Cedant arma togae, ‘let arms yield to the toga’. Thus begins the famous verse from Cicero's poem on his consulship that highlights the protagonist's suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy by favourably contrasting this political achievement with success on the battlefield. But how does the line continue? Its conclusion is transmitted in two different versions,concedat laurea laudiandconcedat laurea linguae, and scholars have long been divided over which one is Cicero's original text. In this paper, we revisit the issue and not only (...) propose an answer to the question of what Cicero actually wrote, but also examine those attestations of the verse that date to the author's own lifetime, elucidating the contexts that account for the quotation of one variant rather than the other. (shrink)

This volume contains ten essays on Seneca the Younger. Approaching the Roman writer from various angles, the authors endeavor both to illuminate individual aspects of Seneca's enormous output and to discern common themes among the different genres practiced by him.

When the Romans adopted Greek literary genres and artistic techniques, they did not slavishly imitate their models but created vibrant and original works of literature and art in their own right. The same is true for philosophy, notwithstanding the fact that the rich Roman philosophical tradition is still all too often treated as a mere footnote to the history of Greek philosophy. This volume aims to reassert the significance of Roman philosophy and to explore the "Romanness" of philosophical writings and (...) practices in the Roman world, endeavoring to show that the Romans in their creative adaptation of Greek modes of thought developed sophisticated forms of philosophical discourse shaped by their own history and institutions, concepts, and values--and last--but not least--by the Latin language, which nearly all Roman philosophers used to express their ideas.This volume of thirteen chapters by an international group of specialists in ancient philosophy, Latin literature, and Roman social and intellectual history moves from Roman attitudes to and practices of philosophy to the great late Republican writers Cicero and Lucretius, then onwards to the early Empire and the work of Seneca the Younger, and finally to Epictetus, Apuleius, and Augustine. Using a variety of approaches, the essays demonstrate the diversity and originality of Roman philosophical discourse over the centuries. (shrink)

One of the most famous scenes in classical literature is theDichterweiheat the beginning of theTheogony: when Hesiod was tending his sheep below Mount Helicon, the Muses approached him, provided him with a staff and a divine voice, and told him to sing of the blessed, everlasting gods.

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 4 Seiten: 465-468.

This volume of thirteen essays originated in a conference on Latin philosophy at Columbia University, organized by the editors in 2012. The guiding principle was to examine how writing philosophy in Latin gave a distinctive character to Roman philosophical thinking. The conference was interdisciplinary, involving philosophers and literary scholars, some interested in ancient history as well. In publishing the papers, the editors had in mind as a model Philosophia Togata I and II, the second volume of which is almost twenty (...) years old. More up to date, this volume also aims to fill gaps in the earlier enterprise by devoting one of the four parts to Seneca, not treated as a separate topic there, and by going beyond... (shrink)

Although moral relativists often appeal to cases of apparent moral disagreement between members of different communities to motivate their view, accounting for these exchanges as evincing genuine disagreements constitutes a challenge to the coherence of moral relativism. While many moral relativists acknowledge this problem, attempts to solve it so far have been wanting. In response, moral relativists either give up the claim that there can be moral disagreement between members of different communities or end up with a view on which (...) these disagreements have no “epistemic significance” because they are always faultless. This paper introduces an alternative strategy: accounting for disagreement in terms of “metalinguistic negotiation”. It argues that this strategy constitutes a better solution to the challenge disagreement poses for moral relativists because it leads to a nuanced understanding of the epistemic significance of moral disagreement between members of different communities. The upshot is a novel account of disagreement for moral relativists that has consequences for how moral relativism should be understood. (shrink)

A recent wave of academic and popular publications say that utopia is within reach: Automation will progress to such an extent and include so many high-skill tasks that much human work will soon become superfluous. The gains from this highly automated economy, authors suggest, could be used to fund a universal basic income (UBI). Today's employees would live off the robots' products and spend their days on intrinsically valuable pursuits. I argue that this prediction is unlikely to come true. Historical (...) precedent speaks against it, but the main problem is that the prediction fundamentally misunderstands how capitalism works—its incentives to increase or decrease production, its principles of income allocation, and the underlying conception of merit. (shrink)

Katharina D. Giesel befasst sich mit den Fragen, was in den verschiedensten Sozialwissenschaften unter Leitbildern verstanden wird, wie diese Kategorie konzeptionell in Forschungs- und Handlungskonzepte eingebunden wird und inwiefern ...

