A number of epistemologists have defended a necessary condition for knowledge that has come to be labeled as the “safety” condition. Timothy Williamson, Duncan Pritchard, and Ernest Sosa are the foremost defenders of safety. According to these authors an agent S knows a true proposition P only if S could not easily have falsely believed P. Disagreement arises, however, with respect to how they capture the notion of a safe belief. This article is a treatment of the different presentations and (...) defenses of the safety condition for knowledge. Special attention is first paid to an elucidation of the various aspects or features of the safety condition. Following a short demonstration of the manner in which the safety condition handles some rather tough Gettier-like cases in the literature, some problems facing safety conclude this article. (shrink)

A large chorus of voices has grown around the claim that theistic belief is epistemically suspect since, as some cognitive scientists have hypothesized, such beliefs are a byproduct of cognitive mechanisms which evolved for rather different adaptive purposes. This paper begins with an overview of the pertinent cognitive science followed by a short discussion of some relevant epistemic concepts. Working from within a largely Williamsonian framework, we then present two different ways in which this research can be formulated into an (...) argument against theistic belief. We argue that neither version works. (shrink)

Since the classical period, Jewish scholars have drawn on developments in philosophy to enrich our understanding of Judaism. This methodology reached its pinnacle in the medieval period with figures like Maimonides and continued into the modern period with the likes of Rosenzweig. The explosion of Anglo-American/analytic philosophy in the twentieth century means that there is now a host of material, largely unexplored by Jewish philosophy, with which to explore, analyze, and develop the Jewish tradition. Jewish Philosophy in an Analytic Age (...) features contributions from leading scholars in the field which investigate Jewish texts, traditions, and/or thinkers, in order to showcase what Jewish philosophy can be in an analytic age. United by the new and engaging style of philosophy, the collection explores rabbinic and Talmudic philosophy; Maimonidean philosophy; philosophical theology; and ethics and value theory. (shrink)

Recent decades have seen a fertile period of theorizing within mainstream epistemology which has had a dramatic impact on how epistemology is done. Investigations into contextualist and pragmatic dimensions of knowledge suggest radically new ways of meeting skeptical challenges and of understanding the relation between the epistemological and practical environment. New insights from social epistemology and formal epistemology about defeat, testimony, a priority, probability, and the nature of evidence all have a potentially revolutionary effect on how we understand our epistemological (...) place in the world. Religion is the place where such rethinking can potentially have its deepest impact and importance. Yet there has been surprisingly little infiltration of these new ideas into philosophy of religion and the epistemology of religious belief. -/- Knowledge, Belief, and God incorporates these myriad new developments in mainstream epistemology, and extends these developments to questions and arguments in religious epistemology. The investigations proposed in this volume offer substantial new life, breadth, and sophistication to issues in the philosophy of religion and analytic theology. They pose original questions and shed new light on long-standing issues in religious epistemology; and these developments will in turn generate contributions to epistemology itself, since religious belief provides a vital testing ground for recent epistemological ideas. (shrink)

This is a review of *Knowledge, Belief and God: New Insights in Religious Epistemology* (edited by Matthew Benton, John Hawthorne, and Dani Rabinowitz). The review briefly discusses the contributed essays by Benton and Isaac Choi.

The problems of racism and racially motivated violence in predominantly African American communities in the United States are complex, multifactorial, and historically rooted. While these problems are also deeply morally troubling, bioethicists have not contributed substantially to addressing them. Concern for justice has been one of the core commitments of bioethics. For this and other reasons, bioethicists should contribute to addressing these problems. We consider how bioethicists can offer meaningful contributions to the public discourse, research, teaching, training, policy development, and (...) academic scholarship in response to the alarming and persistent patterns of racism and implicit biases associated with it. To make any useful contribution, bioethicists will require preparation and should expect to play a significant role through collaborative action with others. (shrink)

The economics profession has become a favourite punching bag in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Economists are widely reviled and their influence derided by the general public. Yet their services have never been in greater demand. To unravel the paradox, we need to understand both the strengths and weaknesses of economics. This book offers both a defence and critique of economics. Economists' way of thinking about social phenomena has great advantages. But the flexible, contextual nature of economics is (...) also its Achilles' heel in the hands of clumsy practitioners. (shrink)

