Introduction -- From paideia to humanism -- Pietism and the problem of human craft (Menschen-Kunst) -- The harmonious harp-playing of humanity: J. G. Herder -- Ethical formation and the invention of the religion of art -- The rise of the Bildungsroman and the commodification of literature -- Authorship and its resignation in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister -- "The Bildung of self-consciousness itself towards science": Hegel.

Augustine famously claimed that the virtues of pagan Rome were nothing more than splendid vices. This critique reinvented itself as a suspicion of acquired virtue as such, and true Christian virtue has, ever since, been set against a false, hypocritical virtue alleged merely to conceal pride. _Putting On Virtue_ reveals how a distrust of learned and habituated virtue shaped both early modern Christian moral reflection and secular forms of ethical thought. Jennifer Herdt develops her claims through an argument (...) of broad historical sweep, which brings together the Aristotelian tradition as taken up by Thomas Aquinas with the early modern thinkers who shaped modern liberalism. In chapters on Luther, Bunyan, the Jansenists, Mandeville, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant, she argues that efforts to make a radical distinction between true Christian virtue and its tainted imitations actually created an autonomous natural ethics separate from Christianity. This secular value system valorized pride and authenticity, while rendering graced human agency less meaningful. Ultimately, _Putting On Virtue_ traces a path from suspicion of virtue to its secular inversion, from confession of dependence to assertion of independence. (shrink)

In this introduction to a cluster of three articles on eighteenth-century ethics written by Mark Larrimore, John Bowlin, and Mark Cladis, the author maintains that although the broad narrative tracing the emergence of a religiously neutral or naturalistic moral language in the eighteenth century is a familiar one, many central questions concerning this development remain unanswered and require further historical study. Against those who contend that historical study is antecedent to, but not part of, the proper substance of religious ethics, (...) the author argues that historical and normative studies are interdependent, each helping to define the questions central to the other. The introduction concludes with an overview of the three articles and suggests ways in which religious ethicists can, in the future, make a distinctive contribution to the history of ethics. (shrink)

Augustine famously claimed that the virtues of pagan Rome were nothing more than splendid vices. This critique reinvented itself as a suspicion of acquired virtue as such, and true Christian virtue has, ever since, been set against a false, hypocritical virtue alleged merely to conceal pride. _Putting On Virtue_ reveals how a distrust of learned and habituated virtue shaped both early modern Christian moral reflection and secular forms of ethical thought. Jennifer Herdt develops her claims through an argument (...) of broad historical sweep, which brings together the Aristotelian tradition as taken up by Thomas Aquinas with the early modern thinkers who shaped modern liberalism. In chapters on Luther, Bunyan, the Jansenists, Mandeville, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant, she argues that efforts to make a radical distinction between true Christian virtue and its tainted imitations actually created an autonomous natural ethics separate from Christianity. This secular value system valorized pride and authenticity, while rendering graced human agency less meaningful. Ultimately, _Putting On Virtue_ traces a path from suspicion of virtue to its secular inversion, from confession of dependence to assertion of independence. (shrink)

In "Theology and Social Theory", John Milbank critiques Scottish Enlightenment political economy and its attendant descriptive moral philosophy for "de-ethicizing" human action. A closer look at the development of theoretical understandings of sympathy, however, shows that instinct did not ultimately displace virtue. Moreover, a survey of practical responses to poverty calls into question the claim that political economy obliterated the Christian sphere of public charity. Many of the innovations Milbank criticizes as de-ethicizing in fact reflect serious efforts to absorb into (...) ethical reflection and practice deep social and economic changes, which Christian theology could ignore only at its own peril. Moreover, it was sometimes non- or even anti-religious thinkers like David Hume and William Hazlitt who were soonest to see the dangers involved in appealing to instinctual behavior and providential coordination of social action. Returning to the roots of social theory allows theologians to recover lost possibilities for productive collaboration with "the secular.". (shrink)

This book explores Hume's concern with the destructiveness of religious factions and his efforts to develop, in his moral philosophy, a solution to factional conflict. Sympathy and the related capacity to enter into foreign points of view are crucial to the neutralization of religious zeal and the naturalization of ethics. Jennifer Herdt suggests that Hume's preoccupation with religious faction is the key which reveals the unity of his varied philosophical, aesthetic, political and historical works.

Seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, writing just at the time when the concept of sympathy was moving from the realm of magic to that of ethics, argued that God must be understood as having a vital sympathy with suffering human beings. Yet while Cudworth invoked sympathy in an attempt to capture God's intimate relation with creation, in fact, it served as a principle of mediation that tended either to collapse God into the world or to distance God from the world. (...) The broader implications of this problematic conception of divine transcendence can be seen in the secularizing tendencies within sentimentalist ethics and in the work of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Anglican theologians, who were the first to affirm divine passibility. (shrink)

Eudaimonism is often regarded as egoistic. If it recommends that agents pursue their own good because it is their own good, it is guilty as charged. But excellence‐prior eudaimonism offers a non‐egoistic alternative to this welfare‐prior eudaimonism. Excellence‐prior eudaimonism recommends that an agent live in a way that is in fact good for the agent, but it does not regard the agent’s own good as necessarily that for the sake of which the agent acts, nor does it regard living well (...) as justified by the fact that it is good for the agent, but simply because it is good. The Christian eudaimonisms of Augustine and Aquinas are best understood as deepened forms of excellence‐prior eudaimonism. (shrink)

Returning to John P. Reeder's 1978 essay on “Religious Ethics as a Field and Discipline,” this essay explores debates surrounding the original intentions for the Journal of Religious Ethics (JRE) and for the field of religious ethics, as these have played out over the decades among an influential group of scholars involved with the JRE since its inception: Arthur Dyck, Ronald Green, Stanley Hauerwas, and Jeffrey Stout. While the JRE and its founding mission are in need of ongoing critique and (...) transformation, we might well still affirm the journal's ongoing importance as a site for the negotiation of a commons, the identification of possibilities for shared life, imagined beyond exclusion and domination. (shrink)

Moral exemplarism, which insists on the centrality of particular embodiments of exemplary virtue to the moral life, is currently receiving significant attention within moral philosophy as well as theological and religious ethics. This introductory essay situates the contributions made by this focus issue on moral exemplarity in relation to the history of attention to moral exemplars, the twentieth‐century turn to virtue, philosopher Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory, Stanley Hauerwas’s particularist embrace of Christian discipleship, Foucauldian turns to critique and self‐cultivation, and (...) the significance of exemplars in Jeffrey Stout’s democratic piety. Arguing for the critical importance of articulating the authority of exemplars, this essay points to the ways in which the present focus can assist us to navigate between the shoals of nostalgic deference to tradition and dismissive critiques of authoritarianism. (shrink)

The probing readings of Putting On Virtue offered by Sheryl Overmyer, Darlene Weaver, and James Foster provide a welcome opportunity for further reflection on key questions: Was Aquinas really concerned with the status of pagan virtues? Can we properly understand a thinker whose driving questions are not the same as our own without taking up a stance of pure deference? Can an inquiry into hyper-Augustinian anxiety over acquired virtue assist us in arriving at an account of positive self-regard? Can an (...) account that stresses the graced character of all virtue formation be coherent? And can it do justice to the ways in which Christians reached for accounts of infused virtue precisely in order to affirm how grace overcomes the ways in which fortune hounds acquired virtue? I respond affirmatively to all of the above. (shrink)

This is a conversation held at the book launch for Christopher Insole’s Kant and the Divine: From Contemplation to the Moral Law, hosted jointly, in November 2020, by the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University, and the Australian Catholic University. The conversation covers the claim made by Insole that Kant believes in God, but is not a Christian, the way in which reason itself is divine for Kant, and the suggestion that reading Kant can open up new possibilities for dialogue (...) between Christian thinkers and contemporary forms of secular religiosity. (shrink)

While agent responsibility appears to be one of the clearest examples of a human distinctive, practices of holding responsible are bound up with social expectations and emotional reactions, many of which are shared with other social animals. This essay attends to the ways in which what Peter Strawson first identified as the reactive emotions, including notably anger, resentment, and indignation, are key to making sense of both the shared and distinctive features of responsible human agency. Like human beings, other social (...) animals express a range of reactive emotions in response to others’ conformity with or violation of implicit social expectations and norms; human beings sometimes reflect on these reactive attitudes and their justifiability, asking whether and when it is appropriate to hold others accountable, blame, and/or punish them. We should recognize that we often praise and blame others for attitudes and desires which they have not chosen and over which they have no direct control, and that this is appropriate. (shrink)

