Wren’s basic thesis is that moral obligation is logically involved in the very concept of human agency. Basic to the notion of agency or action is intention, and the book’s basic argument rests upon this latter notion. In addition to explicit intentions, human agency is also characterized by implicit or tacit intentions. In simplest terms, our sense of moral obligation is a tacit intention which characterizes all agency. At one level, tacit intention is a sheerly formal notion: "... that tacit (...) willingness to choose which is present in every explicit choice...". Because action as such is essentially social, however, we tacitly intend to participate as a member of a group of agents which entails a commitment to the promotion of harmony. This intention to harmony gives rise to the basic moral imperative: "Act in the way that maintains and promotes the most effective harmony among agents". (shrink)

This book is an attempt to give a completely extensional account of belief without recourse to entities such as propositions and the like. This is done by developing a semantical metalanguage and instead of alluding to such intensional elements as meanings, the talk is rather of individuals, virtual classes, and relations. A Quinean kind of paraphrastic program is used, making explicit time references and belief conditions, as well as the above objects of belief. They are all keyed to the user (...) of a specific language through Martin's use of testing and acceptance as primitive notions, giving the entire project a behavioristic flavor. These particular primitives have been chosen in view of the supposition that they have clear experimental meanings and that they are crucial to the logical analysis of experimental method. The upshot of Martin's approach is an analysis of belief in terms of their relational characteristics. Hence, on his view, we cannot properly speak of knowledge and belief, but only of knowing and believing. In the course of developing his logic of belief, Martin manages to touch upon a wide range of topics. Quine's notion of ontic commitment is expanded to include "ontic involvement"--a second order commitment involving the objects of Martin's metalanguage. Arguments are offered against the contemporary view that there are a multiplicity of logics: "One God, one country, one logic" being the professed underlying maxim of his book. There is a longish discussion marking out a distinction between facts and events, modeled after his account of belief. A brief chapter reassesses and defends Frege's notion of Sinn in terms of Martin's logical machinery. Interspersed throughout are commentaries on a number of figures, such as Russell and Carnap, Hintikka and von Wright. Included also is a chapter on human action based on a distinction between action types and action events. There, Davidson's analysis of action sentences is criticized in terms of the 'Fido'-Fido principle. The extensive use of symbols seems cumbersome, but is perhaps necessary given the nature of Martin's enterprise.--K. T. (shrink)

Dismissing epistemologies which object to the notion of an essential property, Plantinga argues that God indeed has a nature, but one evidently distinct from himself and not subject to his control. Plantinga contends that God’s nature cannot be identical with God himself since this would imply that God is a property and that any one of his properties is the same as all the rest. In rejecting the divine simplicity doctrine taught by certain traditional theists, e.g., Augustine and Aquinas, Plantinga (...) examines the latter’s familiar defense of it and finds it unacceptable. He disputes the arguments for it based upon the denial of the composition in God of potency and act, substance and accidents, contending that such notions as potency and accident are applicable to God. Moreover, the objection that analogous thinking may somehow rescue this doctrine meets with the observation that such thinking harbors an agnosticism that works as well against the doctrine as it does in its favor. (shrink)

In this slender volume in The Humanist Library series, Nielsen not only argues for the independence of morality from religion, but as well outlines a normative theory as an alternative to religious [[sic]] morality. The basis of religious morality is the belief that God is all good, and thus we should do what he commands. In response to this, Nielsen elaborates Plato’s argument that morality cannot be based upon religious belief. However one understands the claim "God is good," i.e., whether (...) it is analytic or not, understanding "good" is logically presupposed for one to be able to grasp the meaning or truth of the claim. It is more correct to say that religion is based upon morality since the basis of religious belief is that there is a being worthy of worship, and this conclusion must rest upon autonomous moral insight. The remainder of the book is concerned with two themes involving the competing claims of secular and religious morality. The first is that only the religious perspective provides an adequate account of man’s origin and destiny, and thus the perspective from which one can find happiness and fulfillment. In response, Nielsen invokes "all the old as well as some new objections to religion" as the perspective which provides a true account of the nature of things. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that only religious persons find happiness and meaning in life. The second claim of religious morality is that it alone can provide a satisfactory basis for moral theory. Secular moral theory can provide only conventional relativism. In reply, Nielsen outlines and defends a normative theory of the consequentialist variety. The last part of the book is a general defense of consequential ethical theories against Anscombe-like objections which are associated with "religious absolutism" for reasons not specified.—T.K.H. (shrink)

This scholarly book addresses itself to what Levi believes to be a dual crisis in writing and teaching about the history of philosophy. One element in the crisis is neglect. Recent philosophical work deriving from Wittgenstein, Austin, et al., has given rise to "philosophic indifference and unconcern". Contemporary philosophizing has given to the discipline "an a-historicity hardly matched throughout its long development". The other ingredient in the crisis is the sort of studies which contemporary philosophers undertake when they study historical (...) figures, for example Cartesian studies of the sort in Doney’s anthology or Kenney’s book. In such studies, Descartes "ceases to be a man, living in a specific period, and becomes a text from whose complicated internal structure arguments may be isolated and lifted for philosophic purposes having little to do with those of Descartes himself". (shrink)

This book is a broad in conception and import as the title suggests. It argues that professional philosophy, even in its most technical aspects, bears directly and indirectly on fundamental social and personal concerns. Philosophy in the modern world is both symptom and cause of the deterioration of sustaining values and attitudes, personal and social, which mark the alienation of our age. This alienation or malaise finds expression in art, literature, social criticism as well as in the demise of basic (...) institutions. This spiritual blight has its basis, according to Adams, in a set of false assumptions about the powers of the mind and the possibility of knowledge regarding the central humanistic categories of value and meaning. These faulty assumptions are part of the fabric of naturalism understood as the view that "it is only through sensory experience under scientific refinement and thought grounded therein that we acquire knowledge of the world and that reality is structured as it is conceptually delineated in philosophically clarified scientific thought". Over against naturalism, Adams argues for realistic, objective accounts of value and meaning. (shrink)

This volume contains the Cassirer Lectures delivered by Professor Beck at Yale University in 1974. The strategy of the four lectures is to examine the categorical structures of two competing images of man, the humanistic and the scientific. Alternative descriptions of simple actions are given by Spectator I, a commonsense humanist, and Spectator II who is "a fool, a physiologist". Another guiding motif is provided by the differences between understanding ourselves as active agents and the perspective we have of ourselves (...) and others in the role of spectators. We also hear, from time to time, from an angelic point of view, i.e., one based on actual knowledge of what is in fact going on "backstage and onstage" as opposed to beliefs which reflect our limited perspectives. (shrink)