Many legal, social, and medical theorists and practitioners, as well as lay people, seem to be concerned with the harmfulness of discriminative practices. However, the philosophical literature on the moral wrongness of discrimination, with a few exceptions, does not focus on harm. In this paper, I examine, and improve, a recent account of wrongful discrimination, which divides into a definition of group discrimination, and a characterisation of its moral wrong-making feature in terms of harm. The resulting account analyses the wrongness (...) of discrimination in terms of intrapersonal comparisons of the discriminatee’s actual, and relevantly counterfactual, well-being levels. I show that the account faces problems from counterfactuals, which can be traced back specifically to the orthodox - comparative, counterfactual, welfarist - concept of harm. I argue that non-counterfactual and non-comparative harm concepts face problems of their own, and don’t fit easily with our best understanding of discrimination; hence they are unsuitable to replace the orthodox concept here. I then propose a non-orthodox - comparative, counterfactual, hybrid - concept of harm, which relies on counterfactual comparisons of ways of being treated. I suggest how such a concept can help us handle the problems from counterfactuals, at least for my account of discrimination. I also show that there are similar proposals in other harm-related debates. An upshot of the paper is thus to corroborate the case for a non-orthodox, hybrid concept of harm, which seems better able to fulfil its functional roles in a variety of contexts. (shrink)

Geach is best known for his contributions to theoretical philosophy: Most of his more than one hundred papers and a dozen books are on logic, philosophy of language and metaphysics. But he also made significant contributions to ethics. Particularly influential were a series of short metaethics papers, which are small masterpieces, both in terms of philosophical content and style. In usually less than ten pages, Geach delivers sharp analyses and powerful objections against influential schools. His arguments are always so clear (...) and his examples so simple that they leave the reader wondering why no one before Geach detected the problems he points out. (shrink)

A realist view of numbers often rests on the following thesis: statements like ‘The number of moons of Jupiter is four’ are identity statements in which the copula is flanked by singular terms whose semantic function consists in referring to a number (henceforth: Identity). On the basis of Identity the realists argue that the assertive use of such statements commits us to numbers. Recently, some anti-realists have disputed this argument. According to them, Identity is false, and, thus, we may deny (...) that the relevant statements commit us to numbers. The present paper argues that the correct linguistic analysis of the relevant number statements supports the anti-realist view that Identity is false. However, as will further be shown, pace the anti-realist, this analysis does not establish that such statements do not commit us to numbers after all. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that ‘good care’ in residential nursing homes is enacted through different care practices that are either inspired by a ‘professional logic of care’ that aims for justice and non-maleficence in the professional treatment of residents, or by a ‘relational logic of care’, which attends to the relational quality and the meaning of interpersonal connectedness in people’s lives. Rather than favoring one care logic over the other, this paper indicates how important aspects of care are constantly (...) negotiated between different care practices. Based on the intricate everyday negotiations observed during an ethnographic field study at an elderly nursing home in Germany, the paper puts forth the argument that care is always a matter of tinkering with different, sometimes competing ‘goods’. This tinkering process, which unfolds through ‘intuitive deliberation’, ‘situated assessment’ and ‘affective juggling’ is then theorized along the conceptualization of a ‘practical ethics of care’: an ethics which makes no a priori judgments of what may be considered as good or bad care, but instead calls for momentary judgments that are pliable across changing situations. (shrink)

Following Elizabeth Anscombe, rights exist within practices. A right consists in a bundle of possible and impossible moves within the relevant social 'game', e.g. the practice of private property. What becomes of basic rights on such a social-constructivist conception? Metaphysically, basic rights do not differ from other rights. The right not to be murdered, however, enjoys a transcendental status within Anscombe's moral philosophy, and this construction might extend to other basic rights: Since practical reasoning is directed at the good life, (...) there can be no sound practical inference concluding in murder. Anscombe's argument for this presupposes a particular conception of human dignity, which is quite similar to the dominant conception in contemporary human rights literature. (shrink)