This review essay assesses the significance of J. B. Schneewind's The Invention of Autonomy for the history of moral thought in general and for religious ethics in particular. The essay offers an overview of Schneewind's complex argument before critically discussing his four central themes: the primacy of Immanuel Kant, the fundamentality of conflict, the insufficiency of virtue, and community with God. Whereas Schneewind argues that an impasse between modern natural law and perfectionist ethics revealed irresolvable tensions withing Christian ethics and (...) thus encouraged the emergence of secular moral thought, this author suggests that these tensions were specific to a voluntarist strand of Christian moral thought form which even antivoluntarists of the modern period were unable to break free. (shrink)

Despite the fact that Stanley Hauerwas has not taken up many of the topics normally associated with virtue ethics, has explicitly distanced himself from the enterprise known as “virtue ethics,” and throughout his career has preferred other categories of analysis, ranging from character and agency to practices and liturgy, it is nevertheless clear that his work has had a deep and transformative impact on the recovery of virtue within Christian ethics, and that this impact has largely to do with the (...) ways in which his thought resists normalization. This essay traces the evolution of Hauerwas's reflections on virtue and the virtues over the course of his career, with special attention to how this has been bound up with an increasingly emphatic theological particularism that has remained ambivalent between what I term “comprehensive” versus “exclusive” particularism. I argue that it is important to distinguish between these, and suggest that grasping the destructive tendencies of “exclusive” particularism should cement our commitment to shouldering the responsibilities associated with comprehensive particularism. (shrink)

Can the theology of Thomas Aquinas serve as a resource for reflection on democratic civic virtue? That is the central question taken up by Mark Jordan, Adam Eitel, John Bowlin, and Michael Lamb in this focus issue. The four authors agree on one thing: Aquinas himself was no fan of democracy. They disagree, though, over whether Aquinas can offer resources for theorizing democratic virtues. Bowlin, Eitel, and Lamb believe he can, and propose Thomistic accounts of tolerance, civic friendship, and democratic (...) hope, respectively. Jordan, in contrast, issues a cautionary note against such enterprises. This divergence is due in part to different judgments about what it would mean to claim certain resources as “Thomistic.” In part, too, it flows from a disagreement about whether Aquinas himself countenances genuine virtues among non-Christian citizens, and about whether Christians and non-Christians can be said to share even proximate ends. This conversation is an important one, since accounts of the democratic virtues constructed using Thomistic resources have the potential to move discussions of democratic and theological virtues beyond common impasses. (shrink)

Recent attempts by Christian ethicists to mine the tradition of Christian Platonism have overlooked seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth. Cudworth's significance lies in his creative extension of Christian Platonism in response to the early modern situation of religious conflict. He develops an account of autonomy as the self-rule of the "redoubled soul," while retaining a teleological account of the soul's final end as participation in God. Cudworth can help contemporary Christian ethicists imagine a way beyond pro-Enlightenment secular accounts of autonomy (...) and anti-Enlightenment rejections of autonomy in the name of tradition. (shrink)

William Placher and others have charged seventeenth-century theologians with "domesticating" divine transcendence, with fostering an understanding of God that was clear and comprehensible, but unattractive, unpersuasive, and easily undermined by secular thought. This essay tests that claim by analyzing the discourse of divine compassion which became prominent among post-Restoration Anglican divines. While the second generation of latitudinarians do exemplify the trends Placher traces, the first generation of latitudinarians, notably Cambridge Platonist Benjamin Whichcote, succeeds in finding a way to affirm divine (...) compassion without undermining divine transcendence. Moreover, Whichcote argues that an insistence on divine incomprehensibility fosters a voluntaristic conception of divine power and—contrary to Placher—undermines efforts to promote transformative justice in human society. The present case study suggests that we must reconsider our modes of articulating divine transcendence. (shrink)

