I first demonstrate that certain process philosophers and Aquinas hold extremely similar notions of evil. Whitehead and Hartshorne parallel Aquinas in understanding evil as relational, as a conflict of goods, and as a necessary element in a larger good. On this last point, process philosophers contend that traditional theists must either reject the claim of God’s omnipotence or admit that an omnipotent God would be responsible for evil, including moral evil. I respond that Aquinas’s distinction between physical and moral evil (...) moves beyond the process position and avoids the conclusion that God’s omnipotence must be abandoned. I argue that the process position does not take proper account of Aquinas’s claim that the cause of evil is a negation and the initial criticism relies on a distinction between moral and physical evil that process philosophy cannot make. (shrink)

I will defend a principle at work in Thomas Aquinas’s argument that the human intellect must be immaterial in order to know material things in SummaTheologica, Ia, q.75, a.2. Thomas relies on the position that whatever knows certain things would be impeded in this knowledge if it contained in itself thesesame things. Thus, if humans can, in principle, know all material things, then the intellect cannot be material. The position that a material intellect would be limited in knowledge of material (...) things is perhaps the most controversial part of the argument. I will articulate a version of this argument and argue that two objections to Thomas’s argument, offered by Norman Kretzmann and Robert Pasnau, fail, due in large part to a misunderstanding of proper objects of cognition. (shrink)

Primary substance for Aristotle is either the individual or form. These same two possibilities are the leading candidates for the source of unity in a substance.Thus, if we could determine what is responsible for the unity of a substance, we may well have located primary substance also. I consider the following possiblesources of the unity of form and matter in a substance:1) The unifier is a connector external to form and matter. (This connector may be itself a form, matter, or (...) a relation that is neither formal nor material.)2) There is no need for a unifier because form and matter are simply conceptual ways of understanding a single, already-unified, concrete being.3) The unifier is an inherent aspect of form or matter.I proceed by a process of elimination and conclude that substantial form is both what unifies a substance and the better candidate for primary substance. (shrink)

I will defend a principle at work in Thomas Aquinas’s argument that the human intellect must be immaterial in order to know material things in SummaTheologica, Ia, q.75, a.2. Thomas relies on the position that whatever knows certain things would be impeded in this knowledge if it contained in itself thesesame things. Thus, if humans can, in principle, know all material things, then the intellect cannot be material. The position that a material intellect would be limited in knowledge of material (...) things is perhaps the most controversial part of the argument. I will articulate a version of this argument and argue that two objections to Thomas’s argument, offered by Norman Kretzmann and Robert Pasnau, fail, due in large part to a misunderstanding of proper objects of cognition. (shrink)

Primary substance for Aristotle is either the individual or form. These same two possibilities are the leading candidates for the source of unity in a substance.Thus, if we could determine what is responsible for the unity of a substance, we may well have located primary substance also. I consider the following possiblesources of the unity of form and matter in a substance:1) The unifier is a connector external to form and matter. (This connector may be itself a form, matter, or (...) a relation that is neither formal nor material.)2) There is no need for a unifier because form and matter are simply conceptual ways of understanding a single, already-unified, concrete being.3) The unifier is an inherent aspect of form or matter.I proceed by a process of elimination and conclude that substantial form is both what unifies a substance and the better candidate for primary substance. (shrink)

Clarembald of Arras is recognized primarily as a capable but uncreative alumnus of the school of Chartres, and not without some reason, as George and Fortin note in the opening of their introduction. Clarembald was a student of Thierry of Chartres and Hugh of St. Victor in a rather thoroughgoing sense—his written work often relies heavily on his teachers and focuses exclusively on topics on which Thierry had already written. Nonetheless, George and Fortin suggest that a closer reading of Clarembald’s (...) texts will reveal him to be a more careful and important thinker than is presently appreciated. (shrink)

