Christian morality has been of enormous significance in world history and still underpins moral notions today. In this groundbreaking volume, J. Ian H. McDonald explores the notion of Christian ethics and discusses its roots, its significance in developing moral standards throughout the world and its stability in the modern world. The Crucible of Christian Morality begins with a study of the ethos of early Christian communities, examining the relation of cosmic vision to moral attitude and authority, noting also the (...) types of moral discourse used, and tracing the roots of these developments to the Old Testament and to the ministry of Jesus. The second half of the book concentrates on selected moral themes, concerned with persons, with communities in societies and with virtue or moral excellence, situating them in the context of ancient cultural developments. (shrink)

A collection of articles on the the principles of social justice from an Australian Catholic perspective. Contents: Forward (Archbishop Philip Wilson), Introduction (James Franklin), The right to life (James Franklin), The right to serve and worship God in public and private (John Sharpe), The right to religious formation (Richard Rymarz), The right to personal liberty under just law (Michael Casey), The right to equal protection of just law regardless of sex, nationality, colour or creed (Sam Gregg), The right (...) to freedom of expression (Damian Grace), The right to choose and freely maintain a state of life, married or single, lay or religious (Marita Winters), The right to education (Anthony Cleary), The right to petition government for the redress of grievances (Paul Russell), The right to a nationality (Andrew Hamilton), The right to have access to the means of livelihood, by migration when necessary (Brenda Hubber), The right of association and peaceful assembly (Michael Hogan), The right to work and choose one's occupation (Ian Blandthorn), The right to personal ownership, use and disposal of property subject to the right of others (Brian Coman), The right to a living wage (Garrick Small), The right to collective bargaining (Keith Harvey), The right to associate by industries and professions to obtain economic justice (Henrik Jurisevic), The right to assistance from society, if necessary from the State, in distress of persons and family (Catherine Althaus), Afterword (James Franklin). (shrink)

This article stages a critical-philosophical encounter between Derridean deconstruction and Peircean biosemiotic theory focussing on the role and status of metaphor within each. It argues that the biosemiotic understanding of metaphor as a structuring principle informing the sign-activity of living organisms and processes offers an alternative understanding of a generalised metaphoricity of life as such and an account of what might be called biological text, textuality or even, biosemiotic intertextuality. The article argues that biological textuality obeys a logic of semiotic (...) immanence that is distinct from the logic of différance and of the quasi-transcendental as thought by Derrida. On this basis it elaborates the way in which metaphor in biosemiotic theory, and also the generalised biological metaphoricity informing the text of life, function as radically non-representational, inferential, and hermeneutic operators which model the semiotic processes of life and thereby enable an epistemologically weak or, in a certain sense, non-philosophical realism. (shrink)

This article argues that attempts by philosophy to think emotions as embodied is caught between the necessity of thinking them as a subjective first-person dimension of experience on the one hand and as an objective biological determination on the other. Philosophy has tended to view these two dimensions, qualitative and quantitative, respectively, as either in a parallelism with each other or alternatively has dispensed with either one or the other. This article draws on Georges Canguilhem’s biological thinking of “sense” as (...) a mode of functional relationality that constitutes the being of organisms as such and brings it into a comparative alignment with Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking of sense and touch. On this basis it argues that emotions are an extension of a more fundamental affectivity proper to biological life in general. This allows for the qualitative dimension of emotions and the objective knowledge of them in biology to be thought in an ontological continuity with each other. It also allows for a renewed thinking of the fundamental continuity of emotional and affective experience in human and non-human animal life. (shrink)

The image of philosophy -- The relational universe -- Generic science -- Thinking bodies.