It is common to appeal to governing laws of nature in order to explain the existence of natural regularities. Classical theism, however, maintains the sovereignty thesis: everything distinct from God is created by him and is under his guidance and control. It follows from this that God must somehow be responsible for natural laws and regularities. Therefore, theists need an account of the relation between regularities, laws, and God. I examine competing accounts of laws of nature and conclude that dispositional (...) essentialism provides the most satisfactory explanation of the relation between, and. (shrink)

The doctor-patient relationship is usually seen and accepted as a giving-taking association, in which the doctor is a giver and the patient is a taker. The paper challenges such a one-way relationship, and stresses the patient as a giver and the doctor as a receiver. The patient is described as a source for the emotional development of the doctor, and as a source of knowledge. He is also a source for what could be called life experience. By serving as a (...) source for these three elements, the patient is also seen as a source for reward. There is a danger of under-utilisation of this reward by the doctor, when (1) he is engaged only in giving, (2) he wilfully obstructs the channel of information, and (3) he feels saturation called by the doctor experience. This under-utilisation will ultimately lead to medical parasitism. This parasitism is seldom recognised by the patient, because the arrest of development of a doctor is usually hardly noticed, and this will lead to neglect of the patient, so that the trade between doctor and patient becomes unfair, as the long-term investment which the patient has placed in the doctor, does not pay off any longer. (shrink)

Con Spinoza, la filosofía moderna alcanza una nueva comprensión de la subjetividad. Sobre la base de la crítica del racionalismo, Spinoza descubre, por primera vez, la afectividad para la filosofía. El filósofo reflexiona sobre la repercusión de los afectos en la formación del sujeto ético y piensa que el mayor conocimiento posible sobre los propios afectos redunda en la utilidad colectiva de la humanidad toda. Sostengo que, en la teoría general de los afectos que explica la naturaleza, principios y fundamentos (...) de los fenómenos afectivos, Spinoza anida una oportuna teoría del autoconocimiento. (shrink)

Questions about the status of literary truth are as old as literary criticism, but they have become both more intricate and more compelling as literature has grown progressively more self-conscious and labyrinthian in its dealings with "reality." One might perhaps read The Iliad or even David Copperfield without raising such issues. But authors like Gide , Nabokov, Borges, and Robbe-Grillet seem continually to remind their readers of the complex nature of literary truth. How, for instance, are we to deal with (...) a passage like the following from William Demby's novel The Catacombs:"When I began this novel, I secretly decided that, though I would exercise a strict selection of the facts to write down, be they 'fictional' facts or 'true' facts taken from newspapers or directly observed events in my own life, once I had written something down I would neither edit not censor it ."1What does this sentence mean? When an apparently fictional narrator distinguishes between "fictional" and "true" facts, what is the status of the word "true"? It clearly does not mean the same as "fictional," for he opposes it to that term. Yet it cannot mean "true" in the sense that historians would use, for he calls what he is writing a novel, and even if he quotes accurately from newspapers, the events of a narrator's life are not "historically" true. · 1. William Demby, The Catacombs , p.93. Peter J. Rabinowitz, assistant professor at Kirkland College, is currently working on articles on Raymond Chandler, Faulkner, and Dostoyevsky and is, as well, a music critic for the Syracuse Guide. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in comparative literature on the philosophical implications of Nabokov's use of humor and terror. "Truth in Fiction" is the first article he has had published in a scholarly journal. (shrink)

_Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis_ paints a completely new picture of the man and his ideas. The book suceeds in showing how ideas can become more accessible, and re-evaluates his significance within the field of psychodynamic psychotherapy. The book is structured thematically around five key issues: diagnosis, the analyst's position during the treatment, the management of transference, the formulation of interpretations, and the organisation of analytic training. For each of these issues, Lacan's entire work both published and (...) unpublished material, has been taken into account and theoretical principles have been illustrated with clinical examples. The book also contains the first complete bibliography of Lacan's works in English. Clear, detailed, and wide ranging, _Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis_ will prove essential reading, not only for professionals and students within the fields of psychology and psychiatry, but for all those keen to discover a new Lacan. (shrink)

