Featuring essays from leading philosophical scholars, __12 Modern Philosophers__ explores the works, origins, and influences of twelve of the most important late 20th Century philosophers working in the analytic tradition. Draws on essays from well-known scholars, including Thomas Baldwin, Catherine Wilson, Adrian Moore and Lori Gruen Locates the authors and their oeuvre within the context of the discipline as a whole Considers how contemporary philosophy both draws from, and contributes to, the broader intellectual and cultural milieu.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Past The Present Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Mind Ethics Philosophy and Culture.

When people want to identify the causes of an event, assign credit or blame, or learn from their mistakes, they often reflect on how things could have gone differently. In this kind of reasoning, one considers a counterfactual world in which some events are different from their real-world counterparts and considers what else would have changed. Researchers have recently proposed several probabilistic models that aim to capture how people do (or should) reason about counterfactuals. We present a new model and (...) show that it accounts better for human inferences than several alternative models. Our model builds on the work of Pearl (2000), and extends his approach in a way that accommodates backtracking inferences and that acknowledges the difference between counterfactual interventions and counterfactual observations. We present six new experiments and analyze data from four experiments carried out by Rips (2010), and the results suggest that the new model provides an accurate account of both mean human judgments and the judgments of individuals. (shrink)

In his late work Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Immanuel Kant struggles to answer a straightforward, yet surprisingly difficult, question: how is radical conversion--a complete reorientation of a person's most deeply held values--possible? In this book, Ryan S. Kemp and Christopher Iacovetti examine how this question gets taken up by Kant's philosophical heirs: Schelling, Fichte, Hegel and Kierkegaard. More than simply developing a novel account of each thinker's position, Kemp and Iacovetti trace how each philosopher formulates his (...) theory in response to tensions in preceding views, culminating in Kierkegaard's claim that radical conversion lies outside a person's control. Kemp and Iacovetti close by examining some of the moral-psychological implications of Kierkegaard's account, particularly the question of how someone might responsibly relate to values that have, by their own admission, been acquired in contingent and accidental fashion. (shrink)

We examine the epistemological foundations of a leading technique in the search for evidence of life on exosolar planets. Specifically, we consider the “transit method” for spectroscopic analysis of exoplanet atmospheres, and the practice of treating anomalous chemical compositions of the atmospheres of exosolar planets as indicators of the potential presence of life. We propose a methodology for ranking the anomalousness of atmospheres that uses the mathematical apparatus of support vector machines, and which aims to be agnostic with respect to (...) the particular chemical biosignatures of life. We argue that our approach is justified by an appeal to the “hinge” model of epistemic justification first proposed by as reported by Wittgenstein. We then compare our approach to previous work due to Walker et al. :779–824, 2018) and Cleland :722–729, 2019a; Does ‘life’ have a definition?, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2019b). (shrink)

ABSTRACT Friedrich von Hügel is justifiably regarded as one of the leading philosophers of religion of the twentieth century. He was born of a German- Austrian father and a Scottish mother and spent most of his life in England. He was fluent in four languages and corresponded with scholars from a half dozen European countries. Educated at home he became a famous philosopher and was granted honorary degrees from St. Andrews and Oxford and was chosen to give the Gifford Lectures. (...) While he is remembered for an extraordinary book on mysticism, he wrote on many other aspects of philosophy. He was close to a number of scholars who at first glance seemed rather different from him – especially the German Protestant Ernst Troeltsch and the Scottish philosopher Norman Kemp Smith. It is through his connections with them and by his works that one can gain an understanding of von Hügel's philosophy. His philosophy was often focused on religion but it was expansive enough to incorporate epistemology, ethics, and even metaphysics. (shrink)

How is conversion possible? How could a person come to inhabit a radically new evaluative outlook? Reason and Conversion has a story to tell about Kierkegaard’s thinking on this topic, as the culmi...

In an age where issues like climate change and the unintended consequences of technological innovation are high on the ethical and political agenda, questions about the nature and extent of our responsibilities to future generations have never been more important, yet simultaneously so difficult to answer. This book takes a unique approach to the problem by drawing on diverse traditions of thinking about care (including developmental psychology, phenomenology and feminist ethics) to explore the nature and meaning of our relationship with (...) the future. Demonstrating that many influential perspectives on intergenerational ethics, including positions advanced by John Rawls, Brian Barry, and Ulrich Beck are undermined by problems relating to uncertainty, it shows that an approach based on care ethics can confront the uncertain future successfully and give a viable account of the nature and scope of future-oriented responsibilities. (shrink)

"Faith Has Its Reasons" shows readers how struggles, heartache, and tears can transform from a nightmare into a ministry. This book contains the encouragement to take the first steps out of grief and climb the mountain out of the valley of the shadow of death. This book will also inspire those that may question heaven. A child's amazing visits to heaven gave him the courage to tell others about Jesus. His bravery and boldness after dying and losing his father will (...) open your eyes to how God can use an unthinkable tragedy for His glory. If you have endured a catastrophic loss and questioned God, this book will show you how to persevere and find happiness again. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

