Michael Podro; V—A Sense of Complexity in the Visual Arts, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 63, Issue 1, 1 June 1963, Pages 79–98, https://doi.or.

Michael Podro; V—A Sense of Complexity in the Visual Arts, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 63, Issue 1, 1 June 1963, Pages 79–98, https://doi.or.

Thomas Puttfarken was one of the most accomplished and original art historians of the last quarter century. His enormous contribution to the life and work of the University of Essex, where he spent nearly all of his academic career, included vigorous sponsorship of the arts on and off campus, and support for the preservation of the built and natural environments. He was a lover of good food, good wine, good company, and a wide range of music–as well as a talented (...) painter and furniture-maker. (shrink)

In this article, one of a series he was preparing for publication when he died, Michael Podro discusses how the concept of truthfulness can be applied to paintings, paying particular attention to Cezanne's art and thought.

First and still only philosophy treatise on drawing, explaining the bases of meaning in all kinds of drawings, including technical and informational, design, child, and art drawings--depictive and nondepictive, East and West--engaging cognitive and developmental psychology, philosophy, art history and criticism. Ca 290 double-columned pp., 92 illus. Reviews include: Philosophy--David Hills, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 235-237. Aesthetics--Michael Podro, British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 3 (July 2008): 346-347. Art history--Svetlana Alpers, Phi (...) Bet Kappa Society Key Reporter (Summer 2006): 14 http://www.pbk.org/documents/tkrpdf/TKRSummer2006.pdf. General--Amy Ione, Leonardo On-line Reviews: http://www.leonardo.info/reviews/jan2007/draw_ione.html . (shrink)

Erwin Panofsky explicitly states that the first half of the opening chapter of Studies in Iconology—his landmark American publication of 1939—contains ‘the revised content of a methodological article published by the writer in 1932’, which is now translated for the first time in this issue of Critical Inquiry.1 That article, published in the philosophical journal Logos, is among his most important works. First, it marks the apogee of his series of philosophically reflective essays on how to do art history,2 that (...) reach back, via a couple of major pieces on Alois Riegl, to the 1915 essay on Heinrich Wölfflin.3 Under the influence of his colleague at Hamburg Ernst Cassirer, the principal interpreter of Kant in the 1920s, Panofsky from 1915 on exhibits in his work ever more Kantian thinking and language.4 But Logos was not an art-historical review or one dedicated to aesthetics but a principal mainstream journal of the philosophy of culture. So ‘On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts’ has a good claim to be the culmination of Panofsky's philosophical thinking in his German period under the Weimar Republic. · 1. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance , p. xv; hereafter abbreviated SI. See Panofsky, ‘Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst’, Logos 21 : 103–19; trans. Jaś Elsner and Katharina Lorenz under the title ‘On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts’, Critical Inquiry 38 : 467–82; hereafter abbreviated ‘P’.· 2. See the discussion in Carlo Ginzburg, ‘From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method’, Myths, Emblems, Clues, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi , pp. 17–59, esp. pp. 36–41.· 3. See Panofsky, ‘Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst’, Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, ed. Karen Michels and Martin Warnke, 2 vols. , 2:1009–18; ‘Der Begriff des Kunstwollens’,Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, 2:1019–34, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel Snyder under the title ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, Critical Inquiry 8 : 17–33; and ‘Über das Verhältnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie: Ein Beitrag zu der Erörterung über die Möglichkeit kunstwissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe’, Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, 2: 1035–63, trans. Lorenz and Elsner under the title ‘On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts for a Science of Art’, Critical Inquiry 35 : 43–71.· 4. On neo-Kantianism in pre-Nazi Germany, see Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger , pp. 25–37; Éric Dufour and T. Z. R. Créteil, ‘Le Statue du singulier: Kant et le néokantisme de l’École de Marbourg', Kantstudien 93 : 324–50; Edward Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture , pp. 22–51; and Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos , pp. 52–86. Specifically on the Cassirerian Kantianism of Panofsky, see Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art , pp. 181–82; Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History , pp. 91–92, 147–52; Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History, trans. Richard Pierce , pp. 174–77, 182–84; David Summers, ‘Meaning in the Visual Arts as a Humanistic Discipline’, in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside, ed. Irving Lavin , pp. 9–24; Mark A. Cheetham, Kant, Art, and Art History: Moments of Discipline , pp. 68–77; Paul Crowther, The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and Its History , pp. 70–73; Allister Neher, ‘“The Concept of Kunstwollen”, Neo-Kantianism, and Erwin Panofsky's Early Art Theoretical Essays', Word and Image 20 : 41–51; Georges Didi-Huberman,Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman , pp. 4–6, 90–138; and Lorenz and Elsner, ‘Translators’ Introduction', Critical Inquiry35 : 33–42, esp. pp. 38, 40–42. (shrink)

