En este artículo damos a conocer la concepción de la “ciencia” del filósofo chileno Jenaro Abasolo (1833-1884) desde la indagación de algunas de sus deudas conceptuales contraídas con seis autores fuente. Fichte, Schelling, Krause, Ahrens, Darwin y Quinet son quienes le permiten a Abasolo establecer un particular intento de síntesis entre los descubrimientos de la ciencia positiva y los principios comunes a las formas de idealismo. Dichos principios sirven a Abasolo para mantener una perspectiva espiritualista que es compatible con los (...) nuevos hallazgos que las ciencias de la naturaleza aportan desde los datos sensibles. Como correlato, Abasolo considera que la filosofía tiene un rol fundamental cuando se trata de dar una visión unitaria del universo a partir de encontrar el nexo entre las relaciones cualitativas y cuantitativas de lo real. A su vez, se esboza la manera en que el análisis de la dimensión físico-natural aportaría a la interpretación del mundo humano de la libertad y cómo las ciencias permitirían hallar diversas coordenadas capaces de orientar adecuadamente al hombre en su desarrollo hacia la constitución de lo que Abasolo define como personalidad política. (shrink)

In this article we propose to carry out an examination of the notions of ‘other’ based on the philosophical proposals of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Maurice Blanchot. It seeks to show the common point between both thoughts, from a proposal in which the other is understood as a dislocation, which manifests itself in the way of an opening. For this reason, the notion of opening becomes the central element of this analysis, from which the other manifests itself in an ambiguous way. (...) To this end, the proposals of both authors will be analyzed separately, however, highlighting and relating to each other their respective conceptions of opening and the implications they have regarding the question of the other. (shrink)

Despite Kant’s lasting influence on philosophical accounts of moral motivation, many details of his own position remain elusive. In the Critique of Practical Reason, for example, Kant argues that our recognition of the moral law’s authority must elicit both painful and pleasurable feelings in us. On reflection, however, it is unclear how these effects could motivate us to act from duty. As a result, Kant’s theory of moral sensibility comes under a skeptical threat: the possibility of (...) a morally motivating feeling seems incoherent. My aim in this paper is to reconstruct Kant’s theory in a way that overcomes this threat. By way of conclusion, I show how my reconstruction brings a new perspective to a long-standing dispute over intellectualist and affectivist views of moral motivation. (shrink)

The moral sentiments adumbrated by Adam Smith and Charles Darwin reflect some of our basic social appraisals of each other. One set of moral appraisals reflects disgust and withdrawal, a form of contempt. Another set of moral appraisals reflects active concern responses, an appreciation of the experiences (sympathy for some- one)of other individuals and approach related behaviors. While no one set of neural structures is designed for only moral appraisals, a diverse set of neural regions that (...) include the gustatory/visceral neural axis, basal ganglia and iverse neocortical sites underlie moral judgment. (shrink)

In his early writings, Kant says that the solution to the puzzle of how morality can serve as a motivating force in human life is nothing less than the “philosophers’ stone.” In this dissertation I show that for years Kant searched for the philosophers’ stone in the concept of “respect” (Achtung), which he understood as the complex effect practical reason has on feeling. -/- I sketch the history of that search in Chapters 1-2. In Chapter 3 I show that Kant’s (...) analysis in Groundwork I is incomplete because it does not explain how respect functions as a feeling in motivating choice. In Chapter 4 I argue that Kant’s subsequent attempt to sidestep this explanation in Groundwork III is unsuccessful, and that his position remains open to a skeptical threat. The argument in the second Critique, which I reconstruct in Chapters 5-6, overcomes this threat, and in doing so explains how the feeling of respect is both painful and pleasurable. -/- In the course of defending these claims, I provide an alternative reading of the shift in Kant’s ethical project from the Groundwork of 1785 to the second Critique of 1788 Against a common view in the literature, I argue that the shift does not concern the direction of Kant’s deduction (from freedom to morality, or morality to freedom); rather, it concerns his view of human sensibility and the resources he thinks we have to make our practical self-understanding intelligible. In the second Critique, I argue, Kant develops a novel approach to moral feeling from the perspective of the human agent; and this in turn clears room in his ethics for a new kind of a priori knowledge—namely, knowledge of what the activity of practical reason must feel like. By way of conclusion, I offer a few reasons for why the form of Kant’s argument in the second Critique is still relevant today, as it shows why we can only address moral skepticism from a first-personal perspective. (shrink)