Although pragmatism and phenomenology have both contributed significantly to the genealogy of so-called “4E” – embodied, embedded, enactive and extended – cognition, there is benefit to be had from a systematic comparative study of these roots. As existing 4E cognition literature has tended to emphasise one or the other tradition, issues remain to be addressed concerning their commonalities – and possible incompatibilities. We begin by exploring pragmatism and phenomenology’s shared focus on contesting intellectualism, and its key assumption of mindedness as (...) representation. We then outline distinctive insights from both traditions regarding the nature and role of habits, in order to put forward a habit-based epistemology as an alternative to the Cartesian idea-based epistemology that has dominated modern philosophy. We pay particular attention to the work of classical pragmatist C.S. Peirce, arguing that his semiotics, which analyses sign-use as habit, shows how theorists of embodied cognition can break a certain false dichotomy between embodiment and logical or intellectual structure which has prevented them from fully theorising propositional knowledge. In this way, our work both augments and challenges the Dewey/Merleau-Ponty connection that has been much more extensively explored by the field. (shrink)

This paper reports on a survey of auditors in New Zealand which investigates the nature of the moral judgements they make on a series of problems with ethical dimensions. The framework adopted for this purpose is developed from earlier work which identifies a range of ethical principles which may be involved in business ethical decision‐making. Auditors responded to a questionnaire which posed, firstly, several questions about the context of their ethical decision‐making, and secondly, a series of vignettes elaborating problematical dilemmas (...) which required the selection of one of four possible responses. Data was analysed to determine whether or not it confirmed previous findings in suggesting a predominant ethical orientation for auditors. The results were correlated with demographic variables in order to determine whether or not age, gender, position in firm and size of employee firm were significantly correlated to ethical response. The survey results, on the whole, confirmed the ethical orientation suggested by previous findings, but there were some unexpected results in three out of the ten vignettes examined. Although some correlations were found between the demographic variables and subject responses, the evidence of this survey does not strongly suggest a consistent significant correlation. (shrink)

This paper reports on a survey of auditors in New Zealand which investigates the nature of the moral judgements they make on a series of problems with ethical dimensions. The framework adopted for this purpose is developed from earlier work which identifies a range of ethical principles which may be involved in business ethical decision‐making. Auditors responded to a questionnaire which posed, firstly, several questions about the context of their ethical decision‐making, and secondly, a series of vignettes elaborating problematical dilemmas (...) which required the selection of one of four possible responses. Data was analysed to determine whether or not it confirmed previous findings in suggesting a predominant ethical orientation for auditors. The results were correlated with demographic variables in order to determine whether or not age, gender, position in firm and size of employee firm were significantly correlated to ethical response. The survey results, on the whole, confirmed the ethical orientation suggested by previous findings, but there were some unexpected results in three out of the ten vignettes examined. Although some correlations were found between the demographic variables and subject responses, the evidence of this survey does not strongly suggest a consistent significant correlation. (shrink)

Robert Coles' sentiment characterizes well the moral tenor of medical education today. Indeed, medical educators are frequently “seized by spasms of genuine moral awareness,” as they try to cope with the massive social and economic problems that face medical schools and teaching hospitals. The perception among educators that we currently fail to adequately teach several core aspects of doctoring, including professional values and behavior, constitutes one such spasm. In this case, the proposed remedy has generated considerable enthusiasm, but whether the (...) “core competencies” curriculum will make a difference, or simply “accommodate to the prevailing rhythms of the world we inhabit,” remains to be seen. (shrink)

Mark Eli Kalderon's book boldly positions itself as a work in speculative metaphysics. Its point of departure is the familiar distinction between presentational and representational philosophies of perception. Kalderon notes that the latter has been more popular of late, as it is more amenable to "an account" explicating causal or counterfactual conditions on perception; but he wishes to rehabilitate the former, at least in part. One widely perceived disadvantage of presentationalism has been the way that understanding perception merely as registering (...) the presence of things might seem to leave us vulnerable to error about the nature of what is presented. Kalderon seeks to remedy this not by dealing at length with various disjunctivist positions concerning perception which may be friendly to his position, nor by spending much time criticising opposing views, but by explicating presentationalist perception through a series of tactile metaphors, thereby providing a radically new philosophical view. He claims that we do not just 'stand before' reality, we grasp it-the metaphor survives tellingly in ordinary language-and he thereby seeks to defend a form of realism which is robust, though he admits, "pre-modern". He draws on a remarkably rich variety of thinkers to defend this position, including pre-modern, modern, and various figures from both analytic and continental philosophy-however, although there is plenty of solid scholarship here, the book is aimed at metaphysics more than the history of ideas. (shrink)