Epistemological issues are usually taken to be David Hume's central preoccupation. Attending to the role of sympathy in Hume's thought reveals, however, that his primary aim is to secure the conditions for social peace and prosperity in 18th-century Scotland and beyond, a peace particularly threatened by religious conflict. This perspective not only discloses the unity of Hume's ethical, political, aesthetic, and historical writings, it also suggests that the driving forces in the development of modern ethical and religious thought are ethical (...) and social rather than epistemological. ;The first two chapters discuss the background to Hume's use of sympathy and explore its application in the Treatise. In Hume's secularized account of moral approbation, sympathy fills the place Hutcheson reserved for Providence; it assures an intelligible connection between moral judgments and human flourishing in society. Hume at first makes use of a passive notion of sympathy developed by Latitudinarian divines to counter Hobbesian accounts of self-interested human nature. But this passive form of sympathy is limited and variable, threatening to reinforce, rather than alleviate, religious zeal and sectarian conflict. Hume introduces a new form of corrected, 'extensive' sympathy which involves an active effort to overcome prior affinities and cross factional boundaries. ;Appreciating the role of sympathy in morals also illuminates malfunctions of judgment among religious believers. Chapter 3 interprets Hume's essay on the pleasures of tragedy as an unmasking of Scottish Evangelical condemnation of theater. Evangelical opposition reflects pathologies of belief which grow out of a rejection of worldly existence and eventually distort sympathetic capacities. In "Of the Standard of Taste," discussed in Chapter 4, Hume grapples with disagreement in taste and judgment and argues that sympathy cannot be extended to those who live "artificial" religious lives, deducing practical consequences from speculative theories. ;Where poetry fails, however, history may succeed, since history is for Hume the paradigm of sympathetic understanding. As the final chapter argues, it is in the History of England that sympathy reaches its mature expression and Hume's delineation of the links among religious irrationality, zeal, and faction, attains its most concrete and persuasive form. (shrink)

While refraining from merely reinscribing liberal hagiographies of Locke, this essay questions recent accounts of Locke as facilitator of an insidious subordination of church to state in the early modern period. Locke's defense of toleration and the claims of conscience represent the recovery of key aspects of Christian charity, not the subordination of church to state, and his conception of church membership as voluntary serves as a salutary reminder that loyalty cannot ultimately be coerced, but resides in a bond of (...) trust. While Locke's account of the church is inadequate and his attempt to separate civil and religious realms flounders, these flaws rested in part on problematic assumptions about the fundamentally otherworldly orientation of Christianity and thus the purely instrumental character of the church. These are assumptions shared with earlier Christian thinkers and hardly distinctively modern or liberal. (shrink)

Theological reckoning with our contemporary post-truth context must be cognizant of the ways in which adherence to biblical inerrancy fostered the rise of partisan epistemology. It is essential as well to grapple with the question of whether postliberal theologies, by way of a very different theory of truth, also promote the epistemic insulation of Christian faith communities. We need to understand how groups threatened with the erosion of social influence are tempted to indulge in partisan epistemology. It is equally critical (...) to grasp how unjust power exploits such tendencies in girding its loins with epistemological supremacy. Jesus, facing in Pilate a post-truth dominator, models an alternative, namely, disruptive engagement that resists epistemic injustice and opens new space for the construction of unbounded communities of trust and shared understanding. (shrink)

Hearers of the Sermon on the Mount are called to become children of their heavenly father by loving as God loves. Surprisingly, though, God's love is depicted here as impersonal and indiscriminate, as similar to or even simply as a force of nature, even if a life-giving force: God `makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust' (Matthew 5:45). Anders Nygren used this verse as core support for his (...) dubious characterization of agape as `indifferent to value'. How should we hear it today? (shrink)

BOTH ERASMUS AND LUTHER WRESTLE WITH THE PROBLEM OF APPARENT virtue, although in divergent ways. Luther excludes the possibility of any habituation in true virtue that is not grounded in prior recognition of utter dependency on divine activity. Because social formation may simply conceal the absence of this essential starting point, it is always suspect. By contrast, Erasmus regards grace as working through human activity and by way of natural processes of social formation. He leaves room for gradual habituation in (...) virtue that culminates rather than begins in recognition of true virtue as gift-grace. Thus, Erasmus is able both to countenance true pagan virtue and to offer a differentiated critique of particular social practices of the day that warped formation in Christian virtue. Retrieving an Erasmian critique of apparent virtue will allow a Christian ethics of virtue to avoid communal chauvinism while cultivating charity toward pagan virtue. (shrink)

The doctrine of the image of God is often regarded as grounding human dignity in something permanent and unchanging that transcends our attitudes and behaviors. Yet we persistently encounter the argument that particular human individuals or groups have acted so as to forfeit their moral standing as fellow humans. They are bestialized, categorized as non-human animals, lifting ordinary restraints on punishment. I examine the logic of this argument in John Locke, Thomas Aquinas, and contemporary felony disenfranchisement, showing how it involves (...) slippage between the unobjectionable notion that specific rights may in particular circumstances be forfeited, and the deeply troubling claim that one’s moral standing as human can as such be forfeited. I argue that an apparently similar rhetoric of dehumanization employed by Frederick Douglass, in contrast, refrains from stripping the opponent of moral considerability. (shrink)

