The General Account of Pleasure in Plato's Philebus THOMAS M. TUOZZO 1. INTRODUCTION DOES PLATO IN THE Philebus present a single general account of pleasure, applicable to all of the kinds of pleasure he discusses in that dialogue? Gosling and Taylor think not;' Dorothea Frede has recently reasserted a version of the contrary, traditional view. 2 The traditional view, I shall argue in this essay, is correct: the Philebus does contain a general account of pleasure applicable to all pleasures. (...) Nonetheless, Gosling and Taylor have pointed to a real difficulty with the traditional view, a difficulty that has never been adequately ad- dressed. To show how it can be overcome will involve showing that Plato's account of pleasure, and his analyses of other phenomena of moral psychol- ogy in the Philebus, are more complex and subtle than has often been realized. Gosling and Taylor offer two considerations in support of their view: Socrates insists against Protarchus that different pleasures can be "most oppo- site" to each other, which suggests that no single account can apply to them all,s and Socrates does not indicate how the most likely candidate for a general account of pleasure, one involving the restoration of a natural har- ,j. c. B. Gosling and C. C. W. Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure , 14o: "It seems clear that in the Philebus Plato has no general formula to encapsulate the nature of pleasure .... " So, too, C. Hampton, Pleasure,.. (shrink)

Ward examines Scotus's arguments for his distinctive version of hylomorphism, the view that at least some material objects are composites of matter and form. It considers Scotus's reasons for adopting hylomorphism, and his accounts of how matter and form compose a substance, how extended parts, such as the organs of an organism, compose a substance, and how other sorts of things, such as the four chemical elements and all the things in the world, fail to compose a substance. It highlights (...) the extent to which Scotus draws on his metaphysics of essential order to explain why some things can compose substance and why others cannot. Throughout the book, contemporary versions of hylomorphism are discussed in ways that both illumine Scotus's own views and suggest ways to advance contemporary debates. (shrink)

Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of goodness—those that take there to be (...) absolute goodness—are comparatively rich: they offer grounds for judging some types of things better than others because they have more absolute goodness. Moorean accounts, for example, can tell us that humans and human experiences are superior to bees and blades of grass. But such theories tend to be descriptively poor: they struggle to tell us in virtue of what this is so. In this essay we motivate and flesh out a view that splits the difference between accounts of goodness as relative and accounts of goodness as absolute. Such a view holds promise only if the mechanics of this kind of metaphysics of goodness can be worked out. Here we present a view on which the paradigm for absolute goodness is God and the paradigm for each kind of relative goodness is a divine idea. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Rejoinder to MoriThomas M. LennonGianluca Mori and I are broadly in agreement about everything in my paper except the answer to its main question, viz., how Bayle's use of Saint-Evremond is to be understood in the third Eclaircissement. Mori thinks that Bayle's use of Saint Evremond was one of his "provocations aimed at orthodox readers." It is an instance of his thesis that "Bayle's professions of Christian faith, (...) though frequent, are generally far from being above suspicion: indeed almost every one of them raises questions about their actual significance."1 On my view, one line of argument for not taking Bayle's use of Saint-Evremond "at face value in his profession of religious faith... is highly questionable."2 That is, as far as his use of Saint-Evremond is concerned, Bayle should be taken as the fideist that he, here and in many other places, in effect claimed to be.We are in agreement about the nature of the key text itself that Bayle cites from the Conversation. It is a "ridiculous" text, dripping with sarcasm, an ironic parody of the very views that Bayle claims to believe. Moreover, Bayle himself is in agreement with this view of the text, and expresses it in so many words. The knot of our disagreement consists in how Bayle could have used such a text to express fideist views. Mori thinks that the very use of the text itself is sufficient to call those views into doubt. "Bayle was fully aware that the text he presented as a 'clarification' of his fideism had very little right to be considered as Christian orthodoxy,... In a word, Bayle knew full well that his fideism would be regarded as insincere and destructive of faith."3The basis for my view begins with what Bayle says about this text in a statement that Mori has so far not acknowledged either in his book or in his reply to me. Says Bayle after citing Saint-Evremond, "Give this thought a more serious and proper tone and it will become reasonable." It is here that Bayle [End Page 335] acknowledges the inappropriateness of Saint-Evremond's text, but he does so to reject it as it stands. Bayle did not, as Mori claims, present the text "as a clarification of his fideism." Only when the text is given a "more serious and proper tone," that is, when it is stripped of its irony and sarcasm, does it cease to be a parody of his views and become an accurate expression of them. Bayle explicitly dissociates himself from the unamended text, introducing it with the comment that "this thought has been given a ridiculous sense, in the hands of a master."4 But Mori takes this text as it stands to convey Bayle's message, as if Bayle had not commented on it at all. It is as if, to repeat the text at the end of my paper, the Bible were to be cited as stating the claim that there is no God. It does so, of course, but only preceded by the disclaimer that only "the fool hath said in his heart there is no God" (Psalm 14: 1).According to Mori, Bayle's use of Saint-Evremond was provocative. Bayle's text is not provocative, however. Had he intended it to be, he would have directly cited Saint-Evremond, without comment. Instead, he is perfectly clear about whom he is quoting and how that source should be understood. To be sure, such a citation is dramatic, and no doubt designed for effect, but the effect is to show how unexceptional Bayle took his conception of the faith-reason relation to be. Bayle in the Eclaircissement is not trying to convert anyone but to explain his position in a way that makes it acceptable to the Consistory of the Walloon Church. To be sure, it is an irony that Saint-Evremond's text, slightly but importantly corrected, expresses Bayle's view, but it is not an irony in the sense of winking sarcasm.Mori insists that, as a matter of historical fact, Bayle's text was found to be provocative... (shrink)

Dewey’s A Common Faith has been variously interpreted, both in terms of its relation to Dewey’s corpus and internally in terms of its leading ideas. I argue for its crucial relevance in understanding Dewey and undertake an analysis of the key idea of “religious experience” as an “attitude of existence.” This distinguishes religious experience from other types of qualitative experience and shows the unique place this concept has for Dewey.

