged within the Canadian Federal Government. Although this program is longstanding and is associated Canada’s implementation (...) of new public management initiatives, it has recently drawn particular sustenance from the sponsorship scandal in Canada. We demonstrate that the reincarnated OCG, re-established amid a rhetoric of “modernization” and of “strengthening” accountability, has a wide-ranging mandate to enhance financial and audit controls, create financial standards, nurture professional development, and oversee government spending. We explore some of the consequences of this development and of the broader financial accountability mechanisms introduced in response to the Sponsorship scandal within the Canadian public sector. (shrink)

The fragments of a hexameter poem about Dionysus recently discovered in a palimpsest (Sin. Ar. NF 66) reveal some different faces of Dionysus, including an Adonis-figure at the heart of a dispute between two goddesses (Persephone and Aphrodite), and a personified wine-god, Oinos, threatened by the machinations of his enemies in the court of Zeus. These palimpsest texts help to illuminate some of the allusions to the early life of the god that have long puzzled scholars, especially in some of (...) the early Christian apologists and the collection of OrphicHymns. (shrink)

* Presents a broad survey of philosophical thought * Each chapter explores, and places in context, a major area of philosophical enquiry - including the theory of meaning and of truth, the theory of knowledge, the philosophies of mathematics, science and metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, aesthetics, and religion * Annotated bibliographies for each chapter and indexes of names and subjects * Glossary of commonly-used philosophical terms * Chronological table of the history of philosophy from 1600 (...) `It is a fine achievement and deserves the warmest praise... Anyone interested in learning what contemporary philosophical debate is about will find this book invaluable... for a book of this size and quality of content the cover price is modest. Every public library as well as every university, college and school library should have a copy on its shelves.' - Times Higher Education Supplement `A stimulating collection.' - Reference Reviews. (shrink)

David Hume’s theory of action is well known for several provocative theses, including that passion and reason cannot be opposed over the direction of action. In Hume, Passion, and Action, the author defends an original interpretation of Hume’s views on passion, reason and motivation that is consistent with other theses in Hume’s philosophy, loyal to his texts, and historically situated. This book challenges the now orthodox interpretation of Hume on motivation, presenting an alternative that situates Hume closer to “Humeans” than (...) many recent interpreters have. Part of the strategy is to examine the thinking of the early modern intellectuals to whom Hume responds. Most of these thinkers insisted that passions lead us to pursue harmful objects unless regulated by reason; and most regarded passions as representations of good and evil, which can be false. Understanding Hume’s response to these claims requires appreciating his respective characterizations of reason and passion. The author argues that Hume’s thesis that reason is practically impotent apart from passion is about beliefs generated by reason, rather than about the capacity of reason. Furthermore, the argument makes sense of Hume’s sometimes-ridiculed description of passions as “original existences” having no reference to objects. The author also shows how Hume understood morality as intrinsically motivating, while holding that moral beliefs are not themselves motives, and why he thought of passions as self-regulating, contrary to the admonitions of the rationalists. (shrink)

Issues surrounding organ transplantation are hotly and publicly debated: for it raises unique ethical questions regarding the rights and responsibilities of donors. Leading moral philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards provides a sharp analysis, dissecting the commonly raised arguments concerning organ procurement from the living and the dead.

In at least some cases of justified perceptual belief, our perceptual experience itself, as opposed to beliefs about it, evidences and thereby justifies our belief. While the phenomenon is common, it is also mysterious. There are good reasons to think that perceptions cannot justify beliefs directly, and there is a significant challenge in explaining how they do. After explaining just how direct perceptual justification is mysterious, I considerMichael Huemers (Skepticism and the Veil of Perception, 2001) and Bill Brewers (Perception and (...) Reason, 1999) recent, but radically different, attempts to eliminate it. I argue that both are unsuccessful, though a consideration of their mistakes deepens our appreciation of the mystery. (shrink)

This book offers a reassessment of the political philosophy of the British Idealists, a group of once influential and now neglected nineteenth-century Hegelian philosophers, whose work has been much misunderstood. Peter Nicholson focuses on F. H. Bradley's idea of morality and moral philosophy; T. H. Green's theory of the Common Good, of the social nature of rights, of freedom, and of state interference; and Bernard Bosanquet's notorious theory of the General Will. By examining the arguments offered by the Idealists (...) and by their critics the author is able to penetrate the deep layers of hostile comment laid down by several generations of later writers and to show that these ideas, once properly understood, are not only defensible but interesting and important. (shrink)

In the Western world it is usually taken as given that we all want happiness, and our educational arrangements tacitly acknowledge this. Happiness, Hope, and Despair argues, however, that education has an important role to play in deepening our understanding of suffering and despair as well as happiness and joy. Education can be uncomfortable, unpredictable, and unsettling; it can lead to greater uncertainty and unhappiness. Drawing on the work of Søren Kierkegaard, Miguel de Unamuno, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Simone Weil, Paulo Freire, (...) and others, Peter Roberts shows why these features of educational life need not be feared; to the contrary, they can be seen as a source of hope and human fulfilment. After years of negotiating an education system dominated by the language of competition, performance, and economic advancement, students and teachers often long for something different; they seek not just measurable success but also opportunities to ask searching questions of themselves and the world they encounter. Happiness, Hope, and Despair makes an important contribution toward meeting this need. It fosters a rethinking of the nature, purpose, and value of education, and opens up possibilities for further scholarly and professional inquiry. (shrink)