Cross-cultural comparisons face several methodological challenges. In an attempt at resolving some such challenges, Nathan Sivin has developed the framework of “cultural manifolds.” This framework includes all the pertinent dimensions of a complex phenomenon and the interactions that make all of these aspects into a single whole. In engaging with this framework, Anna Akasoy illustrates that the phenomena used in comparative approaches to cultural and intellectual history need to be subjected to a continuous change of perspectives. Writing about comparative (...) history, Warwick Anderson directs attention to an articulation between synchronic and diachronic modes of inquiry. In addition, he asks: If comparative studies require a number of collaborators, how does one coordinate the various contributors? And how does one ensure that the comparison is between separate entities, without mutual historical entanglement? Finally, how does comparative history stack up against more dynamic approaches, such as connected, transnational, and postcolonial histories? Gérard Colas, for his part, claims that comparisons cannot allow one to move away from the dominant Euroamerican conceptual framework. Should this indeed be the case, we should search for better ways of facilitating a “mutual pollination” between philosophies. Finally, Edmond Eh first asserts that Sivin fails to recognize the difference between comparisons within cultures and comparisons between cultures. He then argues that the application of generalism is limited to comparisons of historical nature. (shrink)

Much of experimental philosophy consists of surveying 'folk' intuitions about philosophically relevant issues. Are the results of these surveys evidence that the relevant folk intuitions cannot be predicted from the ‘armchair’? We found that a solid majority of philosophers could predict even results claimed to be 'surprising'. But, we argue, this does not mean that such experiments have no role at all in philosophy.

Epistemologists frequently claim that the question “What should I believe?” demarcates the field of epistemology. This question is then compared to the question asked in ethics: “What should I do?” The question and the ensuing comparison, it is thought, specify both the content and the normativity at stake in epistemology. I argue that both of the assumptions embedded in this demarcation are problematic. By thinking of epistemology’s focal question in this light, first, we risk importing our assumptions about the epistemic (...) domain into our understanding of the nature and normativity of the belief state, and second, we come to have a false picture of the normativity that supposedly underlies the domain. In Chapter 1, “The Doxastic Account of the Epistemic”, I explore a range of views that assume there to be an essential connection between belief and truth. I look at views that treat all beliefs as attempts to believe the truth, views that consider belief’s biological function to be accurate representation, and views that hold that the very concept of belief is a normative concept. I go on to explore instrumentalist conceptions of belief’s truth connection and conduct an inquiry into the value of true belief. I conclude that neither the value of true belief nor an essential connection between belief and truth can explain epistemic normativity. In Chapter 2, “Evidential Exclusivity, Correctness, and the Nature of Belief” I note that epistemologists have recently argued that the best explanation for the apparent truth of a pair of claims - “Transparency” and “Exclusivity” – is that belief is subject to a standard of correctness such that a belief that p is correct if and only if p is true. I argue that the proposed explanation unduly privileges one part of belief’s full functional profile – its role in deliberation – and that a more complete consideration of belief’s role in cognition suggests an alternative explanation for Exclusivity and Transparency but denies belief’s standard of correctness. In Chapter 3, “Tradeoffs and Epistemic Value”, I look at a debate about whether epistemic norms are teleological. Though it’s standard to assume in keeping with teleology that certain goals or values explain the content of our norms, a collection of recent papers have aimed to show that this assumption can’t be correct because teleological norms countenance tradeoffs but epistemic norms don’t countenance tradeoffs. I note that the kind of non-teleological view that countenances no tradeoffs whatsoever is actually quite extreme and virtually unheard of in ethics. I go on to make the case that norms that license no tradeoffs can’t reasonably be taken to be grounded in value at all, and thus can’t be understood to give rise to necessary normativity. I conclude by suggesting that we broaden our conception of the epistemic domain to recognize teleological norms that provide recommendations for methods of inquiry or pursuit of significant truth or knowledge. (shrink)

The relationship of word-meaning to speaker's-meaning has not been examined thoroughly enough. Some philosophical problems are solved and others made plainer if the full consequences of a proper relationship between these two is worked out.