In this paper evidence will be provided that Wittgenstein’s intuition about the logic of colour relations is to be taken near-literally. Starting from the Aristotelian oppositions between propositions as represented in the logical square of oppositions on the one hand and oppositions between primary and secondary colors as represented in an octahedron on the other, it will be shown algebraically how definitions for the former carry over to the realm of colour categories and describe very precisely the relations obtaining between (...) the known primary and secondary colours. Linguistic evidence for the reality of the resulting isomorphism will be provided. For example, the vertices that resist natural single-item lexicalization in logic (such as the O-corner, for which there is no natural lexicalization *nall (=not all)) are not naturally lexicalized in the realm of colour terms either. From the perspective of the architecture of cognition, the isomorphism suggests that the foundations of logical oppositions and negation may well be much more deeply rooted in the physiological structure of human cognition than is standardly assumed. (shrink)

Dans tous les pays et particulierement en Europe, les citoyens, les magistrats et les juristes en general deplorent la complexite normative. Comment traiter la complexite des normes a prendre en compte dans toutes les decisions fondees sur la regle de droit? Depuis une quinzaine d'annees, l'etude des systemes complexes a fait de grands progres tant du point de vue des methodes que de la modelisation. L'approche politique et l'approche scientifique semblent a priori eloignees, mais elles convergent sur l'interet de prendre (...) en compte un objet nouveau: la complexite des systemes. Ces systemes font emerger de nouvelles proprietes, non observables au niveau des elements constitutifs, par une dynamique difficilement previsible, et rendent vaine toute analyse en sous-systemes plus simples. Pour la premiere fois, des specialistes des systemes complexes, des juristes, des philosophes, des experts de l'action publique et de l'evaluation des lois conjuguent leurs reflexions pour depasser les problematiques de la simplification et proposent des concepts et des outils totalement nouveaux pour comprendre et traiter de facon simple l'inevitable complexite du droit. (shrink)

Ce livre prend position sur les enjeux et les visées des oeuvres d'art en matière de vérité et de morale : il répond, par un retour sur l'époque des Lumières, aux questions contemporaines sur l'idée d'un perfectionnement moral de l'individu (S. Cavell, M. Nussbaum, S. Laugier). Car les Lumières ont remis au coeur de la création artistique les émotions, les affects et les sentiments, mues par la conviction de l'efficacité d'une éducation esthétique de l'homme, d'une éducation sensible par le sensible, (...) en l'occurrence par les oeuvres. La vérité a-t-elle un sens en matière artistique? Notre besoin d'art est-il lié à notre conviction qu'elles nous rendent meilleurs et nous font mieux connaître le monde? L'autonomie de l'oeuvre, la liberté du créateur, la dévaluation de tout canon au nom d'un global turn qui contraint au relativisme rendent aujourd'hui difficile l'affirmation d'une vérité. (shrink)