If we are searching, over the past half-century or so, for the finest articulation of the Augustinian vision of God as the One who satisfies the deepest desire of our heart by way of uprooting desires that more often than not feel like our deepest desires, we would do well to sit at the feet of Gilbert Meilaender. Meilaender rightly suggests that it is only when we see as God does that we can fully recognize what in our created and/or (...) fallen nature is in need of transformation. That said, even where God is not known as the deepest desire of the heart, happiness can be grasped as coming by way of the painful upending of desires. This is what eudaemonist virtue ethics should lead us to expect, even if it is not Christian—as this article seeks to illustrate by way of reflection on ancient Stoic oikeiosis on the one hand, and modern ecological consciousness on the other. (shrink)

This review essay assesses the significance of J. B. Schneewind's "The Invention of Autonomy" for the history of moral thought in general and for religious ethics in particular. The essay offers an overview of Schneewind's complex argument before critically discussing his four central themes: the primacy of Immanuel Kant, the fundamentality of conflict, the insufficiency of virtue, and community with God. Whereas Schneewind argues that an impasse between modern natural law and perfectionist ethics revealed irresolvable tensions within Christian ethics and (...) thus encouraged the emergence of secular moral thought, this author suggests that these tensions were specific to a voluntarist strand of Christian moral thought from which even antivoluntarists of the modern period were unable to break free. (shrink)

The present volume is the fifth out of eight total projected for the Clarendon Edition of the Works of David Hume. Its editor, Tom Beauchamp, is one of the general editors of the Clarendon Hume, together with David Fate Norton and M. A. Stewart. Beauchamp served as the editor for the Clarendon editions of An Enquiry concerning the Principle of Morals and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, both of which have garnered critical acclaim. Like the previous volumes, this new edition (...) of A Dissertation on the Passions and The Natural History of Religion has been prepared with erudition and meticulous attention to detail. It becomes without question the definitive critical edition of these. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:David Hume: A Dissertation on the Passions; The Natural History of ReligionJennifer A. HerdtTom L. Beauchamp, ed. David Hume: A Dissertation on the Passions; The Natural History of Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Pp. cxxxv + 317. ISBN 978-0-19-925188-9, cloth, $150. ISBN 978-0-19-957574-9, Paper, $45.The present volume is the fifth out of eight total projected for the Clarendon Edition of the Works of David Hume. Its editor, Tom (...) Beauchamp, is one of the general editors of the Clarendon Hume, together with David Fate Norton and M. A. Stewart. Beauchamp served as the editor for the Clarendon editions of An Enquiry concerning the Principle of Morals (1998) and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (2000), both of which have garnered critical acclaim. Like the previous volumes, this new edition of A Dissertation on the Passions and The Natural History of Religion has been prepared with erudition and meticulous attention to detail. It becomes without question the definitive critical edition of these texts.The volume begins with a superb editorial introduction, giving a detailed account of the publication history of the two texts included in the volume, including an overview of contemporary reviews and a note explaining how the various editions of the texts were collated and the text prepared. These are followed by the texts of A Dissertation on the Passions and The Natural History of Religion, together comprising eighty-seven pages. The edition includes both line and paragraph numbers for easy reference. A section titled “Editor’s Annotations” extends to nearly the same length and offers not only definitions of obscure terms, translations of non-English quotations, and explanations of references that are incomplete or unclear but also identification of related material elsewhere in Hume’s corpus and information on the broader intellectual context of Hume’s thought. A subsequent “Editorial Appendix” gives a detailed account of the decisions made in arriving at the critical text, which is based primarily on the 1772 edition (the final edition made during Hume’s lifetime) but which does make some departures, in both orthography and punctuation, from Hume’s original. The “Editorial Appendix” also includes a register of all non-systematic editorial changes and all substantive variants among successive editions of the texts. The “Editorial Appendix” is followed by an essay on the intellectual background of both A Dissertation on the Passions and The Natural History of Religion, a “Biographical Appendix” with brief biographies of all the persons mentioned by Hume in the two dissertations, a bibliography of works cited by either Hume or the editor, and a short-title index of Hume’s own references. The volume concludes with Hume’s index, compiled for the 1758 edition of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, followed by the editor’s index.The two texts comprising this volume are two of the Four Dissertations published by Hume in 1757. A Dissertation on the Passions was for the most part extracted [End Page 233] from Book 2 of A Treatise of Human Nature. Thus, its publication completed Hume’s project of reworking the material from the Treatise into a more essayistic style, a project Hume had commenced with Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding (in 1748, reworking Book 1 of the Treatise) and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (in 1751, reworking Book 3). The fact that Hume left A Dissertation on the Passions for last suggests that he regarded it as less central to his own original philosophical contribution than the other two. This impression is reinforced by the fact that he refers to it in “My Own Life” simply as one of “some other small pieces” published with The Natural History of Religion (xxvii), as well as by the fact that while Books 1 and 3 were completely re-written, nearly three-quarters of A Dissertation on the Passions was taken verbatim from Book 2 of the Treatise (li). One of the great merits of the present edition is the inclusion of a section devoted to presenting, in parallel columns, all Treatise passages preserved in A Dissertation on the Passions, thereby facilitating an easy comparison of the two texts.Scholars of Hume... (shrink)