Autumn Fiester's “Neglected Ends: Clinical Ethics Consultation and the Prospects for Closure” (2015) demonstrates how a focus on recommendations in clinical ethics consultations (CECs) can fail to...

Patients with covert awareness who present as being vegetative raise the question of moral status and clinical decisions about those who have suffered major brain injuries. When the idea of moral s...

Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton formulate two objections to moral sensibility theories in their overview of twentieth-century moral theory, “Toward Fin de siècle Ethics: Some Trends.” Instead of using the work of sensibility theorists John McDowell and David Wiggins to address these objections, I turn to H. A. Prichard and P. F. Strawson. The reason for doing so is that the objections misunderstand the importance of the idea of the autonomy of the moral (...) domain. Prichard and Strawson have provided important defenses of this idea that are independent of moral sensibility theories. Hence their work provides independent grounds for answering the two objections. Particularly important is the loosely a posteriori way they make their arguments. oral. (shrink)

Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton formulate two objections to moral sensibility theories in their overview of twentieth-century moral theory, “Toward Fin de siècle Ethics: Some Trends.” Instead of using the work of sensibility theorists John McDowell and David Wiggins to address these objections, I turn to H. A. Prichard and P. F. Strawson. The reason for doing so is that the objections misunderstand the importance of the idea of the autonomy of the moral (...) domain. Prichard and Strawson have provided important defenses of this idea that are independent of moral sensibility theories. Hence their work provides independent grounds for answering the two objections. Particularly important is the loosely a posteriori way they make their arguments. (shrink)

This article pushes Lacan into the area of moral philosophy. In the posthumously published Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, Goethe expresses his perplexity concerning a short passage in the tragedy of Antigone in which the eponymous character gives to Creon a rather extravagant justification of her deadly gesture. This essay contends that Lacan’s reference to Goethe in his Ethics of Psychoanalysis clarifies what is at stake in his dialogues with Aristotle and Kant. Moral sensibility gravitates (...) towards contingencies that hinder a subject from fully participating in the market of exchangeable goods and the realm of social justice or the universal demands of a categorical imperative. In the tragedy of Antigone, a contingent blood tie incarnates a symbolic value that accumulates such enormous power that it isolates Antigone from her social context and even from her desire for self-preservation. Moral sensibility circulates around those areas in which an individual is separated from the universal. (shrink)

This article pushes Lacan into the area of moral philosophy. In the posthumously published Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, Goethe expresses his perplexity concerning a short passage in the tragedy of Antigone in which the eponymous character gives to Creon a rather extravagant justification of her deadly gesture. This essay contends that Lacan’s reference to Goethe in his Ethics of Psychoanalysis clarifies what is at stake in his dialogues with Aristotle and Kant. Moral sensibility gravitates (...) towards contingencies that hinder a subject from fully participating in the market of exchangeable goods and the realm of social justice or the universal demands of a categorical imperative. In the tragedy of Antigone, a contingent blood tie incarnates a symbolic value that accumulates such enormous power that it isolates Antigone from her social context and even from her desire for self-preservation. Moral sensibility circulates around those areas in which an individual is separated from the universal. (shrink)

This paper presents research on the moral sensibility of six pre-service teachers in an undergraduate teacher education program. Using their reflective writing across their first two semesters of coursework as well as focus group interviews in their third semester as sources of data, the paper identifies and describes three distinctive types of moral sensibility and examines ways in which moral sensibility interacts with experiences in teacher education. Suggestions for explicitly incorporating the moral in (...) pre-service teacher education are presented. (shrink)

