Hibbing et al. (2014) contend that individual differences in political ideology can be substantially accounted for in terms of differences in a single psychological factor, namely, strength of negativity bias. We argue that, given the multidimensional structure of ideology, a better explanation of ideological variation will take into account both individual differences in negativity bias and differences in empathic concern.

Philip R. Shields shows that ethical and religious concerns inform even the most technical writings on logic and language, and that, for Wittgenstein, the need to establish clear limitations is both a logical and an ethical demand. Rather than merely saying specific things about theology and religion, major texts from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations express their fundamentally religious nature by showing that there are powers which bear down upon and sustain us. Shields finds a religious (...) view of the world at the very heart of Wittgenstein's philosophy. "Shields argues that the appearance throughout Wittgenstein's writings of such concepts as ritual, limit, transgression, a change of will, pride, temptation, and judgment implies a relation between religion and the logical aspects of Wittgenstein's philosophy."-- Choice "Of the many recent books about Wittgenstein, Logic and Sin is one of the very few that are well worth having"--Fergus Kerr, Modern Theology "What Shields has uncovered in Wittgenstein's religious sensibility is something genuine and profound. . . . Shields has not just written an important book on Wittgenstein but an enlightening work that invites further reflection."--Eric O. Springsted, Cross Currents. (shrink)

In our contemporary society it is widely recognized that public discourse has become increasingly polemical and polarized, as claims to truth and justice are cynically dismissed as manipulative power plays. We argue first that this growth of power politics reflects the triumph of the objectifying stance of the social sciences, and the consequent loss of any distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power, and second that it is ad hominem to dismiss or accept people’s arguments simply because of their identity interests, (...) their positionality, instead of considering the explicit meaning and validity of what they say. By adopting the objectifying perspective of the social sciences, identity theorists on the left and the right reduce “power” to coercion and fail to appreciate the power of persuasion, and the normative conditions that make rational agency possible. This tendency is ultimately contemptuous of human dignity because it undermines the rational agency and moral responsibility of everyone concerned, from the objectified human subjects to the objectifying theorists. (shrink)

De verkenning van God als vreeswekkende rechter is diep verankerd in het werk van Wittgenstein. Hiermee wil hij de grenzen van het menselijk denken aftasten.

A paper was published in 2003 discussing the ethics of nurses participating in executions by inserting the intravenous line for lethal injections and providing care until death. This paper was circulated on an international email list of senior nurses and academics to engender discussion. From that discussion, several people agreed to contribute to a paper expressing their own thoughts and feelings about the ethics of nurses participating in executions in countries where capital punishment is legal. While a range of opinions (...) were presented, these opinions fell into two main themes. The first of these included reflections on the philosophical obligations of nurses as caregivers who support those in times of great need, including condemned prisoners at the end of life. The second theme encompassed the notion that no nurse ever should participate in the active taking of life, in line with the codes of ethics of various nursing organisations. This range of opinions suggests the complexity of this issue and the need for further public discussion. (shrink)

This paper argues that there is a counter-productive tendency for many feminist critiques of patriarchy to revert to the same impoverished conception of power that they are critiquing, and thus—despite a commitment to the idea of a social self—inadvertently to valorize the notions of independence, autonomy, and choice that are enshrined in the ideal of the patriarchal individual. An adequate account of power relations between men and women cannot be rendered if we employ a misplaced and reductive model of power, (...) nor if we fail to acknowledge the intersubjective and interdependent nature of human self-consciousness—the deep and varied ways in which our identity and agency are intricately interwoven and wax or wane as a whole. Rightly understood, men are not as powerful and autonomous, nor women as powerless and oppressed, as they seem when viewed through the distorting lens provided by modern liberal individualism. (shrink)

Recent books by Paul Johnston, D. Z. Phillips, Philip Shields, and B. R. Tilghman all depict Wittgenstein as centrally concerned with ethics, but they range from representing his main works as expressing and advocating a particular religious-ethical outlook to arguing that his work has no ethical content but aims primarily to clarify such logical distinctions as that between ethical and empirical judgments. All four books raise the question about the moral philosopher's proper role, and each suggests a rather (...) different answer. Via the discussion of these books, I argue that Wittgenstein's stress on diversity in the ways of human life, his notion of conceptual grammar, the idea of a perspicuous representation, his lifelong involvement with art and his suggestions about its connection with morality, and his preoccupation with aspect-seeing-all suggest new possibilities of rehabilitating the historically recurrent idea that the philosopher may be a moral sage. (shrink)

