A short reconstruction of the story of eighteenth-century ethical rationalism followed bu the nineteenth century controversy between utilitarianism and the 'intuitive system' reaching Sidgwick, Moore and David Ross.

Volume I. Dall'idealismo al realismo filosofico.

Riassunto: Gli sviluppi recenti nell’ambito della ricerca sui processi decisionali relativi ai cosiddetti effetti di incorniciamento hanno ricevuto particolare attenzione da parte di quell’ambito della filosofia morale che si occupa di spiegare i dilemmi morali classici legati al famoso problema del carrello. Alcuni filosofi sostengono che illusioni cognitive come l’ effetto di incorniciamento mettano seriamente in discussione alcuni punti di vista classici della filosofia morale come, per esempio, l’ etica normativa e l’ intuizionismo morale. L’obiettivo di questo articolo è (...) cercare di mostrare se, alla luce della ricerca empirica sugli effetti di incorniciamento, possiamo mantenere un punto di vista intuizionista o meno e, più in generale, che cosa implichino questo genere di dati per la filosofia morale. Parole chiave: Filosofia morale; Intuizionismo; Effetti di inconiciamento; Dilemmi morali; Teoria del prospetto Should we Abandon Moral Intuitionism? Framing Effects and Moral Dilemmas: Recent developments in experimental research on decision-making have received attention from moral philosophers trying to explain classical moral dilemmas. The class of cognitive illusions known as framing effects have received particular attention because they appear to play a role in explaining the famous trolley-problem. Some philosophers maintain that cognitive illusions such as framing effects seriously undermine classical point of views in moral philosophy such as normative ethics and moral intuitionism. This essay investigates whether, in light of empirical research on framing effects, we can still maintain an intuitionist point of view, and what the available data imply in general for moral philosophy. Keywords: Moral Philosophy; Intuitionism; Framing Effects; Moral Dilemmas; Prospect Theory. (shrink)

The article concerns the moderate intuitionism of Robert Audi beteween epistemology and ethics.

According to the intuitionist picture of moral normativity, prima facie duties are features of the overall nature of an act, which together make them overall right or wrong. W.D. Ross says that prima facie duties are «not a duty», but something which has a special relation to duty. These fea-tures are «apprehended» by way of an intellectual act , which implies that they are the object of a theoretical cognitive act. This image creates serious problems for both the theory of (...) moral normativity and the theory of motivation. The problem is how to explain the practical nature of duties and their connection with the will: the intuitionist picture sketches a rather passive role for the will, both in determining the obligatoriness of an action and the possible motivation for it. This rather intellectualistic picture fails to explain the authority and motivational power of moral reasons. Furthermore, the outcome of this position is to lead back to a form of naturalism and to a problematic externalist explanation of moral motivation. In the end it is suggested that a more thoroughly Kantian theory of normativity shows a more promising picture for this problem. (shrink)