This article analyzes the first animal cruelty conviction in the United States. Members of America’s founding generation worked to enhance awareness of animal cruelty, while drawing out its ethical implications and linking them to the nation’s birth struggles. They then took action to alter how animals were viewed in the inchoate American legal system. Perhaps the solution to contemporary animal cruelty lies in reexamining our past. A conviction for animal cruelty was unprecedented in 18th-century America. A revolution of thought regarding (...) animals needed to occur. Dusting off centuries-old documents may reveal how we can have a revolution of thought today. (shrink)

This book argues that Augustine assimilated the Stoic theory of perception and mental language (lekta/dicibilia), and that this epistemology underlies his accounts of motivation, affectivity, therapy for the passions, and moral progress. Byers elucidates seminal passages which have long puzzled commentators, such as Confessions 8, City of God 9 and 14, Replies to Simplicianus 1, and obscure sections of the later ‘anti-Pelagian’ works. Tracking the Stoic terminology, Byers analyzes Augustine’s engagement with Cicero, Seneca, Ambrose, Jerome, Origen, and Philo of (...) Alexandria, demonstrating that Augustine appropriated Stoicism with greater sophistication than other religious writers. She also shows how he moved beyond the Stoics by enriching Stoic cognitivism with Platonic motivational theory, arguing that Augustine created a coherent synthesis. This newly discovered Augustinian moral psychology has elements that contemporary philosophers and psychologists have identified as important. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to offer an analysis of the notion of artificial moral agent (AMA) and of its impact on human beings’ self-understanding as moral agents. Firstly, I introduce the topic by presenting what I call the Continuity Approach. Its main claim holds that AMAs and human moral agents exhibit no significant qualitative difference and, therefore, should be considered homogeneous entities. Secondly, I focus on the consequences this approach leads to. In order to do (...) this I take into consideration the work of Bostrom and Dietrich, who have radically assumed this viewpoint and thoroughly explored its implications. Thirdly, I present an alternative approach to AMAs—the Discontinuity Approach—which underscores an essential difference between human moral agents and AMAs by tackling the matter from another angle. In this section I concentrate on the work of Johnson and Bryson and I highlight the link between their claims and Heidegger’s and Jonas’s sug-gestions concerning the relationship between human beings and technological products. In conclusion I argue that, although the Continuity Approach turns out to be a necessary postulate to the machine ethics project, the Discontinuity Approach highlights a relevant distinction between AMAs and human moral agents. On this account, the Discontinuity Approach generates a clearer understanding of what AMAs are, of how we should face the moral issues they pose, and, finally, of the difference that separates machine ethics from moral philosophy. (shrink)

This paper examines the current scholarship on Mengzi’s metaethical thoughts and reconstructs Mengzi’s view to contribute to our understanding of the relation between sensibility and the apparent o...

Since Jonathan Shay's work with Vietnam veterans, moral injury has largely focused on the harm done to soldiers' moral character through their participation in warfare. This essay argues for the inclusion of noncombatants in the scope of inquiry involving moral injury. Specifically, it argues for the necessity of ordinary citizens assuming responsibility for the moral injury done to soldiers and civilians alike in the post‐9/11 wars.

… an immense gulf is fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, the supersensible, so that no transition from the sensible to the supersensible is possible, just as if they were two different worlds.

_Sensibility in the Early Modern Era_ investigates how the early modern characterisation of sensibility as a natural property of the body could give way to complex considerations about the importance of affect in morality. What underlies this understanding of sensibility is the attempt to fuse Lockean sensationism with Scottish sentimentalism – being able to have experiences of objects in the world is here seen as being grounded in the same principle that also enables us to feel moral (...) sentiments. Moral and epistemic ways of relating to the world thus blend into one another, as both can be traced to the same capacity that enables us to affectively respond to stimuli that impinge on our perceptual apparatus. This collection focuses on these connections by offering reflections on the role of sensibility in the early modern attempt to think of the human being as a special kind of sensitive machine and affectively responsive animal. Humans, as they are understood in this context, relate to themselves by sensing themselves and perpetually refining their intellectual and moral capacities in response to the way the world affects them. Responding to the world here refers to the manner in which both natural _and_ man-made influences impact on our ability to conceptualise the animate and inanimate world, and our place within that world. This book was originally published as a special issue of the _Intellectual History Review. _. (shrink)