In this paper we investigate composition models of incarnation, according to which Christ is a compound of qualitatively and numerically different constituents. We focus on three-part models, according to which Christ is composed of a divine mind, a human mind, and a human body. We consider four possible relational structures that the three components could form. We argue that a ‘hierarchy of natures’ model, in which the human mind and body are united to each other in the normal way, and (...) in which they are jointly related to the divine mind by the relation of co-action, is the most metaphysically plausible model. Finally, we consider the problem of how Christ can be a single person even when his components may be considered persons. We argue that an Aristotelian metaphysics, according to which identity is a matter of function, offers a plausible solution: Christ's components may acquire a radically new identity through being parts of the whole, which enables them to be reidentified as parts, not persons. (shrink)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the French philosopher of science Edmond Goblot wrote three prescient papers on function and teleology. He advanced the remarkable thesis that functions are, as a matter of conceptual analysis, selected effects. He also argued that “selection” must be understood broadly to include both evolutionary natural selection and intelligent design. Here, I do three things. First, I give an overview of Goblot’s thought. Second, I identify his core thesis about function. Third, I argue that, (...) despite its ingenuity, Goblot’s expansive construal of function cannot be right. Still, Goblot deserves long-overdue credit for his work. (shrink)

Many political theorists today deny that citizenship can be defended on liberal grounds alone. Cosmopolitans claim that loyalty to a particular state is incompatible with universal liberal principles, which hold that we have equal duties of justice to persons everywhere, while nationalist theorists justify civic obligations only by reaching beyond liberal principles and invoking the importance of national culture. In Liberal Loyalty, Anna Stilz challenges both views by defending a distinctively liberal understanding of citizenship. Drawing on Kant, Rousseau, and (...) Habermas, Stilz argues that we owe civic obligations to the state if it is sufficiently just, and that constitutionally enshrined principles of justice in themselves--rather than territory, common language, or shared culture--are grounds for obedience to our particular state and for democratic solidarity with our fellow citizens. She demonstrates that specifying what freedom and equality mean among a particular people requires their democratic participation together as a group. Justice, therefore, depends on the authority of the democratic state because there is no way equal freedom can be defined or guaranteed without it. Yet, as Stilz shows, this does not mean that each of us should entertain some vague loyalty to democracy in general. Citizens are politically obligated to their own state and to each other, because within their particular democracy they define and ultimately guarantee their own civil rights. Liberal Loyalty is a persuasive defense of citizenship on purely liberal grounds. (shrink)

This conversation between two scholars of international law focuses on the contemporary realities of feminist analysis of international law and on current and future spaces of resistance. It notes that feminism has moved from the margin towards the centre, but that this has also come at a cost. As the language of women’s rights and gender equality has travelled into the international policy worlds of crisis management and peace and security, feminist scholars need to become more careful in their analysis (...) and find new ways of resistance. While noting that we live in dangerous times, this is also a hopeful discussion. (shrink)

How many hairs must a person lose before they become bald? There doesn’t seem to be an easy way of answering this. This is because “bald”, along with a large number of other words, is vague. This vagueness causes problems and Anna Mahtani specialises in thinking very precisely about these problems….

This article explains what is meant by the creolizing of ideas and then demonstrates it through exploring a political observation about political illegitimacy made by eighteenth-century Genevan social and political thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and creolized when the nineteenth-century African-American educator and social critic Anna Julia Cooper argued that the ideal of independence that lay at the core of political doctrines of republican self-governance relied on forms of willful blindness that cloaked the ongoing dependence of all human beings on one (...) another. In conclusion, the article considers what Cooper's expansion of Rousseau's insight and creolized readings of political philosophy imply for our pursuit of just political institutions today. (shrink)

Originally published in 1955, The Moral Decision remains today a fresh, lively, and literate quest for moral guides in the American system of law. Each topic is introduced with a real courtroom case followed by a summary of the uncontroverted facts, the issues before the court, the judge's opinion, and Edmond Cahn's objective and penetrating discussion of the ethical issues involved. The cases chosen operate as prisms, revealing an entire spectrum of moral forces—personal ambitions, group standards, lusts, sufferings, and ideals. (...) A new foreword by Norman Redlich, Dean of the New York University School of Law, affirms the value of The Moral Decision as an authoritative and humane introduction to law and morality. (shrink)

Fifteen philosophers offer new essays exploring the metaphysics of relations from antiquity to the present day. They address topics as diverse as ancient and medieval reasons for scepticism about polyadic properties; recent attempts to reduce causal and spatiotemporal relations; recent work on the directionality of relational properties; powers ontologies and their associated problems; whether the most promising interpretations of quantum mechanics posit a fundamentally relational world; and whether the very idea of such a world is coherent. From those who question (...) whether there are relational properties at all, to those who hold they are a fundamental part of reality, The Metaphysics of Relations covers a broad spectrum of positions on the nature and ontological status of relations, from antiquity to the present day. (shrink)

How can we explain the structure of perceptual experience? What is it that we perceive? How is it that we perceive objects and not disjoint arrays of properties? By which sense or senses do we perceive objects? This book investigates Aristotle's views on these and related questions.

"Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind" is an elegant survey of Stoic and Epicurean ideas about the soul an introduction to two ancient schools whose belief in the soul's physicality offer compelling parallels to modern approaches in the ...

Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary is the first full-length overview of the important work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Anna Marie Smith clearly shows how Laclau and Mouffe's work has brought Gramscian, poststructuralist and psychoanalytic perspectives to revitalize traditional political theory. With clarity and insight, she shows how they have constructed a highly effective theory of identity formation and power relations that carefully draws from the criticism of political theory from postmodern anti-foundationalist political theory.

In 1766 philosopher, novelist, composer, and political provocateur Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a fugitive, decried by his enemies as a dangerous madman. Meanwhile David Hume—now recognized as the foremost philosopher in the English language—was being universally lauded as a paragon of decency. And so Rousseau came to England with his beloved dog, Sultan, and willingly took refuge with his more respected counterpart. But within months, the exile was loudly accusing his benefactor of plotting to dishonor him—which prompted a most uncharacteristically violent (...) response from Hume. And so began a remarkable war of words and actions that ensnared many of the leading figures in British and French society, and became the talk of intellectual Europe. Rousseau's Dog is the fascinating true story of the bitter and very public quarrel that turned the Age of Enlightenment's two most influential thinkers into deadliest of foes—a most human tale of compassion, treachery, anger, and revenge; of celebrity and its price; of shameless spin; of destroyed reputations and shattered friendships. (shrink)

This special volume of Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy presents sixteen specially written essays on virtue and happiness, and the treatment of these topics by thinkers from the fifth century BC to the third century AD. It is published in honour of Julia Annas--one of the leading scholars in the field.

When first published twenty years ago, The Logic of Medicine presented a new way of thinking about clinical medicine as a scholarly discipline as well as a profession. Since then, advances in research and technology have revolutionized both the practice and theory of medicine. In this new, extensively rewritten edition, Dr. Murphy includes changes to show how these different areas of scholarship may affect details of "the logic of medicine" without compromising its fundamental coherence. New to this edition are discussions (...) of the challenge of the flood of new empirical data, new ideas in genetics, molecular biology, homeostasis, pathogenesis, cancer, aging, and Alzheimer's disease. Murphy also comments on such new theoretical topics as dynamic systems, chaos, and fractals and their impact on the burgeoning fields of philosophy and practice of medicine. Written with medical students in mind, the book includes a glossary, many new examples, and problems for solutions with comments on each. An entirely new chapter deals with modeling. Clinicians and researchers will also find the principles thought-provoking and illuminating. (shrink)

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

What is "race"? What role, if any, should race play in our moral obligations to others and to ourselves? Ethics along the Color Line addresses the question of whether black Americans should think of each other as members of an extended racial family and base their treatment of each other on this consideration, or eschew racial identity and envision the day when people do not think in terms of race. Anna Stubblefield suggests furthermore that white Americans should consider the (...) same issues. She argues, finally, that for both black and white Americans, thinking of races as families is crucial in helping to combat anti-black oppression. Stubblefield is concerned that the philosophical debate—argued notably between Kwame Anthony Appiah and Lucius Outlaw—over whether or not we should strongly identify in terms of race, and whether or not we should take race into account when we decide how to treat each other, has stalled. Drawing on black feminist scholarship about the moral importance of thinking and acting in terms of community and extended family, the author finds that strong racial identification, if based on appropriate ideals, is morally sound and even necessary to end white supremacy. (shrink)

In Philosophy Bites Again, a brand new selection of interviews from the popular podcast, leading philosophers explore some of the major philosophical questions that affect us all. Both thought-provoking and engaging, the discussion ranges from pleasure, pain, and himour, to free will, the self, and the meaning of life.

This paper explores the relationship between a prominent version of the relational view of memory and recent work on forms of unsuccessful remembering or memory errors. I argue that unsuccessful remembering poses an important challenge for the relational view. Unsuccessful remembering can be divided into two kinds: misremembering and confabulating. I discuss each of these cases in light of a recent relational account, according to which remembering is characterized by an experiential relation to past events, and I argue that experiential (...) relations do not adequately distinguish between remembering and unsuccessful remembering. This is because there are, on the one hand, cases of remembering that do not instantiate the relevant experiential relations, and, on the other hand, cases of confabulation and misremembering that do instantiate the relevant experiential relations. I conclude by suggesting that any successful relationalist attempt to explain remembering needs to come to grips with unsuccessful remembering. (shrink)