An investigation of public support for coastal adaptation options and public finance options in Florida evaluated stakeholder judgments and how they changed through a participatory engagement process. The study found that public finance mechanisms that imposed fiscal burdens on those who directly benefit from hazard reduction were rated as more acceptable than others. Significantly, visualisations and data on local economic damage and return on investment of potential adaptation options further increased acceptability ratings. The question of whether a development fee for (...) adaptation or any other public purpose supported by private funds is a legal issue that depends on a test called the rational nexus. One concern of this article is to explore options for such fees to cover adaptation to climate change. This raises issues about the potential conflict with the community-wide and intergenerational nature of long-term adaptation. We also explore the relevance of environmental attitudes using the 'new environmental paradigm' (NEP) scale and political party affiliation. Results have implications for infrastructure improvements that require public approval for financing. (shrink)

Daniel Defoe’s fictional autobiographies often contain a puritanical conversion narrative, but Colonel Jack’s narrator is unique in his problematized relationship to Christian conversion. Alert to the negative implications of mercenary conversion, Defoe presents in Colonel Jack a hero who not only revels in his complex ploys to evade the law, but explicitly rejects conversion to Christianity at several points in the narrative. By reading Colonel Jack alongside narratives of European enslavement and incarceration, I suggest that in this (...) text Defoe deliberately reproduces the form of the popular Barbary captivity narrative. This subgenre of narrative portrays conversion as a force to be resisted, informs Jack’s reluctance to embrace Christianity, and ultimately suggests that living in a Christian nation may actually be a hindrance to conversion, making Catholic South America a milieu more conducive to the protagonist’s religious transformation than Protestant Virginia. (shrink)

Daniel Defoe’s fictional autobiographies often contain a puritanical conversion narrative, but Colonel Jack’s narrator is unique in his problematized relationship to Christian conversion. Alert to the negative implications of mercenary conversion, Defoe presents in Colonel Jack a hero who not only revels in his complex ploys to evade the law, but explicitly rejects conversion to Christianity at several points in the narrative. By reading Colonel Jack alongside narratives of European enslavement and incarceration, I suggest that in this (...) text Defoe deliberately reproduces the form of the popular Barbary captivity narrative. This subgenre of narrative portrays conversion as a force to be resisted, informs Jack’s reluctance to embrace Christianity, and ultimately suggests that living in a Christian nation may actually be a hindrance to conversion, making Catholic South America a milieu more conducive to the protagonist’s religious transformation than Protestant Virginia. (shrink)

Domestic violence and abuse (DVA) are at last coming to be recognised as serious global public health problems. Nevertheless, many women with personal histories of DVA decline to disclose them to healthcare practitioners. In the health sciences, recent empirical work has identified many factors that impede DVA disclosure, known as barriers to disclosure. Drawing on recent work in social epistemology on testimonial silencing, we might wonder why so many people withhold their testimony and whether there is some kind of epistemic (...) injustice afoot here. In this paper, I offer some philosophical reflections on DVA disclosure in clinical contexts and the associated barriers to disclosure. I argue that women with personal histories of DVA are vulnerable to a certain form of testimonial injustice in clinical contexts, namely, testimonial smothering, and that this may help to explain why they withhold that testimony. It is my contention that this can help explain the low rates of DVA disclosure by patients to healthcare practitioners. (shrink)

Introduction: Platonic dramatology -- The political and philosophical problems. Using pre-Socratic philosophy to support political reform: the Athenian stranger ; Plato's Parmenides: Parmenides' critique of Socrates and Plato's critique of Parmenides ; Becoming Socrates ; Socrates interrogates his contemporaries about the noble and good -- Paradigms of philosophy. Socrates' positive teaching ; Timaeus-Critias: completing or challenging Socratic political philosophy? ; Socratic practice -- The trial and death of Socrates. The limits of human intelligence ; The Eleatic challenge ; The trial (...) and death of Socrates -- Conclusion: Why Plato made Socrates his hero. (shrink)