In his later moral writings Kant claims that we have a duty to cultivate certain aspects of our sensuous nature. This claim is surprising for three reasons. First, given Kant’s ‘incorporation thesis’ − which states that the only sensible states capable of determining our actions are those that we willingly introduce and integrate into our maxims − it would seem that the content of our inclinations is morally irrelevant. Second, the exclusivity between the passivity that is characteristic of (...) class='Hi'>sensibility and the spontaneous quality of our free will that operates throughout Kant’s philosophy seems to preclude that any such cultivation is possible. Third, Kant’s specific arguments concerning why we are obliged to cultivate our sensible nature are unclear. The goal of this paper is to address each of these three concerns and thus fully explain Kant’s theory of the moral necessity of cultivation. (shrink)

Drawing on philosophical thought from the eighteenth century as well as conceptual frameworks developed in the twenty-first century, the essays in Beyond Sense and Sensibility examine moral formation as represented in or implicitly produced by literary works of late eighteenth-century British authors.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Practical Wisdom and Moral Imagination in Sense and SensibilityKaren StohrThere is no single virtue more important to Aristotle's ethical theory than the intellectual virtue of phronesis, or practical wisdom. Yet for all its importance, it is not easy to make sense of this virtue, either in Aristotle's own writings or in virtue ethics more generally. Insofar as Aristotle defines it, he does so opaquely, saying it is "a (...) state grasping the truth, involving reason, concerned with action about things that are good or bad for a human being." 1Practical wisdom is a form of knowledge aimed fundamentally at acting well. It requires both a general understanding of what is worthwhile in human life and the ability to act in ways that reflect that understanding. 2 My goal in this paper is to explore the latter aspect of practical wisdom in its application to ordinary social behavior. The circumstances that will interest me here are often thought to be the domain of manners or decorum, rather than morals proper. Although no one who takes Hume seriously can deny the moral significance of manners, the relationship between one's inner state of character and how that character is expressed in seemingly mundane behavior has received insufficient attention from moral philosophers. 3 In such a task, there can be few better places to begin than with Jane Austen, whose novels reveal the intricacies of ordinary moral behavior with extraordinary acumen.I shall use Austen's Sense and Sensibility to examine the skill associated with knowing how to behave rightly in the sense we associate with propriety or decorum. This skill is essential to pleasant social life, and hence, on the Aristotelian view, to human flourishing. Yet it is often lacking, even among those who have sound moral principles and good hearts. Well-meaning people frequently say or do what is inappropriate. [End Page 378] Consider, for instance, how common it is for kindly disposed people to say to bereaved friends things like, "it's all for the best" or "be thankful for your other healthy children" or "you're young, you'll marry again." The intricacies of offering sympathy are hard to get right, and otherwise good people can unwittingly leave behind disasters in their wakes.The skill of acting well in complex social situations has interesting links to the capacity for moral imagination. Engaging in imaginative identification with others is essential to empathy. 4 Without suggesting that empathy is at the root of all fluid social interactions, I shall argue that certain characteristic failures to act well in that sphere are imaginative failures. In other words, insofar as the exercise of practical wisdom is present in the realm of manners, it requires moral imagination.Failures of moral imagination, however, can take different forms and have different social effects. I shall use two of Austen's characters in Sense and Sensibility—Marianne Dashwood and Mrs. Jennings—to illustrate different ways in which inadequate imaginative capacity can impede the exercise of practical wisdom. The contrast I shall draw is with Elinor Dashwood, to whom I ascribe practical wisdom in full. 5 This contrast is especially interesting because it is not always very sharp: all three characters have fundamentally good moral principles and warm hearts. Yet unlike Elinor, Mrs. Jennings and Marianne routinely fail to act well, and in characteristic ways. Despite the differences in their characters, they have in common an inability to use moral imagination appropriately. The moral errors of Marianne and Mrs. Jennings occur in relatively insignificant circumstances, but the errors themselves point to something deeper about how the virtue of practical wisdom functions in ordinary moral practice.In exploring the link between moral imagination and moral practice, it will help to remember Aristotle's emphasis on the reciprocity between practical wisdom and the moral virtues. Aristotle held that that practical wisdom is necessary for the exercise of the moral virtues and that conversely, the moral virtues are necessary for the exercise of practical wisdom. 6 The justification for the first of these two claims is clearest in the context of Aristotle's doctrine of the mean. Since what counts as a virtuous action depends on features... (shrink)