In this paper, we are concerned with the morality of killing human shields. Many moral philosophers seem to believe that knowingly killing human shields necessarily involves intentionally targeting human shields. If we assume that the distinction between intention and foresight is morally significant, then this view would entail that it is generally harder to justify a military operation in which human shields are knowingly killed than a military operation in which the same number of casualties result (...) as a merely foreseen side effect. We argue, however, that only some cases of knowingly killing human shields should be regarded as intentionally targeting human shields, and thus only those cases face higher bars of justification. We shall formulate different principles that help us to distinguish between cases where a military operation involves the deliberate harming of human shields and cases where it does not. As we shall see, these principles are relevant in scenarios that are all too realistic and common, such as the bombing of legitimate military targets located amid civilian populations. (shrink)

Aristotle attaches particular significance to the homonymy of many central concepts in philosophy and science: that is, to the diversity of ways of being common to a single general concept. His preoccupation with homonymy influences his approach to almost every subject that he considers, and it clearly structures the philosophical methodology that he employs both when criticizing others and when advancing his own positive theories. Where there is homonymy there is multiplicity: Aristotle aims to find the order within this multiplicity, (...) and believes that doing so is crucial to scientific inquiry and philosophical progress.Christopher Shields investigates and evaluates Aristotle's approach to questions about homonymy, characterizing the metaphysical and semantic commitments necessary to establish the homonymy of a given concept. Then, in a series of case-studies, Shields examines in detail some of Aristotle's principal applications of homonymy--to the body, sameness and oneness, life, goodness, and being. Shields's aim is not only to give a fuller understanding of Aristotle's methodology and to illuminate his specific doctrines in a variety of areas, but to show that this methodology remains fruitful today. (shrink)

Instead of conceiving ethical commands as divine revelations or as the discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of years, as members of our species have worked out how to live together and prosper. Here, Kitcher elaborates his radical vision of this millennia-long ethical project.

We understand Aristotle’s soul–body hylomorphism better if we first understand the critical discussions of his predecessors which occupy most of the first book of his De Anima. Given that he regards his view as preferable to all earlier approaches, he must also think that his alternative, hylomorphism, avoids the pitfalls he identifies in those positions. In some cases, it is easy to see why he might think hylomorphism is defensible where they are not: for instance, he regards the reductively materialistic (...) views of the earliest natural philosophers as explanatorily impoverished. In other cases, however, this is far from clear. Aristotle highlights for special consideration the view that the soul is a harmonia (attunement) of the body, a view which, as was noted in antiquity, bears more than a passing resemblance to his own hylomorphism. It proves both difficult and instructive to determine, then, how he supposes hylomorphism avoids the problems he identifies in the doctrine of the soul as a harmonia. The core difference, it emerges, turns on Aristotle’s thoroughgoing teleology: the soul, he thinks, unlike a harmonia, has an intrinsic good toward which the body is orchestrated. (shrink)

In “Scientific Knowledge,” Philip Kitcher challenges arguments that deny the truth of the theoretical claims of science, and he attempts to discover reasons for endorsing the truth of such claims. He suggests that the discovery of such reasons might succeed if we ask why anyone thinks that the theoretical claims we accept are true and then look for answers that reconstruct actual belief‐generating processes. To this end, Kitcher presents the “homely argument” for scientific truth, which claims that when a (...) field of science is continually applied to yield precise predictions, then it is at least approximately true. He defends this approach and offers a supplementary account that gives more attention to detail. This account includes a historical aspect that must answer to skeptical challenges and a social aspect. (shrink)

The new computer technology that dramatically improves color reproduction in newspapers also allows digital retouching of photographs. Digital retouching can alter and synthesize photos to the point that the alteration is undetectable. This technology gives publications the ability to create eye?catching illustrations, but does it have a place in photojournalism? This paper attempts to raise some initial ethical questions. Although manipulation of photographs is not new, digital retouching allows for imperceptible alterations of photographs to be made with speed, ease, and (...) precision. All the editors agreed that news photographs should not be altered. However, there was disagreement about photographs that appeared in the feature sections, in particular photo illustrations. (shrink)

Presents general information about meteorology, weather, and climate and includes more than thirty activities to help study these topics, including making a ...