This essay, part of a special issue on the Warburg Institute and Library, offers personal recollections of scholars whom the author encountered there as a student in the early 1970s, including E. H. Gombrich, Otto Kurz, Michael Baxandall, Frances Yates, D. P. Walker, A. I. Sabra, Michael Podro, Michael Screech, Arnaldo Momigliano, and Nikolaus Pevsner. The author's focus is on differences between the milieu of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, as it had been in Hamburg, and the (...) ethos of the Warburg Institute in London. The key document for establishing this contrast is an anonymous review — by Edgar Wind — attacking Gombrich's biography of Aby Warburg, which was published in 1970. Wind found the new Warburg circle “Lilliputian” in comparison with the old Hamburg circle, to which he had belonged. This essay disputes Wind's finding, based on its author's own experience, as well as on his sympathy with the reasoned empirical approach of Gombrich, Baxandall, and others at the London Warburg to issues that Aby Warburg had raised when the Library was in Germany. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Time and History in Alois Riegl's Theory of PerceptionMichael GubserIn an early essay, the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl (1858–1905), a pioneer of the modern discipline of art history, linked the creation of the zodiac images in calendar art to the designation of constellations in the heavens.1 Ancient calendar artists observed the motion of stars across the night sky and attempted to map them into recognizable patterns representing specific (...) temporal periods. Their efforts inscribed the cyclical temporality of the heavens into the images of the ancient calendar. This inherent temporality came to characterize all art forms in Riegl's work; his choice of calendar art as his earliest research topic heralded a career-long interest in the connection between temporality and artistic form. Art objects, he believed, were temporal as well as spatial. Just as the light from constellations reflected a deep history, artworks illuminated the passage of time by visually re-presenting the perceptual world of past eras.Riegl's work has garnered attention in recent decades among art historians and non–art historians alike. This interest is due in part to the renewed concern for disciplinary origins that art history, like other fields, has experienced in the wake of poststructuralist critiques. Scholars outside of art history have taken note of his work because of its broad scope and relevance for the study of historiography and perception; Riegl's work provides models for linking the analysis of specific artworks with a history of perception, exploring the relationship between monuments and memory, and analyzing the nature of visual modernity. Interest in Riegl also stems from his acknowledged impact on such preeminent philosophers and historical theorists as Erwin Panofsky, Paul Feyerabend, Gilles Deleuze, Fèlix Guattari, and above all Walter [End Page 451] Benjamin.2 Figures as varied as Georg Lukács, Karl Mannheim, Walter Gropius, and Mikhail Bakhtin have cited his work favorably.3 Riegl is perhaps best known for his attempts to dismantle the hierarchy of high and low art, his attack on the preeminence of classical aesthetic ideals, and his effort to construct a universal history of style. The combination of these commitments led him to consider European and non-European craft genres that fell outside conventional definitions of art. In books such as Problems of Style, Late Roman Art Industry, and The Group Portraiture of Holland, Riegl examined the high arts, decorative arts, and manufactured artifacts alike, gleaning insights into the structure of an era's perception from close descriptive analyses of its artwork.4 In Problems of Style, Riegl traced the development of ancient vegetal decorative motifs toward their fulfillment in the naturalized tendrils and acanthus leaves of Greek ornament. A single, universal development encompassed seemingly distinct motivic forms, and creative innovation was driven by an inner formal logic. Similarly, Late Roman Art Industry, the [End Page 452] epoch-making work that Walter Benjamin described as a revolution in art historical method,5 traced the gradual development of space as an object of artistic concern in the late Roman Empire. In this volume, Riegl explored his controversial notion of the Kunstwollen, or artistic will, which asserted art's autonomy on the basis of a formal creative volition internal to artworks.6 Finally, The Group Portraiture of Holland documented the emergence and decline of a "typically Hollandish painting" emphasizing space and attention.7Riegl scholars have frequently attempted to situate his art history within a variety of philosophical traditions, an effort complicated by Riegl's limited citation of sources. Several scholars have linked Riegl's historical vision with the embattled tradition of Hegelian philosophy. Riegl's teleology; his stress on the unified, internal, and purposive development of art; his notion of art as mind overcoming material; and even his emphasis on the role of the viewer in art all have a distinctly Hegelian resonance. Wolfgang Kemp fits Riegl squarely within a late-nineteenth-century Hegelian revival,8 Michael Podro incorporates him within a Hegelian critical tradition of art history that spanned the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,9 and Michael Ann Holly posits a clear trajectory, linking Kant and Hegel with Riegl and Panofsky.10Others, however, just as firmly reject this... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Wittgensteinian Approach to Discerning the Meaning of Works of Art in the Practice of Critical and Contextual Studies in Secondary Art EducationLeslie Cunliffe (bio)In order to get clear about aesthetic words you have to describe ways of living.Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief1Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from (...) another side and no longer know your way about.Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations2IntroductionThis article explores a Wittgensteinian approach for dealing with the meaning of works of art in the practice of critical and contextual studies in art education. The article is aimed at developing a methodology for eleven to nineteen year olds, known in the UK as the secondary phase of education, but the approach could be generalized to other educational phases.Henry Finch3 interprets four references to meaning found in Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of language as a quadrant that combines the horizontal axis of meaning as physiognomies (the experiential and visual) and meaning as constructions (concepts, uses, science, and mathematics), with a vertical axis of meaning as imperatives (rule following, obligations, and law) and meaning as custom (ceremonies, myths, and ritual).4 The quadrant represents Finch's understanding of Wittgenstein's views about how language serves a different but complementary role in the way human beings engage [End Page 65] with meaning in the world and their place in it.5 Such meanings are embedded in social practices, including first-person responses to a physiognomy, although these start off as biologically primed reactions.Michael Luntley argues that Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and the related remarks on perception should be understood as setting conditions for the possibilities of judgment in "seeing the world aright, in taking the right attitude to the world"6 rather than simply mapping the possibilities of meaning, as the former underscores the role of will7 in the way meaning is actively witnessed and ethically processed by an agent. Having the right view is still only a view, but for Wittgenstein this amounted to an immense ethical and philosophical project to see things accurately and in correct relationship to each other. Such perspectival stances result from an agent's capacity to selectively engage with meaning, with a more unitary understanding resulting from criss-crossing the same territory from different points of view. Wittgenstein's four references to meaning can be thought of as forming four different points on a compass that direct the "self-as-will engaged with that which is independent of will "8 in a quest to see things aright. By extension, such an approach could be used in art education to enable students to develop the dispositions to see works of art aright.Marcia Eaton describes the tension between epistemic and interpretative approaches to the meaning of works of art in this way: "In which direction should one go? In other words, how can judgments which seem so personal (relative, subjective, etc.) also play a role in interpersonal (absolute, objective, etc.) language games?"9 Michael Podro gives a similar description of the apparent tension between a context-bound analysis of works of art and their irreducible and autonomous qualities as like "constantly treading a tightrope."10 Ralph Smith highlights the difference "between having knowledge about art and personally experiencing its presence and power."11Ben Tilghman12 advocates a Wittgensteinian way of going beyond these twofold approaches for understanding and interpreting art by focusing on the role that ponderable and imponderable evidence play in achieving the right stance when attempting to condense the meaning of works of art. Following Wittgenstein, Tilghman argues that a judgment based on imponderable evidence can often be supported by ponderable evidence, a process that is always linked to the relative experience, knowledge, and wisdom of the person making the judgment. Wittgenstein's four references to meaning could be thought of as points on a compass for directing the will in fittingness when endeavoring to understand the role and relationship of ponderable and imponderable evidence in any attempt to see works of art aright. But before these ideas can be... (shrink)