To advance a successful reading of Kant's theory of motivation, his interpreter must have a carefully developed position on the relation between our rational and sensible capacities of mind. Unfortunately, many of Kant's commentators hold an untenably dualistic conception, understanding reason and sensibility to be necessarily conflicting aspects of human nature that saddle Kant with a rigoristic and fundamentally divided moral psychology. Against these interpreters, I argue for a reading that maintains a unified conception, claiming that we must (...) think of reason and sensibility as interdependent capacities, which stand to one another as form to matter. Our sensible nature thus does not stand opposed to reason; its fundamental character is determined by reason's activity. I take Kant's account of moral motivation and the feeling of respect to represent the lynchpin of this unified account. Against interpreters who would emphasize either the intellectual or affective nature of respect, I claim that it should be understood as the formal element of moral sensibility, the result of practical reason determining the capacity to feel and fundamentally transforming its character. To make this argument, I draw on Kant's account of sensibility in the Critique of Pure Reason, claiming that space, time, and respect for the moral law are analogous formal elements of sensibility. (shrink)

Drawing on philosophical thought from the eighteenth century as well as conceptual frameworks developed in the twenty-first century, the essays in Beyond Sense and Sensibility examine moral formation as represented in or implicitly produced by literary works of late eighteenth-century British authors.

Original value -- Value incrementalism -- A normative proposal -- Valuing development -- The many faces of value -- Direct and indirect moral considerability -- Affirming moral theories -- Ethical vegetarianism? -- The possibility of an environmental ethic -- Racism and moral perfectionism -- The bankruptcy of moral relativism.

This chapter explores the debate between contemporary projectivists or expressivists, and the advocates of sensibility theory. Both positions are best viewed as forms of sentimentalism — the theory that evaluative concepts must be explicated by appeal to the sentiments. It argues that the sophisticated interpretation of such notions as “true” and “objective” that are offered by defenders of these competing views ultimately undermines the significance of their meta-ethical disputes over “cognitivism” and “realism” about value. Their fundamental disagreement lies in (...) moral psychology; it concerns how best to understand the emotions to which sentimentalist theories must appeal. (shrink)