Philosophers are divided over moral internalism, the claim that moral judgement entails some motivation to comply with that judgement. Against moral internalism, externalists defend the conceptual coherence of scenarios in which an individual makes genuine moral judgements but is entirely unmoved by them. This is amoralist skepticism and these scenarios can be called amoralist scenarios. While the coherence of amoralist scenarios is disputed, philosophers seem to agree that the coherence of amoralist scenarios is not affected by whether the amoralist is (...) described as having moral knowledge or mere belief. But recent experimental research challenges this assumption. When evaluating amoralist scenarios, people’s intuitions lean towards externalism when the amoralist is described as knowing that X is morally wrong, whereas people’s intuitions lean towards internalism when the amoralist is described as believing that X is morally wrong. Call this the factivity effect. In this paper, I argue that the factivity effect is unlikely to be explained as an experimental artifact and that as a consequence, the traditional dispute over moral internalism and amoralist skepticism may need a major overhaul. The results of three studies testing the factivity effect provide support for this thesis. Implications of these results for the traditional debate over moral internalism are discussed. (shrink)

This book argues against the view that mathematical knowledge is a priori,contending that mathematics is an empirical science and develops historically,just as ...

Examines what is necessary for a group to constitute an agent that can display akrasia, and what steps such a group might take to establish self‐control. The topic has some interest in itself, and the discussion suggests some lessons about how we should think of akrasia in the individual as well as in the collective case. Under the image that the lessons support, akrasia is a sort of constitutional disorder: a failure to achieve a unity projected in the avowal of (...) agency. This image fits well with the constitutional model of the soul in Plato's Republic. (shrink)

Introductory Chapter to the _Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition_ (CUP, 2009).

There has recently been a revival of interest in panpsychism as a theory of consciousness. The hope of the contemporary proponents of panpsychism is that the view enables us to integrate consciousness into our overall theory of reality in a way that avoids the deep difficulties that plague the more conventional options of physicalism on the one hand and dualism on the other. However, panpsychism comes in two forms — strong and weak emergentist — and there are arguments that seem (...) to show that weak emergentist panpsychism faces problems analogous to those of physicalism whilst strong emergentist panpsychism faces problems analogous to those of dualism. In this paper, I will develop a new hybrid of the strong and weak emergentist forms of panpsychism, a view according to which subjects of experience are strongly emergent but their phenomenal properties are weakly emergent. I will argue that this hybrid view manages to avoid the challenges facing both physicalism and dualism, and the analogues of those challenges that seem to undermine standard forms of panpsychism. (shrink)

Without question, Process Philosophy and Political Liberalism: Rawls, Whitehead, Hartshorne, is Daniel Dombrowski's most important and well-argued treatise to date within his growing, prolific literary corpus. Bringing his expertise on John Rawls's political thought to bear on the process thinking of A. N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, he explores commonalities of approach and ventures the interpretive hypothesis that Rawls is, at least broadly speaking, a process philosopher. He also argues that each of these philosophers appropriately shares the appellation “political liberal” (...) when that term is carefully defined. I find this strongly plausible. (shrink)

One way to determine whether a mental condition should be considered a disorder is to first give necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be a disorder and then see if it meets these conditions. But this approach has been criticized for begging normative questions. Concerning autism (and other conditions), a neurodiversity movement has arisen with essentially two aims: (1) advocate for the rights and interests of individuals with autism, and (2) de-pathologize autism. We argue that denying autism’s disorder status (...) could undermine autism’s exculpatory role in cases where individuals with autism are charged with a crime. Our argument raises a dilemma for the neurodiversity movement: advocating for the rights and interests of individuals with autism may require viewing autism as a condition that can be inherently disabling (at least for some individuals). If this is right, autism’s disorder status might be maintained (again, at least for some individuals) without deriving this result from any general account of disorder. (shrink)