"Philosophy and Civilization" is one of Dewey's most important—and most neglected—essays. It is unsettling to anyone who wants to think of Dewey primarily as a "pragmatist." Dewey says the aim of philosophy should be to deal with the meaning of culture and not "inquiry" or "truth": "Meaning is wider in scope as well as more precious in value than is truth and philosophy is occupied with meaning rather than with truth" (LW 3:4).1 Truths are one kind of meaning, but they (...) are only an "island" lying in "the ocean of meanings to which truth and falsity are irrelevant. We do not inquire whether Greek civilization was true or false, but we are immensely concerned to penetrate its meaning," he adds, and continues, "In .. (shrink)

Gaunilo’s Lost Island Objection to Anselm’s Ontological Argument aims to show that if Anselm’s argument can establish the existence of a greatest conceivable being then a very similar argument can establish the existence of a greatest conceivable island. The challenge for the defender of Anselm is to identify the relevant disanalogy between Anselm’s argument and Gaunilo’s, in order to explain why Anselm’s can succeed while Gaunilo’s fails. In this essay I take up this challenge. Reflection on the differences between the (...) nature of islands and the nature of being yields the relevant disanalogy. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas produced a voluminous body of work on moral theory, and much of that work is on virtue, particularly the status and value of the virtues as principles of virtuous acts, and the way in which a moral life can be organized around them schematically. Thomas Osborne presents Aquinas's account of virtue in its historical, philosophical and theological contexts, to show the reader what Aquinas himself wished to teach about virtue. His discussion makes the complexities of Aquinas's (...) moral thought accessible to readers despite the differences between Thomas's texts themselves, and the distance between our background assumptions and his. The book will be valuable for scholars and students in ethics, medieval philosophy, and theology. (shrink)

I will argue that a desert-based justification for treating a person in a certain way is a justification that holds this treatment to be justified simply by what the person is like and what he or she has done, independent of (1) the fact that treating the person in this way will have good effects (or that treating people like him or her in this way will have such effects); (2) the fact that this treatment is called for by some (...) (justified) institution or practice; or (3) the fact that the person could have avoided being subject to this treatment by choosing appropriately, and therefore cannot complain of it. I will explore the implications of this understanding of desert for the role of desert-based justifications of blame, punishment, and economic reward. (shrink)

This article reports the results of a study of attitudes of future business executives towards issues of social responsibility and business ethics. The 455 respondents, who were MBA students during 1985 at one dozen schools from various regions in the United States, were asked to respond to a series of open-ended and closed-ended questions. From the responses to the questions the authors were able to conclude that future executives display considerable sensitivity, though to varying degrees, towards ethical issues in business. (...) Women, in particular, tend to evince strong feelings regarding such issues. (shrink)

Thomas Alexander shows that the primary, guiding concern of Dewey's philosophy is his theory of aesthetic experience.

" Our various cultures are symbolic environments or "spiritual ecologies" within which the Human Eros can thrive. This is how we inhabit the earth. Encircling and sustaining our cultural existence is nature.

This paper explores the idea of robust discursive equality on which respect-based conceptions of justificatory reciprocity often draw. I distinguish between formal and substantive discursive equality and argue that if justificatory reciprocity requires that people be accorded formally equal discursive standing, robust discursive equality should not be construed as requiring standing that is equal substantively, or in terms of its discursive purchase. Still, robust discursive equality is purchase sensitive: it does not obtain when discursive standing is impermissibly unequal in purchase. (...) I then showcase different candidate conceptions of purchase justice, and draw conclusions about the substantive commitments of justificatory reciprocity. (shrink)

Conceptions of acceptability-based moral or political justification take it that authoritative acceptability constitutes, or contributes to, validity, or justification. There is no agreement as to what bar for authoritativeness such justification may employ. The paper engages the issue in relation to (i) the level of idealization that a bar for authoritativeness, ψ, imparts to a standard of acceptability-based justification, S, and (ii) the degree of discursive purchase of the discursive standing that S accords to people when it builds ψ. I (...) argue that (i) and (ii) are interdependent: high idealization values entail low discursive purchase, while high degrees of purchase require low idealization values. I then distinguish between alethic conceptions of justification that prioritize ends that commit to high idealization values, and recognitive conceptions that favour high discursive purchase. On this basis, I argue for a moderately recognitivist constraint on idealization. To render the recognitive discursive minimum available to relevant people at the site of justification, S should set ψ low enough so that it is a genuine option for actual people to reject relevant views in ways that S recognizes as authoritative. (shrink)