In this 2002 book, Anna Elisabetta Galeotti examines the most intractable problems which toleration encounters and argues that what is really at stake is not religious or moral disagreement but the unequal status of different social groups. Liberal theories of toleration fail to grasp this and consequently come up with normative solutions that are inadequate when confronted with controversial cases. Galeotti proposes, as an alternative, toleration as recognition, which addresses the problem of according equal respect to groups as well (...) as equal liberty to individuals. She offers an interpretation that is both a revision and an expansion of liberal theory, in which toleration constitutes an important component not only of a theory of justice, but also of the politics of identity. Her study will appeal to a wide range of readers in political philosophy, political theory, and law. (shrink)

The long section on knowledge and the philosopher in books V–VII of the Republic is undoubtedly the most famous passage in Plato's work. So it is perhaps a good idea to begin by stressing how very peculiar, and in many ways elusive, it is. It is exciting, and stimulating, but extremely hard to understand.

Some years ago I started to write a book on virtue ethics, in which I tried to meet early criticisms of what was then a new way of doing ethics. The book continued to be unsatisfactory, and I finally abandoned it, realizing that I needed to get clear about virtue before producing a defence of virtue ethics. This need should have been obvious, especially since I frequently teach Platonic dialogues where Socrates gets people to see that they are doing what (...) I was doing, namely developing ideas about something without first examining what it is. The need became even more obvious as the field rapidly expanded with the production of Humean, Nietschean, Kantian and consequentialist kinds of virtue ethics. Within the field of neo-Aristotelian ethics itself it became clear that different aspects can be stressed: the importance of practical wisdom can be developed, for example, without defending a naturalistic account of the relation of virtue to happiness.I finally wrote a book to explore and d .. (shrink)

Assuming that people want to be happy, can we show that they cannot be happy without being ethical, and that all rational people therefore should be able to see that it is in their own best interest to be ethical? Is it irrational to reject ethics? Aristotle thought so, claims Anna Lännström; but, she adds, he also thought that there was no way to prove it to a skeptic or an immoral person. Lännström probes Artistotle's view that desire is (...) crucial to decision making and to the formation of moral habits, pinpointing the "love of the fine" as the starting point of any argument for ethics. Those who love the fine can be persuaded that ethics is a crucial part of our happiness. However, as Lännström explains, the immoral person does not share this love and therefore Aristotle denied that this argument would convince the immoral person to change. Lännström maintains, thus, that Aristotle's _Ethics_ was written for those who already love the fine, aiming to help them improve their self-understanding and encouraging them to become better human beings. As a consequence, Aristotelian ethics remain viable today. Written in accessible and lucid prose, _Loving the Fine_ contributes to the renewed interest in Aristotle's moral philosophy and will be of interest to students of virtue ethics and the history of philosophy. "_Loving the Fine_ is a very interesting manuscript, treating some of the most significant issues in moral philosophy. As is well known, Aristotelian moral philosophy has undergone a great revival in the last quarter century through the work of scholars such as MacIntyre, Anscombe, and Nussbaum, to name only a few. Lännström enters into the debates that this revival has engendered and has important things to say about them." —Gilbert Meilaender, Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Professor of Christian Ethics, Valparaiso University. (shrink)

Conceptual primitives and semantic universals are the cornerstones of a semantic theory which Anna Wierzbicka has been developing for many years. Semantics: Primes and Universals is a major synthesis of her work, presenting a full and systematic exposition of that theory in a non-technical and readable way. It delineates a full set of universal concepts, as they have emerged from large-scale investigations across a wide range of languages undertaken by the author and her colleagues. On the basis of empirical (...) cross-linguistic studies it vindicates the old notion of the "psychic unity of mankind", while at the same time offering a framework for the rigorous description of different languages and cultures. (shrink)

The primary goal of this paper is to provide substantial motivation for exploring an Acquaintance account of phenomenal consciousness, on which what fundamentally explains phenomenal consciousness is the relation of acquaintance. Its secondary goal is to take a few steps towards such an account. Roughly, my argument proceeds as follows. Motivated by prioritizing naturalization, the debate about the nature of phenomenal consciousness has been almost monopolized by representational theories (first-order and meta-representational). Among them, Self-Representationalism is by far the most antecedently (...) promising (or so I argue). However, on thorough inspection, Self-Representationalism turns out not explanatorily or theoretically better than the Acquaintance account. Indeed, the latter seems to be superior in at least some important respects. Therefore, at the very least, there are good reasons to take the Acquaintance account into serious consideration as an alternative to representational theories. The positive contribution of this paper is a sketch of an account of consciousness on which phenomenal consciousness is explained partly in representationalist terms, but where a crucial role is played by the relation of acquaintance. (shrink)