In today’s highly dynamic societies, moral norms and values are subject to change. Moral change is partly driven by technological developments. For instance, the introduction of robots in elderly care practices requires caregivers to share moral responsibility with a robot (see van Wynsberghe 2013 ). Since we do not know what elements of morality will change and how they will change (see van der Burg 2003 ), moral education should aim at fostering what has been called “moral resilience” (Swierstra 2013 (...) ). We seek to fill two gaps in the existing literature: (i) research on moral education has not paid enough attention to the development of moral resilience; (ii) the very limited literature on moral resilience does not conceptualise moral resilience in relation to new technological developments. We argue that philosophical accounts of moral education need to do justice to the importance of moral resilience, and that a specific form of moral resilience should be conceptualised as “technomoral resilience” to underline the added value of cultivating moral resilience in relation to technomoral change. We illustrate the role of technomoral resilience in practice by looking at the context of elderly care. To make the first step towards an account of how technomoral resilience can be fostered in moral education, we propose that moral education shall focus on a triangle of capacities: (1) moral imagination, (2) a capacity for critical reflection, and (3) a capacity for maintaining one’s moral agency in the face of disturbances. (shrink)

Bioethicists tend to focus on the individual as the relevant moral subject. Yet, in highly complex and socially differentiated healthcare systems a number of social groups, each committed to a common cause, are involved in medical decisions and sometimes even try to influence bioethical discourses according to their own agenda. We argue that the significance of these collective actors is unjustifiably neglected in bioethics. The growing influence of collective actors in the fields of biopolitics and bioethics leads us to pursue (...) the question as to how collective moral claims can be characterized and justified. We pay particular attention to elaborating the circumstances under which collective actors can claim ‘collective agency.’ Specifically, we develop four normative-practical criteria for collective agency in order to determine the conditions that must be given to reasonably speak of ‘collective autonomy’. For this purpose, we analyze patient organizations and families, which represent two quite different kinds of groups and can both be conceived as collective actors of high relevance for bioethical practice. Finally, we discuss some practical implications and explain why the existence of a shared practice of trust is of immediate normative relevance in this respect. (shrink)

As the pre-eminent Enlightenment philosopher, Kant famously calls on all humans to make up their own minds, independently from the constraints imposed on them by others. Kant's focus, however, is on universal human reason, and he tells us little about what makes us individual persons. In this book, Katharina T. Kraus explores Kant's distinctive account of psychological personhood by unfolding how, according to Kant, we come to know ourselves as such persons. Drawing on Kant's Critical works and on his (...) Lectures and Reflections, Kraus develops the first textually comprehensive and systematically coherent account of our capacity for what Kant calls 'inner experience'. The novel view of self-knowledge and self-formation in Kant that she offers addresses present-day issues in philosophy of mind and will be relevant for contemporary philosophical debates. It will be of interest to scholars of the history of philosophy, as well as of philosophy of mind and psychology. (shrink)

It has recently been pointed out that the cloudiness of the concept of authenticity as well as inflated ideologies of the ‘true self’ provide good reasons to criticize theories and ideals of authenticity. Nevertheless, there are also good reasons to defend an ethical ideal of authenticity, not least because of its critical and oppositional force, which is directed against experiences of self-abandonment and self-alienation. I will argue for an elaborated ethical ideal of authenticity: the ambitious ideal of a continuous self-reflective (...) process of ‘self-authentication’. For this purpose, the ideal of being authentic in expressing and unfolding one’s individual personality and characteristics will be combined with the ideal of being ‘an authentic person’ - whereby ‘a person’ is to be understood in a Kantian sense as an autonomous person who is reasonable and morally responsible. (shrink)

Katharina Dück widmet sich in diesem Buch dem umfangreichen Doktrinenschatz des Begriffs „Materia prima“ im Spannungsfeld von Theorie und wiederholbarer Praxis in deutschsprachigen alchemisch-naturkundlichen Sachschriften des 16. Jahrhunderts. Sie trägt damit neue Aspekte zur Debatte des Materialismus in der Frühen Neuzeit bei. Untersucht werden Texte sogenannter Meisterdenker als auch Zeugnisse derer, die bisher wenig berücksichtigt wurden. Dem Corpus Paracelsicum und der Strömung des Paracelsismus wird besondere Beachtung gezollt. Drei rasterartig umrissene Grundmuster, denen die „Materia prima“-Vorstellungen zugeordnet sind, werden ausführlich (...) vorgestellt und dabei Kontinuitäten sowie Transformationen von vorhandenen Materie-Konzepten festgestellt.​. (shrink)