Suppose we believe that God created the world. Then surely we want it to be the case that he intended, in some sense at least, to create THIS world. Moreover, most theists want to hold that God didn't just guess or hope that the world would take one course or another; rather, he KNEW precisely what was going to take place in the world he planned to create. In particular, of each person P, God knew that P was to exist. (...) Call this the "standard" conception. Most theists find the standard conception appealing. Unfortunately, the view seems to conflict with the equally appealing idea — call it "temporal actualism" — that there are no "future" individuals beyond those that already exist in the present moment. For, on this view, for any historical person P, prior to creation, there was no such person as P and hence nothing about P for God to know. Hence, in particular, God couldn't have known that P was to exist. This is of course not a new problem. But past solutions to it are highly problematic. In this paper, after canvassing previous approaches, I will propose a solution that seems to preserve both temporal actualism and a suitably robust form of the standard conception while avoiding the pitfalls of the past. (shrink)

Aristotle attaches particular significance to the homonymy of many central concepts in philosophy and science: that is, to the diversity of ways of being common to a single general concept. His preoccupation with homonymy influences his approach to almost every subject that he considers, and it clearly structures the philosophical methodology that he employs both when criticizing others and when advancing his own positive theories. Where there is homonymy there is multiplicity: Aristotle aims to find the order within this multiplicity, (...) and believes that doing so is crucial to scientific inquiry and philosophical progress.Christopher Shields investigates and evaluates Aristotle's approach to questions about homonymy, characterizing the metaphysical and semantic commitments necessary to establish the homonymy of a given concept. Then, in a series of case-studies, Shields examines in detail some of Aristotle's principal applications of homonymy--to the body, sameness and oneness, life, goodness, and being. Shields's aim is not only to give a fuller understanding of Aristotle's methodology and to illuminate his specific doctrines in a variety of areas, but to show that this methodology remains fruitful today. (shrink)

Christopher Hookway presents a series of studies of themes from the work of the great American philosopher and pragmatist, Charles S. Peirce (1839-1913). These themes center on the question of how we are to investigate the world rationally. Hookway shows how Peirce's ideas about this continue to play an important role in contemporary philosophy.

The De hebdomadibus (DH) of Boethius presents a problem with the idea that ordinary finite substances are good and then proposes a solution to the problem. Careful reconstruction of Boethius’ arguments reveals that his solution relies on an account of finite goodness that he does not make explicit. Moreover, accounts of finite goodness that commentators have supplied to the DH should be rejected. Instead, the account of finite goodness given in book III of the Consolatio successfully resolves the problem raised (...) in the DH. (shrink)

Moral error theories are often rejected by appeal to ‘companions in guilt’ arguments. The most popular form of companions in guilt argument takes epistemic reasons for belief as a ‘companion’ and proceeds by analogy. I show that this strategy fails. I claim that the companions in guilt theorist must understand epistemic reasons as evidential support relations if her argument is to be dialectically effective. I then present a dilemma. Either epistemic reasons are evidential support relations or they are not. If (...) they are not, then the companions in guilt argument fails. If they are, then a reduction of epistemic reasons to evidential support relations becomes available and, consequently, epistemic reasons cease to be a viable ‘companion’ for moral reasons. I recommend this structure of argument over existing strategies within the literature and defend my claims against recent objections from companions in guilt theorists. (shrink)

As is true for most small divisions, membership in PIRI overlaps with membership in all other APA divisions. Thus, our members include hardcore experimentalists teaching in Christian colleges, social psychologists focusing on research in the psychology of religion, pastoral counselors, transpersonal psychologists, religiously-committed psychologists attempting to integrate psychology and theology, and numerous others. Our roots lie in the American Catholic Psychological Association; our branches point to religion in all its forms. Our common commitment is to the assertion that religion is (...) a critical psychological variable. Examples are given of our theoretical and philosophical interests, including Philosophy of Science; Anthropologies/Theories of Human Nature; Spiritual or Religious Development; Psychology, Politics, and Ethics; Religion as a Significant Psychological Variable; and Critique of Psychological Theories. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Author argues that the implicit bias against theism is part of a larger pattern of ignoring the realm of illusion and related products of culture. In response, each psychologist must develop an integrated theory that incorporates four dimensions of human experience: intrapersonal, interpersonal, impersonal, and transpersonal. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

The paper provides a systematic overview of recent debates in epistemology and philosophy of science on the nature of understanding. We explain why philosophers have turned their attention to understanding and discuss conditions for “explanatory” understanding of why something is the case and for “objectual” understanding of a whole subject matter. The most debated conditions for these types of understanding roughly resemble the three traditional conditions for knowledge: truth, justification and belief. We discuss prominent views about how to construe these (...) conditions for understanding, whether understanding indeed requires conditions of all three types and whether additional conditions are needed. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker's important study of epistemic injustice is focussed primarily on testimonial injustice and hermeneutic injustice. It explores how agents' capacities to make assertions and provide testimony can be impaired in ways that can involve forms of distinctively epistemic injustice. My paper identifies a wider range of forms of epistemic injustice that do not all involve the ability to make assertions or offer testimony. The paper considers some examples of some other ways in which injustice can prevent someone from participating (...) in inquiry. (shrink)

Plato's Utopia Recast is an illuminating reappraisal of Plato's later works, which reveals radical changes in his ethical and political theory. Christopher Bobonich examines later dialogues, with a special emphasis upon the Laws, and argues that in these late works, Plato both rethinks and revises the basic ethical and poltical positions that he held in his better-known earlier works, such as the Republic. This book will change our understanding of Plato. His controversial moral and political theory, so influential in (...) Western thought, will henceforth be seen in a new light. (shrink)