This book gives a critical assessment of key developments in contemporary French philosophy, highlighting the diverse ways in which recent French thought has moved beyond the philosophical positions and arguments which have been widely associated with the terms 'post-structuralism' and 'postmodernism'. These developments are assessed through a close comparative reading of the work of seven contemporary thinkers: Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou and François Laruelle. The book situates the writing of each philosopher in (...) relation to earlier traditions of French thought. In differing ways, these philosophers decisively distance themselves from the linguistic paradigm which dominated so much twentieth-century thought in order to rethink philosophical conceptions of materiality, worldliness, shared embodied existence and human agency or subjectivity. They thereby open the way for a radical renewal of the claims, possibilities and transformative power of philosophical thinking itself. This book will be an indispensable text for students of philosophy and for anyone interested in current developments in philosophy and social thought. (shrink)

This introduction to the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy gives an overview of his philosophical thought to date and situates it within the broader context of contemporary French and European thinking. The book examines Nancy’s philosophy in relation to five specific areas: his account of subjectivity; his understanding of space and spatiality; his thinking about the body and embodiment; his political thought; and his contribution to contemporary aesthetics. In each case it shows the way in which Nancy develops or moves beyond (...) some of the key concerns associated with phenomenology, post-structuralism, and what could broadly be termed the “post-modern.”. (shrink)

Keith Reader's brief, unfinished article ‘Freeze Peach’ situates contemporary controversies surrounding free speech in relation to material and economic concerns. Ian James's response draws attention to the way Keith does this by bringing together four key figures of late twentieth-century philosophy and theory: Louis Althusser, Jean-François Lyotard, Terry Eagleton and Stanley Fish. Ian argues that the conjugation of Marx-inspired theory with thinkers associated with the postmodern would have allowed Keith to develop a uniquely perceptive and productive insight into the (...) present moment of political disorientation, one which demands a renegotiation of the legacies of both modernity and postmodernity. (shrink)

This article seeks to address the question of humanity and animality through an elaboration of what will be called here the ‘nonhuman demand’. It aims to problematize the category of the ‘posthuman...