Riassunto: Questo lavoro mira a un confronto tra la psicologia morale di Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche e l’approccio socio-intuizionista al giudizio morale proposto da Jonathan Haidt. Questo confronto metterà in luce somiglianze notevoli tra i due modelli. Il lavoro intende inoltre chiarire quali implicazioni Nietzsche trae dalla sua descrizione della psicologia umana e quali cambiamenti di prospettiva egli esorta a operare rispetto alla comprensione di noi stessi come “esseri morali”. Parole chiave: Giudizio morale; Sviluppo morale; Intuizionismo; Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche; Jonathan (...) Haidt The Dawn of Moral Psychology. Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology and some Recent Empirical Investigations: Comparing Nietzsche’s moral psychology and the social intuitionist approach to moral judgment proposed by Jonathan Haidt, this paper reveals remarkable similarities between the two models. It also clarifies what implications Nietzsche drew from his description of human psychology and the perspective changes these entail for understanding ourselves as “moral beings”. Keywords: Moral Judgment; Moral Development; Intuitionism; Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche; Jonathan Haidt. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 279 shirted gangsters of the totalitarian regimes. Only gradually did Sorel come to seek his paragons of virtue among the proletariat, partly because of his disillusionment with Jean Jaur~s over the Dreyfus case. Sorel had been one of the first to champion Dreyfus, but felt that demagogues had transformed the latter's cause into a new dogmatism and a new establishment. Sorel was genuinely concerned about some of (...) the deepest problems facing modern industrial man. He could not believe that they could be solved, either by "demagogic plutocracy" or by orthodox Marxism. Hence he sought to synthesize Vico, Proudhon, Marx, and Bergson in a new movement that should be both liberal and revolutionary and heroically virtuous. The strongest influence upon his thinking, says Goriely, came from Vico, from whom he borrowed "the fundamental idea of his whole work: "Man does not know what he does' " (105). History can therefore be rational only after it has happened: "The future is the field in which we use our imaginations, not our understandings" (109). That Sorel anticipated many twentieth-century developments in philosophy and politics, there can be no doubt. The author says that he was "the first philosopher in France who sought not only to locate man in history and society, but also to locate history and society in man, to give them a significance which may be called existential" (148). Before William James's pragmatism reached European shores, Sorel had made such statements as "Science is a means of verifying the possibility of acting in a certain manner." 1Even some of his pessimistic fears anticipated such developments as Burnham's "managerial revolution," at the same time that he welcomed the growth of industrial techniques in other hands (155). Professor Goriely's careful tracing of Sorel's profusion of suggestions for the ethical redemption of mankind in a machine age reveals the unreconciled contradictions in his pluralism. In the R~[lexions he could resolve the conflicts of myth versus utopia, force versus violence, liberalism versus absolutism, says Goriely, only "'by a conceptual jugglery.., which sets the mind's teeth on edge rather than stimulates it" (200). Caught between the poles of an attachment to historical tradition and to liberty, Sorel celebrated the constant tension between the two. Man lives only to create; he "has no other end than the creative ~lan itself. Born of liberty, history can never block its course.., it is always a point of departure toward the future.... Human institutions, the products of an infinity of obscure causes, never realize any universal moral principle. They live in the relative, which man ought to accept with moderation and a sense of the limits of the possible, without ever losing the sense of the unlimited" (222). HAROLD A. LARRABEE Union College 1Georges Sorel, "Storia e scienza sociale," Rivista itallana di sociologia, March-June, 1902,p. 224. Storia Della Filosofia: La Filosofia del Novecento. By E. Paolo Lamanna. Intuizionismo, filosofia dell'azione e modernismo--Prammatismo--La problematica della scienza--La problematica della storla. (Firenze: Felice Le Monnier, 1963. 671 pp. 3800 L.) This first of three volumes describing the philosophies of the twentieth century, and the fifth volume in Lamanna's History of Philosophy, is truly a monumental and encyclopedic work. In this volume alone there are concise, clear, scholarly expositions of the important ideas of more than fifty philosophers, including biographical information and bibliographical references. The style is exceptionally intelligible and the organization of even complicated materials is well defined with good headings and with definitions that are intelligible 280 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY even to a layman. The work is not only very informative but amazingly objective and dispassionate. And despite its disinterestedness it is highly interesting, for it succeeds in presenting each philosopher's ideas as one imagines he would like to present them himself, sympathetically and persuasively. One leaves the book after reading about the achievements of our own little century marvelling at the variety and range of recent achievements. For over and above our follies and horrors, these thinkers emerge as men trying hard and ably to be sane and tell the truth. Lamanna himself emerges as a mind with an extraordinary critical ability to... (shrink)

La logica matematica di Russell, di K. Gödel.--Che cos'è il problema del continuo di Cantor?, di K. Gödel.--Osservazioni al Convegno su i problemi di matematica per il secondo centenario di Princeton, di K. Gödel.--Matematica e logica, di A. Church.--Osservazioni sulla definizione e sulla natura della matematica, di H.B. Curry.--Sull'infinito, di D. Hilbert.--Il programma di Hilbert, di G. Kreisel.--Fondamenti storici, principi e metodi dell'intuizionismo, di L.E.J. Brouwer.--Disputa, di A. Heyting.--L'intuizionismo in matematica, di A. Heyting.--Verso un nominalismo costruttivo, di N. (...) Goodman e W.V. Quine.--Un mondo di individui, di N. Goodman. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to synthesize the two most influential contemporary ethical approaches that appeal to moral intuitions, viz., Rawlsian reflective equilibrium and Audi’s moderate intuitionism. This paper has two parts. First, building upon the work of Audi and Gaut, I provide a more detailed and nuanced account of how these two approaches are compatible. Second, I show how this novel synthesis can both (1) fully address the main objections to reflective equilibrium, viz., that it provides neither necessary nor (...) sufficient conditions for the justification of our moral beliefs and (2) help ethical intuitionism to deal with the fundamental problem of peer disagreement over our basic moral intuitions. In doing so, I sketch out a novel and attractive diachronic way of thinking about peer disagreement more generally. (shrink)