Depuis quelques années, un mouvement d'idées venu des Etats-Unis, qualifié de "Révolution transhumaniste", a pris un essor considérable. Demain, on vivra 200 ou 300 ans... et bien sûr en parfaite santé : l'immortalité n'est pas loin! Ces prophéties s'appuient sur les avancées réelles de l'intelligence artificielle et de la recherche en biologie, en particulier dans le domaine du vieillissement, passant ainsi allègrement de l'homme préservé et/ou augmenté à un véritable homme dieu. Mais dès que l'on s'intéresse au cerveau, les données, (...) particulièrement complexes, ne vont pas dans leur sens. Il existe une contradiction criante entre la jeunesse éternelle promise et la réalité actuelle, marquée en particulier par les échecs thérapeutiques répétés dans les maladies neurodégénératives. Forts de leur expérience et de leur autorité dans le domaine des neurosciences et du vieillissement, Danièle Tritsch et Jean Mariani dénoncent l'imposture du transhumanisme et ses excès ou délires, données scientifiques à l'appui. De façon accessible et vivante, avec de nombreux exemples de la vie quotidienne, ils démontrent que les efforts lents et soutenus de la recherche biologique et médicale - auxquels contribuera l'intelligence artificielle - restent la seule voie pour comprendre le fonctionnement du cerveau, le maintenir en bonne santé (cerveau préservé), le doter de capacités nouvelles (cerveau augmenté) et, dans un délai non prévisible, guérir ou stabiliser les maladies neurodégénératives (cerveau réparé). L'homme dieu, quant à lui, ne s'appuie sur rien de tangible. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Cet article propose une analyse détaillée des considérations de Hans-Georg Gadamer sur l’herméneutique théologique proprement dite. Pensée dans et pour la foi chrétienne, la conception de l’herméneutique théologique qu’il met en avant se veut essentiellement une herméneutique du texte biblique. Les réflexions de Gadamer sur ce thème nous conduisent cependant tout droit dans sa théorie de la littérature. La question directrice devient celle de la nature du texte religieux (entendons : du texte biblique, reçu en son unité canonique) en (...) tant que texte éminent, dont la structure singulière est mise en relief au moyen d’une éclairante comparaison avec les textes poétique, philosophie et juridique. L’Écriture, en tant qu’elle répond à la structure textuelle de la promesse, exige du lecteur une forme particulière d’appropriation qui trouve sa réalisation exemplaire dans la prédication. Toutefois, contre une lecture (Ommen, Eberhard, etc.) qui insiste sur la discontinuité de l’herméneutique théologique de Gadamer avec sa propre oeuvre philosophique, je soutiens la thèse de leur foncière cohérence. ABSTRACT: This paper offers a detailed analysis of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s considerations on theological hermeneutics proper. Thought within and for the Christian faith, the conception of theological hermeneutics he puts forward is mainly understood as a hermeneutics of the biblical text. However, Gadamer’s reflections on this theme bring us straight to his theory of literature. The guiding question becomes that about the nature of the religious text (meaning : the biblical text, received in its canonical unity) as eminent text, which peculiar structure is thrown into relief through an enlightening comparison with the poetical, the philosophical and the legal text. The Scripture, in that it has the textual structure of a promise, requires from the reader a particular form of appropriation, which finds its exemplary fulfillment in preaching. Against a reading that emphasizes discontinuity between Gadamer’s theological hermeneutics and his own philosophical work (Ommen, Eberhard, etc.) I defend the thesis of their fundamental coherence. (shrink)

The recent publication of a special number of the SAJP dedicated to a discussion of Samantha Vice’s thoughts on being a white South African prompted this reflection on justice, equity and the modern idea of the state – against the background of moral feelings of guilt and shame, cultural diversity and merging identities. Its aim is to provide a perspective on the unity of the public legal order of the state, the distinct meaning of citizenship and affirmative action in terms (...) of the distinction between constitutive and regulative legal principles also helping white South Africans to understand how affirmative action relates to injustices of the past. The classical understanding of equity will play a key role in this discussion, aimed at showing how we can avoid the apparent impasse of equality before the law and of “fair discrimination.”. (shrink)

Studie over het verschijnsel helderziendheid waarbij de verschillende in de loop der tijden ontwikkelde theorieën en verklaringen in een logisch verband behandeld worden.

Events in the US in 2020 have laid bare the reality that racism and its effects continue to take a heavy toll on the lives of Black Americans. The three articles in this issue of AJOB each provide...

In this paper, I present an account of group competence that is explicitly framed for cases of epistemic performances. According to it, we must consider group epistemic competence as the group agents’ capacity to produce knowledge, and not the result of the summation of its individual members’ competences to produce knowledge. Additionally, I contend that group competence must be understood in terms of group normative status. To introduce my view, I present Jesper Kallestrup’s denial that group competence involves anything over (...) and beyond the aggregation of individual competences. I have divided my response into two parts. First, I compare two conceptions of competence from Ernest Sosa’s reliabilist virtue epistemology, Thinking about oneself: The place and value of reflection in philosophy and psychology, Springer, 2019) and David Löwenstein’s account of know-how. Second, I take the results from this comparison and apply them to the issue of group know-how, by the hand of Orestis Palermos and Deborah Tollefsen’s twofold approach to the topic Socially extended epistemology, Oxford University Press, 2018). Finally, I return to Kallestrup’s denial to make my point in favour of the conception of genuine group competence as the group normative status to achieve success. (shrink)