This landmark study examines the role played by the rediscovery of the writings of the ancient atomists, Epicurus and Lucretius, in the articulation of the major philosophical systems of the seventeenth century, and, more broadly, their influence on the evolution of natural science and moral and political philosophy. The target of sustained and trenchant philosophical criticism by Cicero, and of opprobrium by the Christian Fathers of the early Church, for its unflinching commitment to the absence of divine supervision and the (...) finitude of life, the Epicurean philosophy surfaced again in the period of the Scientific Revolution, when it displaced scholastic Aristotelianism. Both modern social contract theory and utilitarianism in ethics were grounded in its tenets. Catherine Wilson shows how the distinctive Epicurean image of the natural and social worlds took hold in philosophy, and how it is an acknowledged, and often unacknowledged presence in the writings of Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, Boyle, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley. With chapters devoted to Epicurean physics and cosmology, the corpuscularian or "mechanical" philosophy, the question of the mortality of the soul, the grounds of political authority, the contested nature of the experimental philosophy, sensuality, curiosity, and the role of pleasure and utility in ethics, the author makes a persuasive case for the significance of materialism in seventeenth-century philosophy without underestimating the depth and significance of the opposition to it, and for its continued importance in the contemporary world. Lucretius's great poem, On the Nature of Things, supplies the frame of reference for this deeply-researched inquiry into the origins of modern philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophical arguments usually are and nearly always should be abductive. Across many areas, philosophers are starting to recognize that often the best we can do in theorizing some phenomena is put forward our best overall account of it, warts and all. This is especially true in esoteric areas like logic, aesthetics, mathematics, and morality where the data to be explained is often based in our stubborn intuitions. -/- While this methodological shift is welcome, it's not without problems. Abductive arguments involve (...) significant theoretical resources which themselves can be part of what's being disputed. This means that we will sometimes find otherwise good arguments which suggest their own grounds are problematic. In particular, sometimes revising our beliefs on the basis of such an argument can undermine the very justification we used in that argument. -/- This feature, which I'll call self-effacingness, occurs most dramatically in arguments against our standing views on the esoteric subject matters mentioned above: logic, mathematics, aesthetics, and morality. This is because these subject matters all play a role in how we reason abductively. This isn't an idle fact; we can resist some challenges to our standing beliefs about these subject matters exactly because the challenges are self-effacing. The self-effacing character of certain arguments is thus both a benefit and limitation of the abductive turn and deserves serious attention. I aim to give it the attention it deserves. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that hope is polysemous in that it sometimes refers to hoping and other times to being hopeful. That it has these two distinct senses is reflected in the observation that a person can hope for an outcome without being hopeful that it will occur. Below, I offer a new argument for this distinction. My strategy is to show that accepting this distinction yields a rich account of two distinct ways in which hope can be lost, (...) ways that map onto the two senses of hope: A person can lose hope either by ceasing to hope for an outcome (hopelessness) or by ceasing to be hopeful that it will obtain (despair). Thinking about these negative attitudes in these two ways, I contend, is explanatorily rich and fruitfully reveals how they differ in phenomenology, behavioral differences, and the ways in which a person can escape them. (shrink)

A short discussion piece arguing that the neuropsychological phenomenon of double dissociations is most revealing of underlying cognitive architecture because of the capacities that are spared, more than the capacities that are lost.

In Pascal’s famous wager, he claims that the seeking non-believer can induce genuine religious belief in herself by joining a religious community and taking part in its rituals. This form of belief regulation is epistemologically puzzling: can we form beliefs in this way, and could such beliefs be rationally held? In the first half of the paper, we explain how the regimen could allow the seeking non-believer to regulate her religious beliefs by intervening on her evidence and epistemic standards. In (...) the second half of the paper, we argue that regulated religious beliefs can be rationally held. (shrink)