This chapter outlines three programs that aim to use biological insights in support of philosophical positions in ethics: Aristotelian approaches found, for example, in Thomas Hurka and Philippa Foot; Humean approaches found in Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard; and biologically grounded approaches found in of Elliott Sober and Brian Skyrms. The first two approaches begin with a philosophical view, and seek support for it in biology. The third approach begins with biology, and uses it to illuminate the status of morality. (...) This chapter pursues a version of the third program. A major accomplishment of evolutionary biology has been the explanation of biological altruism, which opens the door to a similar explanation of psychological altruism, or “fellow-feeling.” The chapter conjectures that humans have evolved a capacity for normative governance by socially shared rules. A process of cultural evolution led to the social rules with which we are familiar. This genealogical story poses a challenge, for the idea of moral truth plays no role in it. The story therefore lends support to non-cognitivism or anti-realist expressivism. The chapter concludes by exploring the implications of the genealogical story for moral knowledge, moral objectivity, and the idea of moral authority. (shrink)

This is a book about the aesthetics of wonder, about wonder as it figures in our relation to the visual world and to rare or new experiences.

In “Epistemology in Philosophy of Religion,” Philip Quinn focuses on the central problem of religious epistemology for monotheistic religions: the epistemic status of belief in the existence of God. He explores what epistemic conditions arguments for God's existence would have to satisfy to be successful and whether any arguments satisfy those conditions. Turning to the claims of reformed epistemology about belief in God, Quinn assesses Alvin Plantinga's claim that belief in God is for many theists properly basic, that is, (...) has positive epistemic status even when it is not based on arguments or any other kind of propositional evidence. Quinn distinguishes two versions of this claim. According to the first, emphasized in Plantinga's earlier work, theistic belief is properly basic with respect to justification or rationality, while according to the second version, prominent in Plantinga's more recent work, theistic belief is properly basic with respect to warrant. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of moral uncertainty in explaining the morally disruptive character of new technologies. We argue that existing accounts of technomoral change do not fully explain its disruptiveness. This explanatory gap can be bridged by examining the epistemic dimensions of technomoral change, focusing on moral uncertainty and inquiry. To develop this account, we examine three historical cases: the introduction of the early pregnancy test, the contraception pill, and brain death. The resulting account highlights what we call “differential (...) disruption” and provides a resource for fields such as technology assessment, ethics of technology, and responsible innovation. (shrink)

Experiments in particle physics have hitherto failed to produce any significant evidence for the many explicit models of physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) that had been proposed over the past decades. As a result, physicists have increasingly turned to model-independent strategies as tools in searching for a wide range of possible BSM effects. In this paper, we describe the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SM-EFT) and analyse it in the context of the philosophical discussions about models, theories, and (bottom-up) (...) effective field theories. We find that while the SM-EFT is a quantum field theory, assisting experimentalists in searching for deviations from the SM, in its general form it lacks some of the characteristic features of models. Those features only come into play if put in by hand or prompted by empirical evidence for deviations. Employing different philosophical approaches to models, we argue that the case study suggests not to take a view on models that is overly permissive because it blurs the lines between the different stages of the SM-EFT research strategies and glosses over particle physicists' motivations for undertaking this bottom-up approach in the first place. Looking at EFTs from the perspective of modelling does not require taking a stance on some specific brand of realism or taking sides in the debate between reduction and emergence into which EFTs have recently been embedded. (shrink)

A person presented with adequate but not conclusive evidence for a proposition is in a position voluntarily to acquire a belief in that proposition, or to suspend judgment about it. The availability of doxastic options in such cases grounds a moderate form of doxastic voluntarism not based on practical motives, and therefore distinct from pragmatism. In such cases, belief-acquisition or suspension of judgment meets standard conditions on willing: it can express stable character traits of the agent, it can be responsive (...) to reasons, and it is compatible with a subjective awareness of the available options. (shrink)

Strong claims have been made for emergence as a new paradigm for understanding science, consciousness, and religion. Tracing the past history and current definitions of the concept, Clayton assesses the case for emergent phenomena in the natural world and their significance for philosophy and theology. Complex emergent phenomena require irreducible levels of explanation in physics, chemistry and biology. This pattern of emergence suggests a new approach to the problem of consciousness, which is neither reducible to brain states nor proof of (...) a mental substance or soul. Although emergence does not entail classical theism, it is compatible with a variety of religious positions. Clayton concludes with a defence of emergentist panentheism and a Christian constructive theology consistent with the new sciences of emergence. (shrink)

There are a number of assumptions made in our accepted psychology of moral decision-making that consequentialism seems to violate:: value connectionism, pluralism and dispositionalism. But consequentialism violates them only on a utilitarian or similar theory of value, not on the rival sort of theory that is sketched here.