Статтю присвячено аналізу розуміння ієрархії у православній філософській та богословській думці, та визначенню того, як це розуміння впливає на православний світогляд. Мета статті досягається за допомогою застосування авторами методології, розробленої представниками філософської школи інтегрального традиціоналізму, оскільки остання являє собою продукт глибокого вивчення та зіставлення досвіду різних релігійних традицій, а також виявляє критерії традиціоналістського світогляду як такого, спільні для різних традицій. Зокрема, автори використовують висновки французького філософа-традиціоналіста Рене Генона про сакральну та ініціатичну природу ієрархії у традиційних суспільствах для пошуку відповідників у (...) православній релігійній традиції. Такі відповідники автори знаходять у працях отців церкви, які вважаються канонічними для православної релігійної традиції та являють собою «становий хребет» її філософського світогляду. За підсумками проведеного дослідження, автори даної публікації виявили, що православний релігійний світогляд є ієрархічним за своєю суттю. (shrink)

The language of rights is increasingly used to regulate access to health care and allocation of resources in the health care field. The right to health has been grounded on different theories of justice. Scholars within the liberal tradition have grounded the right to health care on Rawls's two principles of justice. Thus, the right to health care has been justified as being one of the basic liberties, as enabling equality of opportunity, or as being justified by the maximin principle. (...) In this article, Filc analyzes—from a radical egalitarian standpoint—the limitations of the different attempts to ground an equal right to health on Rawls's theory of justice and offers a first approximation to a radical egalitarian formulation of the right to health. (shrink)

The article aims to, from the study of several writings of Pascal,return to what the seventeenth century thinker would have consideredabout time and eternity: what they would be, if and how they wouldrelate. For this, it will be firstly outlined a course that will go through thestudy of the human condition, describing its situation of disproportion and misery, and the condition of the things of worldly life, in addition to man, until the understanding of the existence of another order is (...) reached. This will then mark a course from time to eternity, or, as it will be seen, from flow to presence. (shrink)

O percurso argumentativo do Discurso de Metafísica encontra um momento de tensão quando se atinge o artigo 13, pois, após abordar Deus e a substância individual com caracterizações que induzem ao fatalismo, Leibniz procura afirmar a contingência e a liberdade tanto divina quanto humana. O exame que se segue tem como objetivo a descrição dessa dificuldade, bem como a apresentação de tentativas de solucioná-la – articulando as noções e respostas dadas no Discurso de Metafísica e outros textos de Leibniz, e (...) buscando sempre manter uma coerência em relação à sua filosofia. (shrink)

We intend to present a reading of Franklin Leopoldo e Silva’s Bergson: intuição e discurso filosófico from the perspective of the problem of expression, emphasizing how the methodological and discursive issue in philosophy is resolved by overcoming traditional problems related to the subject-object distinction, privileging now interiority, a genetic method, suggestion, and philosophical attitude, which we will finally try to qualify as generous. Thus, we aim not only to reveal Franklin Leopoldo e Silva’s Bergson, but also the Bergsonism present in (...) the Brazilian philosopher. (shrink)

In the particular case of Heraclitus, the complexity of the problem of interpretation is compounded by virtue of the stylistic peculiarities of his expression, which is apophthegmatic, logically asyndetic, cryptically symbolic, and haughtily enigmatic. It is not surprising, therefore, that in successive ages Heraclitus has been held up to glory or obloquy as the teacher of a Flowing Philosophy eventuating in irrationalism and mysticism; as the inspirer of Stoicism, conflagration and all; as the avatar of Satan behind the Monarchian heresy (...) of Noëtus; as he who first dimly discerned the Grundeinsicht of Hegelianism; as a Fascist, a Marxist, a Nietzschean, an Existentialist. (shrink)