This paper addresses standard questions regarding comics and the arts (comics and fine arts, image and word combinations), then poses and addresses the neglected, but deeper and wider--thus philosophical--question, of how depictions, not just words, can have mental contents at all, including light, funny, scathing, comic ones.

The aging of attentional and emotional functions has been extensively studied but relatively independently. Therefore, the relationships between aging and the interactions of attentional and emotional processes remain elusive. This study aimed to determine how age affected the interactions between attentional and emotional processes during adulthood. One-hundred forty adults aged 18–79 performed the emotional variant of the Attention Network Test, which probed alerting, orienting, and executive control in the presence and absence of threatening faces. During this task, contexts with varying (...) levels of task preparatory processes were created to modulate the effect of threatening faces on attention, and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to examine the neural underpinnings of the behavioural effects. The behavioural results showed that aging was associated with a significant decline in alerting efficiency, and there was a statistical trend for age-related deficits in executive control. Despite these age differences, age did not significantly moderate the interactions among attentional networks or between attention and emotion. Additionally, the fNIRS results showed that decreased frontal cortex functioning might underlie the age-related decline in executive control. Therefore, while aging has varying effects on different attentional networks, the interactions of attentional and emotional processes remain relatively unaffected by age. (shrink)

Michael J. Zimmerman explores whether and how our ignorance about ourselves and our circumstances affects what our moral obligations and moral rights are. He rejects objective and subjective views of the nature of moral obligation, and presents a new case for a 'prospective' view.

I defend the principle of Phenomenal Conservatism, on which appearances of all kinds generate at least some justification for belief. I argue that there is no reason for privileging introspection or intuition over perceptual experience as a source of justified belief; that those who deny Phenomenal Conservatism are in a self-defeating position, in that their view cannot be both true and justified; and that thedemand for a metajustification for Phenomenal Conservatism either is an easily met demand, or is an unfair (...) or question-begging one. (shrink)

Wedin addresses the debate over whether nonsubstantial individuals, that inhere in a subject but are not said of a subject, i.e. accidents, such as the pallor of Socrates, are nonrecurring particulars or a kind of determinate universal. Wedin examines the secondary literature on this topic and divides it into two schools of thought, determined by the contributions of J.L. Ackrill and G.E.L. Owen. According to Ackrill, individuals in non‐substance categories are particular to the substance they are in; Owen critiques Ackrill's (...) view, and proposes that these items can recur in more than one subject and hence are a sort of universal. Wedin finds Owen's thesis unsatisfactory, even after supplementing it with an improved version due to Michael Frede; instead, Wedin argues for a revised version of Ackrill's interpretation of nonsubstantial individuals as nonrecurrent particulars. According to Wedin, Aristotle is committed to individuals only—e.g. to Socrates and to the particular bit of pallor in him: this conclusion has an important bearing on the ontological status of individuals and on the primacy of substance to nonsubstantial items. (shrink)

Wedin considers the problem of the compatibility of the Categories account of primary substance with the theory of substantial form of the Metaphysics. Wedin collects from the secondary literature the most important arguments for incompatibilism, and offers some proposals for restoring their harmony. While admitting the evident differences in the way Aristotle treats the question of substance in each treatise, Wedin is keen to argue that these differences are not sufficient to conclude that the treatises are incompatible. Wedin singles out (...) for particular attention, and criticism, Michael Frede and Gunther Patzig's account of Metaphysics Zeta, according to which the primary substance of the Metaphysics and the basic subject of predications is the form. Wedin considers two ‘philosophical’ arguments and one ‘Aristotelian’ argument for the subjecthood of forms, and argues that the textual evidence does not support the claim that form is the subject of accidents. (shrink)

People from one cultural background often find themselves wondering how those from a different cultural background could willingly live the way they do and/or criticize others for living in the way they do. How are we to explain this kind of mutual incomprehension? Three different possible explanations will be considered. The first is that such mutual incomprehension is sourced in a moral flaw. The flaw might be in one of the cultures, as certain cultures might be premised on a moral (...) mistake. Alternatively, the flaw might be a feature of the incomprehending individuals. If only they tried harder, they would come to appreciate the other’s point of view. The second possibility is that such mutual incomprehension is the product of principled limits on the interpretation of someone from another culture. Contrary to the first possibility, there might be no way for people from different cultures to even understand each other, let alone find fault in each other, because the culturally mediated ways in which they understand the world are inaccessible to each other. The third possibility is that the mutual incomprehension is sourced in metaphysics. Contrary to the second possibility, there might be some non-metaphorical sense in which people from different cultures inhabit different worlds. The main task of the chapter is to describe and evaluate these three possibilities with a view to ruling out the third. (shrink)