Testimony of oppression is testimony that something constitutes or contributes to a form of oppression, such as, for example, “The stranger’s comment was sexist.” Testimony of oppression that is given by members of the relevant oppressed group has the potential to play an important role in fostering a shared understanding of oppression. Yet, it is frequently dismissed out of hand. Against the background of a recent debate on moral testimony, this paper discusses the following question: How should privileged hearers approach (...) testimony of oppression if they aim to do so in an ethically and epistemically sound way? Should they defer or try to understand? Both strategies constitute ways of learning from testimony of oppression. However, they differ in important respects and exclude each other. Because testimony of oppression is often based on personal experience, empathizing with the speaker can play an important role in trying to understand testimony of oppression. While the fact that empathy can change your mind and the advantages of understanding over knowledge support trying to understand as the right approach to testimony of oppression, considerations of the “limits of empathy” and the value of deference support deferring. I argue that, on balance, these contrasting arguments allow for a limited defense of the role of empathy in learning from testimony of oppression. We should try to understand testimony of oppression by empathizing with the speaker, but not treat our ability to understand as a condition on accepting a speaker’s claim. (shrink)

Problems arise when applying the current procedural conceptualization of decision-making capacity to paediatric healthcare: Its emphasis on content-neutrality and rational cognition as well as its implicit assumption that capacity is an ability that resides within a person jeopardizes children’s position in decision-making. The purpose of the paper is to challenge this dominant account of capacity and provide an alternative for how capacity should be understood in paediatric care. First, the influence of developmental psychologist Jean Piaget upon the notion of capacity (...) is discussed, followed by an examination of Vygostky’s contextualist view on children’s development, which emphasizes social interactions and learning for decision-making capacity. In drawing parallels between autonomy and capacity, substantive approaches to relational autonomy are presented that underline the importance of the content of a decision. The authors then provide a relational reconceptualization of capacity that leads the focus away from the individual to include important social others such as parents and physicians. Within this new approach, the outcome of adults’ decision-making processes is accepted as a guiding factor for a good decision for the child. If the child makes a choice that is not approved by adults, the new conceptualization emphasizes mutual exchange and engagement by both parties. (shrink)

When facing a choice between saving one person and saving many, some people have argued that fairness requires us to decide without aggregating numbers; rather we should decide by coin toss or some form of lottery, or alternatively we should straightforwardly save the greater number but justify this in a non-aggregating contractualist way. This paper expands the debate beyond well-known number cases to previously under-considered probability cases, in which not (only) the numbers of people, but (also) the probabilities of success (...) for saving people vary. It is shown that, in these latter cases, both the coin toss and the lottery lead to what is called an awkward conclusion, which makes probabilities count in a problematic way. Attempts to avoid this conclusion are shown to lead into difficulties as well. Finally, it is shown that while the greater number method cannot be justified on contractualist grounds for probability cases, it may be replaced by another decision method which is so justified. This decision method is extensionally equivalent to maximising expected value and seems to be the least problematic way of dealing with probability cases in a non-aggregating manner. (shrink)

We answer the title question with a qualified “No.” We arrive at this answer by spelling out what the proper place of the concept 'happiness' is in a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics: (1) Happiness in the sense of personal well-being has only a loose relation to virtue; it doesn't deserve any prominent place in virtue ethics. (2) Happiness in the sense of flourishing is impossible without virtue, but that doesn't imply that individual actions should aim at flourishing. (3) Instead, flourishing sets (...) the standard of good practical reasoning; it is hardly ever the proper aim of a practical inference. This paper begins with a common (mis)interpretation of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, on which it is a form of rational egoism. We then develop our alternative understanding against this foil. (shrink)

Recent social‐psychological research suggests that a considerable amount of, for example, racial and gendered discrimination may be connected to implicit biases: mental processes beyond our direct control or endorsement, that influence our behaviour toward members of socially salient groups. In this article I seek to improve our understanding of the phenomenon of implicit bias, including its moral status, by examining it through the lens of a theory of discrimination. In doing so, I also suggest ways to improve this theory of (...) discrimination, by creating conceptual space for implicit bias discrimination. I explore two ways of distinguishing direct and indirect discrimination and spell out the resulting four different forms of discrimination. The resulting taxonomy provides some room for implicit bias discrimination. I also deal with four challenges to my proposal for capturing implicit bias within discrimination theory: the metaphysical challenge, the moral insignificance challenge, the causal connection challenge, and the challenge from irreducibly collective bias. (shrink)

Hume's explanation of our tendency to confuse calm passions with reason due to lack of feeling appears to present a tension with his claim that we cannot be mistaken about our own impressions. I argue that the calm/violent distinction cannot be understood in terms of presence/absence of feeling. Rather, for Hume the presence or absence of disruption and disordering of natural and/or customary modes of thought is the key distinction between the calm and violent passions. This reading provides new explanations (...) of our confusion of calm passions with reason, and the potential for calm passions to prevail over violent. (shrink)