The thesis presented here focuses on the concept of totality in the work of the contemporary cultural critic Fredric Jameson (1934–). By totality, we mean how the human heart enables the human body, but without the body, the heart has no part concerning the whole; they are mutually dependent. This work shall argue that totality is the allegorical figuration framing Jameson’s political critiques of modernity in The Political Unconscious (1981) and Postmodernism (1991). The postmodern world today as an absent totality (...) represents the contradiction in Jameson: We live in a complex world despite its unrepresentability. Whilst studies of early Jameson have interpreted his works through postmodernity and cognitive mapping, their unsubstantiation of Jameson’s later totality has resulted in not being able to explicate Jameson’s view of the a-historicity of postmodernity. Part One shall examine Jameson’s readings of Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel, demonstrating that Hegel’s critique of Kant concerning the boundary of knowledge includes its overcoming and that Hegelian totality is not closed, permitting Jameson to represent the world as an open totality. Part Two shall argue that Jameson’s reading of the works of Karl Marx and the Marxist tradition of Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin reinforces totality in their writing styles, which allows Jameson to glimpse totality through writing. Part Three shall argue that totality in Jameson’s interpretation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796) is at work and that Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde (1799) elucidates a counterpoint to totality which can be used to understand non-dialectical thinkers which Jameson examines such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Part Four shall argue that Jameson’s reading of these thinkers is justified in critiquing their productive misreadings of totality as closed, informing their political quietism, thereby re-politicising totality as an allegory. (shrink)

This book offers solutions to two persistent and I believe closely related problems in epistemology. The first problem is that of drawing a principled distinction between perception and inference: what is the difference between seeing that something is the case and merely believing it on the basis of what we do see? The second problem is that of specifying which beliefs are epistemologically basic (i.e., directly, or noninferentially, justified) and which are not. I argue that what makes a belief a (...) perceptual belief, or a basic belief, is not any introspectible feature of the belief but rather the nature of the cognitive system, or "module", that is causally responsible for the belief. Thus, even zombies, who in the philosophical literature lack conscious experiences altogether, can have basic, justified, perceptual beliefs. -/- The theories of perceptual and basic beliefs developed in the monograph are embedded in a larger reliabilist epistemology. I use this theory of basic beliefs to develop a detailed reliabilist theory: Inferentialist Reliabilism, which offers a reliabilist theory of inferential justification and which solves some longstanding problems for other reliabilist views by demanding inferential support for some—but not all—beliefs. The book is an instance of a thoroughgoingly naturalistic approach to epistemology. Many of my arguments have an empirical basis, and the view that I endorse reserves a central role for the cognitive sciences—in particular, cognitive neuroscience—in filling in the details of an applied epistemological theory. (shrink)

Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure takes sociology in a new direction. It examines key aspects of social structure by using a fresh understanding of emotions categories. Through that synthesis emerge new perspectives on rationality, class structure, social action, conformity, basic rights, and social change. As well as giving an innovative view of social processes, J. M. Barbalet's study also reveals unappreciated aspects of emotions by considering fear, resentment, vengefulness, shame, and confidence in the context of social structure. While much (...) has been written on the social consequences of excessive or pathological emotions, this book demonstrates the centrality of emotions to routine operations of social interaction. Dr Barbalet also re-evaluates the nature of social theory, for once the importance of emotions to social processes becomes clear, the intellectual constitution of sociology, and therefore its history, must be rethought. (shrink)

Many contemporary Anglo-American philosophers describe themselves as naturalists. But what do they mean by that term? Popular naturalist slogans like, "there is no first philosophy" or "philosophy is continuous with the natural sciences" are far from illuminating. "Understanding Naturalism" provides a clear and readable survey of the main strands in recent naturalist thought. The origin and development of naturalist ideas in epistemology, metaphysics and semantics is explained through the works of Quine, Goldman, Kuhn, Chalmers, Papineau, Millikan and others. The most (...) common objections to the naturalist project - that it involves a change of subject and fails to engage with "real" philosophical problems, that it is self-refuting, and that naturalism cannot deal with normative notions like truth, justification and meaning - are all discussed. "Understanding Naturalism" distinguishes two strands of naturalist thinking - the constructive and the deflationary - and explains how this distinction can invigorate naturalism and the future of philosophical research. (shrink)

Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart explore the ability of complicated rules to generate simple behaviour in nature through 'the collapse of chaos'.