Because of its complexity, contemporary scientific research is almost always tackled by groups of scientists, each of which works in a different part of a given research domain. We believe that understanding scientific progress thus requires understanding this division of cognitive labor. To this end, we present a novel agent-based model of scientific research in which scientists divide their labor to explore an unknown epistemic landscape. Scientists aim to climb uphill in this landscape, where elevation represents the significance of the (...) results discovered by employing a research approach. We consider three different search strategies scientists can adopt for exploring the landscape. In the first, scientists work alone and do not let the discoveries of the community as a whole influence their actions. This is compared with two social research strategies, which we call the follower and maverick strategies. Followers are biased towards what others have already discovered, and we find that pure populations of these scientists do less well than scientists acting independently. However, pure populations of mavericks, who try to avoid research approaches that have already been taken, vastly outperform both of the other strategies. Finally, we show that in mixed populations, mavericks stimulate followers to greater levels of epistemic production, making polymorphic populations of mavericks and followers ideal in many research domains. (shrink)

Parsimony is a virtue of empirical theories. Is it also a virtue of philosophical theories? I review four contemporary accounts of the virtue of parsimony in empirical theorizing, and consider how each might apply to two prominent appeals to parsimony in the philosophical literature, those made on behalf of physicalism and on behalf of nominalism. None of the accounts of the virtue of parsimony extends naturally to either of these philosophical cases. This suggests that in typical philosophical contexts, ontological simplicity (...) has no evidential value. (shrink)

Wedin considers the relation between the ontological commitment in the Categories and the semantical theory of underlying ontological configurations for standard categorical statements. According to Wedin, Aristotle's fourfold division of beings, which divides things according to whether they are, or are not, said of, and/or present in a subject, is a meta‐ontology that is concerned with beings per se, i.e. the fundamental things that are. Wedin explains that the primacy of c‐substance involves an asymmetry in the relation between c‐substance and (...) everything else, or between the substantial and the nonsubstantial. This is because there is an ontological dependence of non‐substances, and also of secondary substances, on substances: everything is either said of, or in, primary substance. The argument of this chapter, then, is that the world of the Categories is a world of individuals: all ontological relations needed for semantics can be accommodated by appeal to individuals only. (shrink)

Wedin argues that Aristotle makes form the substance of c‐substances because it is the essence of the c‐substance. Much of this chapter consists of a careful examination of a passage in Metaphysics Zeta 4, which Wedin calls the ‘New Primacy Passage’, that is crucial to Wedin's overall thesis, because here Aristotle appeals to a notion of definitional primacy, as opposed to the ontological primacy of the Categories. Z.4 focuses on this claim that form must be essence: Wedin argues that essence (...) is a certain kind of form, a form of a genus ; this does not mean ‘species’, as some commentators have thought. This is because the species is a combination of form and matter, whereas the genous eidos, Wedin argues, is the formal part only of the definition that applies to the thing. On Wedin's account, Aristotle introduces the notion of explanatory primacy of form in Z.4. (shrink)

Wedin offers an interpretation of Metaphysics Zeta 13, a very important and difficult chapter, where Aristotle apparently denies that substance is a universal, having, on most accounts, already claimed that form is substance, and that form is a universal. This interpretation of the argument of Z.13, Wedin argues, threatens the possibility of attaining a definition of substance, and places in doubt what has gone before in the treatise. According to Wedin, what Aristotle is concerned with in Z.13 is not the (...) denial that substance is a universal but rather with the denial that anything predicated universally of a c‐substance is the substance‐of the c‐substance, which Wedin calls ‘Weak proscription’. In Wedin's account of Z.13, then, Aristotle is continuing to pursue issues first raised in Z.10–11 that have to do with the relations between form and definition, and form and the universal. Wedin also argues that the dilemma at the conclusion of Z.13, regarding the definability of substance, is resolved in Z.16, with the notion of ‘Dual Complexity’, according to which the parts of a form exist potentially in the form, just as the parts of the c‐substance exist potentially in the c‐substance. (shrink)