Sensibility, in any of its myriad realms – moral, physical, aesthetic, medical and so on – seems to be a paramount case of a higher-level, intentional property, not a basic property. Diderot famously made the bold and attributive move of postulating that matter itself senses, or that sensibility (perhaps better translated ‘sensitivity’ here) is a general or universal property of matter, even if he at times took a step back from this claim and called it a “supposition.” (...) Crucially, sensibility is here playing the role of a ‘booster’: it enables materialism to provide a full and rich account of the phenomena of conscious, sentient life, contrary to what its opponents hold: for if matter can sense, and sensibility is not a merely mechanical process, then the loftiest cognitive plateaus are accessible to materialist analysis, or at least belong to one and the same world as the rest of matter. This was noted by the astute anti-materialist critic, the Abbé Lelarge de Lignac, who, in his 1751 Lettres à un Amériquain, criticized Buffon for “granting to the body [la machine, a common term for the body at the time] a quality which is essential to minds, namely sensibility.” This view, here attributed to Buffon and definitely held by Diderot, was comparatively rare. If we look for the sources of this concept, the most notable ones are physiological and medical treatises by prominent figures such as Robert Whytt, Albrecht von Haller and the Montpellier vitalist Théophile de Bordeu. We then have, or so I shall try to sketch out, an intellectual landscape in which new – or newly articulated – properties such as irritability and sensibility are presented either as an experimental property of muscle fibers, that can be understood mechanistically (Hallerian irritability, as studied recently by Hubert Steinke and Dominique Boury) or a property of matter itself (whether specifically living matter as in Bordeu and his fellow montpelliérains Ménuret and Fouquet, or matter in general, as in Diderot). I am by no means convinced that it is one and the same ‘sensibility’ that is at issue in debates between these figures (as when Bordeu attacks Haller’s distinction between irritability and sensibility and claims that ‘his own’ property of sensibility is both more correct and more fundamental in organic beings), but I am interested in mapping out a topography of the problem of sensibility as property of matter or as vital force in mid-eighteenth-century debates – not an exhaustive cartography of all possible positions or theories, but an attempt to understand the ‘triangulation’ of three views: a vitalist view in which sensibility is fundamental, matching up with a conception of the organism as the sum of parts conceived as little lives (Bordeu et al.); a mechanist, or ‘enhanced mechanist’ view in which one can work upwards, step by step from the basic property of irritability to the higher-level property of sensibility (Haller); and, more eclectic, a materialist view which seeks to combine the mechanistic, componential rigour and explanatory power of the Hallerian approach, with the monistic and metaphysically explosive potential of the vitalist approach (Diderot). It is my hope that examining Diderot in the context of this triangulated topography of sensibility as property sheds light on his famous proclamation regarding sensibility as a universal property of matter. (shrink)

Although we usually identify our abilities to reason, to adapt to situations, and to solve problems with the mind, recent research has shown that we should not, in fact, detach these abilities from the body. This work provides an integrative framework for understanding how these abilities are affected by visceral reactions. Schulkin presents provocative neuroscientific research demonstrating that thought is not on one side and bodily sensibility on the other; from a biological point of view, they are integrated. Schulkin (...) further argues that this integration has important implications for judgements about art and music, moral sensibilities, attraction and revulsion, and our perpetual inclination to explain ourselves and our surroundings. (shrink)

For Habermas, a moral point of view is based in the procedural requirements of our linguistic competence. For Levinas, it is the way in which we find ourselves related in speech to the face of the other that we find ourselves obliged to the other. But these differing conceptions of the moral significance of language need not be seen as opposed to each other. Rather, they can be conceptualized as complimentary accounts of the ways in which a (...) class='Hi'>moral point of view onto life is inextricably bound up for us with our capacities as linguistic creatures. While Habermas enables us to see the importance of language as a rule-governed social practice for the constitution of a moral point of view, Levinas draws our attention to the way in which the moral significance of language so conceived lies in a form of sensibility, a sensible “exposure” or “vulnerability” to the other person, older than language itself. Appropriately coordinated, these two perspectives give us a more adequate understanding than either can on its own of the central place of language in our lives as moral agents. (shrink)

El artículo realiza una lectura de Rey Lear desde el punto de visa del nomadismo filosófico, introduciendo elementos que permiten evaluar la relación entre los aspectos políticos y poéticos de la obra. Para ello, se toma como eje de análisis a los personajes principales del drama, en cuya relación dialéctica, se evidencia una ascética cristiana que, basada en el concepto de razón sensible, pone en juego las categorías propias de la moral. A partir de este análisis, el artículo indaga (...) en la relación dialéctica que se establece entre categorías tales como lo poético-lo político, el bien-el mal, moral paternal-moral política, y muestra cómo Shakespeare se sirve de ella para dar cuenta de la naturaleza del ser humano en toda su amplitud. (shrink)