The editors of the JRE solicited short essays on the COVID‐19 pandemic from a group of scholars of religious ethics that reflected on how the field might help them make sense of the complex religious, cultural, ethical, and political implications of the pandemic, and on how the pandemic might shape the future of religious ethics.

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page W17-W19.

Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society.

Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society.

The key concept in Kant’s aesthetics is “aesthetic reflective judgment,” a critique of which is found in Part 1 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). It is a critique inasmuch as Kant unravels previous assumptions regarding aesthetic perception. For Kant, the comparative edge of a “judgment” implicates communicability, which in turn gives it a public face; yet “reflection” points to autonomy, and the “aesthetic” shifts the emphasis away from objective properties to the subjective response evoked by the (...) object. Contrary to the view he had inherited, Kant did not treat aesthetic judgments as confused perceptions or inferior cognitions, but rather put them in a category of their own. For Kant, aesthetic reflective judgments implicated not only the processes involved in understanding the empirical world but also the processes involved in ascribing ideas or meaning to experience (which go beyond what is given in perception/cognition). This “going beyond cognition” may have been referred to by Kant as non-cognitive, but it is conditioned on a way of cognizing the object. Kant describes the features of such judgments in the Analytic of the Beautiful before addressing their possibility in subtle ways throughout the Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments. Kant’s critique gives rise to three apparent dichotomies: immediate intuition and prior learning; autonomy and communicability; and non-cognitive response and aesthetic ideas. An interpretation of Kant’s theory can be deemed correct to the degree that it succeeds in showing that the contradictions are only apparent. I will argue that the resulting positive account of Kant’s aesthetic theory offers an understanding of aesthetic reflective judgment that is quite different from the standard formalism that the critics of formalism usually target and by which they misrepresent Kant’s aesthetic theory. When I refer to Kant’s formalism, then, I mean something quite different by this than what is meant by “standard formalism.” The latter is the representation given Kant’s formalism by its contemporary critics and is the typical account of formalism found in the art theory and philosophy of art literature, as will be demonstrated. (shrink)

This essay addresses feminist approaches to medical aid in dying (MAID), considering whether it is a practice that should be supported for women and other marginalized groups. Some feminists have raised rights and justice-based arguments in support of MAID; others have taken a care-based approach to suggest that the practice violates relationships of care and only worsens distrust between marginalized groups and the medical establishment. I argue that we need to adopt both justice and care approaches to develop a robust (...) feminist account of MAID. I defend a woman’s right to choose death in cases of terminal illness or suffering but argue that relational concerns of care, trust, and trustworthiness must be addressed at the same time to ensure that MAID is justly practiced and accessible to all those who want it. (shrink)

The standard cognitive theory of art claims that art can be insightful while maintaining that imagining is motivationally inert [Walton 1990] even when some epistemic advantage is claimed for it [Currie 1995]. However, if we assume art as art can be insightful, we also assume that the imagining it occasions has a lasting impact on belief. In this chapter, I argue that imagining of the kind occasioned by art can be held non-occurrently [Schellenberg 2013] without delusion and can motivate behaviour (...) [Gendler 2000, 2003, 2006a/b; Langland-Hassan 2016]. As such, certain features of imagination can be appreciated in a new light. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Why Do We Date? A Brief History of Dating Calculated Relationship Initiation and Maintenance All “Perfect” Dating Relationships Stumble, but Not in the Same Way Dating as a Particular Genre of Friendship Against Unconditional Love Conclusion.