Chapters 10 and 11 are critical to the argument of Metaphysics Zeta: these chapters are concerned with the purification of form. Z.10 introduces the apparatus of part and whole and consists of an argument to the end that form and its parts have priority over the other internal structural components of c‐substances, i.e. matter and the compound of form and matter; while in Z.11 Aristotle argues that form and its parts cannot involve any admixture of matter. Wedin argues that the (...) causal role of form presupposes its purity: if form is to explain why a certain portion of matter constitutes a c‐substance of a given kind, then matter—whether this latter is understood as functional, or remnant matter—cannot already be contained in the form. This is the ‘purity thesis’, as Wedin calls it: matter cannot be included in the definitions of natural organisms, Wedin points out, because that would make the explanandum a part of the principle that explains it. Wedin also argues that form must be sufficiently complex to provide definitions of the natures of particular compounds, which are complex, even though form itself is a kind of universal. (shrink)

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle often says that ‘form is substance’: in this chapter, Wedin argues that ‘substance’ in this context means the ‘substance‐of’ c‐substances. Wedin begins by examining Aristotle's use, and retention, of the framework of the Categories in Metaphysics Zeta, before turning to discuss Z.3, which is crucial to understanding the relation between the Categories and Metaphysics theories of substance, because it is usually thought that here Aristotle departs from the substance of the Categories. Wedin denies that Z.3 involves (...) a rejection of the Categories subjecthood criterion for primary substance: Aristotle rejects only the claim that one thing is the substance of another simply if it is the primary underlying subject of the other. Wedin argues that in Z.3 Aristotle introduces the idea of the ‘substance‐of’ a thing, and identifies as candidates for the substance of c‐substances the internal structural components form, matter, and the compound of form and matter. (shrink)

Wedin discusses Aristotle's claims in Metaphysics Zeta 6 that the essence of a thing is to be sought among its per se attributes, and that each thing that is primary and spoken of per se, e.g. primary substance, is the same as its essence. Wedin argues that the Zeta 6 Thesis, i.e. that the essence of a thing is the thing's immediate essence, is a crucial requirement of the explanatory role of essence as the substance of c‐substances. According to Wedin, (...) Aristotle introduces this requirement in order to establish that a thing's essence cannot depend on another essence. Form must be the essence; if form cannot explain the nature of the thing of which it is the form, there would be the threat of a regress of explanatory forms. At the end of the chapter, Wedin considers the problem that the identity of a thing and its essence is a requirement that can be met by non‐substance items, but he denies that this leads to a dilution of the conception of substance. (shrink)

This introduction treats the field of ethics in a new way. The main topic is normative ethics and in particular the ethics of moral right and wrong, and the emphasis is on the recently highlighted division or conflict between ethical rationalism and moral sentimentalism. Rationalism treats moral judgment and motivation as a matter of rational judgment, and its main practitioners have been Immanuel Kant and, more recently, the intuitionists H. A. Prichard and W. D. Ross. Philosophical weaknesses in intuitionism have (...) led recent rationalists to follow Kant's transcendental form of deontology, and this leads us to an examination of the Kant-influenced work of John Rawls and of his followers T. M. Scanlon and Stephen Darwall. After a critical examination of ethical rationalism, the book proceeds to consider the sentimentalist tradition, which goes all the way back to the Chinese philosopher Mencius and is more recently instanced in the writings of the eighteenth-century sentimentalist David Hume and in the work of feminist thinker Carol Gilligan. The sentimentalist tradition has potential strengths that have not been fully appreciated, and the book dwells on these. But it then goes on to show how Chinese thought in general offers a large philosophical context in which to make better sense of moral sentimentalism and of recent debates in normative ethics. (shrink)

Utilitarianism does best to approach justice, rationality, and various virtues in symmetric and impartialist fashion. A scalar form of utilitarianism that makes only comparative judgments of better and worse may be preferable for abstract theoretical purposes, though not in practice.