Why Virilio? -- The politics of perception -- Speed -- Virtualization -- War -- Politics -- Art -- After Virilio.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 119-135MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Evaluating Klossowski's Le BaphometIan JamesLiterature, under historical conditions which are not simply linguistic, has come to occupy a place which is always open to a kind of subversive juridicity. [...] This subversive juridicity supposes that self-identity is never assured or reassuring.—Jacques Derrida, "Préjugés: Devant la loi"The ControversyOn 14 June 1965, Roger Caillois resigned from the jury of the prestigious Prix des Critiques. (...) His resignation was provoked by the majority decision of the jury to award the critics' prize that year to Klossowski's final novel, Le Baphomet.1 Le Baphomet, a singular, Walter Scott-inspired tale about the Knights Templar, is set, initially at least, at the beginning of the fourteenth century just before the dissolution of the Templar Order at the behest of the then French king, Philippe Le Bel. After the historical prologue the action is transferred to a seemingly atemporal sphere, where the disembodied souls of the former Knights Templar await the moment when the Last Judgment will be pronounced and they will be reunited once more with their earthly bodies. The setting, tone, and style are at first gothic, but with the appearance of the disembodied spirit of Saint Teresa of Avila baroque elements begin to dominate and to mix with evocations of Masonic and esoteric ritual, Gnostic heresy, and theological but also philosophical discussion. These are accompanied by the appearance of Philippe le Bel himself and the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche, the "Antichrist," initially in the form of an anteater. With its unorthodox and often archaic vocabulary and syntax and, after the historical prologue, its discontinuous and fantastical narrative presentation, in which the boundaries between persons and identities appear permeable and insecure, Le Baphomet engages the reader in a textual experience that can be both baffling and obscure. It is also a work that can appear to lack any intellectual or formal coherence, one whose multiplicity and evident complexity may seem to promise rich possibilities of interpretation and literary value but whose narrative disorder and stylistic singularity can ultimately leave the reader frustrated with the sense of having been exposed to something of a literary mess.This, at least, was the view of Roger Caillois when he resigned in protest at the decision of the Prix des Critiques jury to confer its honor on Klossowski's novel. Caillois was himself a singular writer whose work can be situated at the intersection of a [End Page 119][Begin Page 120]number of disciplines, including mythology, sociology, aesthetics, biology, and literary criticism. He had known Klossowski since 1936, when they collaborated along with Georges Bataille and others in the antifascist avant-garde grouping Contre-Attaque and then later, again with Bataille, on the review Acéphale and in the Collège de sociologie.2 Defending his resignation from the Prix des Critiques jury a few days after the event, Caillois published an article in Le Monde in which he drew attention to what he saw as Le Baphomet's primary weakness: its poor formal organization and in particular what he perceived as its stylistic insufficiency and grammatical inaccuracy.3 Perhaps with the desire to avoid accusations of prudery or Puritanism he denied that the content of the work was the cause of his disapproval. The infatuation of certain Knights Templar with an adolescent page, Ogier de Beaséant, oblique references to possible acts of sodomy, together with the stylized description of scenes involving mutilation, penetration, and ejaculation are all elements of the narrative. On the content of the work Caillois writes: "Some may see in this a novelistic exposé of an original and subtle theology, others only mystico-pederastic rubbish. For a literary prize I hold solely to the literary value of a work." According to Caillois the content of such a work may be interesting or absurd depending on one's tastes but has nothing to do with its literary value. The invocation of literary value, here, necessarily implies a set of criteria for the judgment of the standing of a work... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 3-6MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Whispers of the Flesh Essays in Memory of Pierre KlossowskiIan JamesRussell Ford Pierre Klossowski—novelist, essayist, painter, and translator—was one of the most startling, original, and influential figures in twentieth-century French intellectual culture. The older brother of the well-known painter Balthus and a close associate of Georges Bataille, Klossowski's diverse oeuvre includes novels, philosophical essays, and translations, as well as paintings and films. (...) Confined thus far to an undeserved but somehow fitting shadow existence in the margins and notes of theorists who have become mainstays of Anglo-American criticism, Klossowski's own work has increasingly become a focus of critical interest for its decisive contribution to the development of thought and aesthetics in France from the 1950s onward. Born in 1905, the eldest son of Polish émigrés, Klossowski spent his first ten years in Paris in an artistic milieu, heavily influenced by the neoimpressionism of figures such as Bonnard and Derain. His father, Erich Klossowski de Rola, was a painter and art historian, the author of an important monograph on Daumier. His mother, Baladine, was also a painter and trained under Bonnard. While still a teenager Klossowski was introduced to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom he became close and who in turn introduced him to the novelist André Gide. At eighteen he became Gide's secretary and assisted him with the drafts of his famous novel Les faux-monnayeurs.Not until 1930, however, did Klossowski's own career properly begin, when he translated with Jean-Pierre Jouve a collection of poems by Friedrich Hölderlin. Throughout his life Klossowski was a prolific and influential translator from both German and Latin into French, translating amongst others Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein from the German, and Suetonius, Virgil, Augustine, and Tertullian from the Latin. While working for the prominent Parisian psychoanalyst René Laforgue, Klossowski published his first philosophical essay on the Marquis de Sade in 1933 in the Revue française de la psychanalyse. Scandalized by Klossowski's Nietzschean-inflected psychoanalytic interpretation of Sade's writing, Laforgue dismissed Klossowski immediately. Throughout the 1930s Klossowski made a number of key friendships and acquaintances, most importantly with Georges Bataille, but also many others, including Walter Benjamin, André Masson, Jean Wahl, and Maurice Heine. During this period he published several articles and collaborated with Bataille on the review Acéphale and in the avant-garde experiment of the Collège de Sociologie (where, it is said, he would attend meetings dressed in a soutane). During the war years Klossowski trained in a number of Catholic seminaries, a vocation which ultimately failed and led to the writing of his first novel, La vocation suspendue. In the postwar period he married [End Page 3] a war widow, Denise Morin Sinclair, who had been interned in Ravensbrück for her activities in the Resistance and who became the model for Roberte, a key figure in much of Klossowski's fiction and painting. After the war Klossowski began to publish the influential works for which he will chiefly be remembered: literary-philosophical essays on Sade and Nietzsche (among others), as well as six important novels written between 1950 and 1965, La vocation suspendue (1950), the three works, originally published separately, which went on to form the Lois de l'hospitalité trilogy—Roberte ce soir (1954), La révocation de l'Édit de Nantes (1959) and Le souffleur ou le théâtre de société (1960)‚—and, finally, Le Baphomet (1965).Klossowski's seminal 1947 work, Sade mon prochain, was one of the first full-length literary and philosophical studies of Sade's work to be published in France and marked a decisive break from earlier accounts. Whereas earlier treatments of Sade had focused either on biographical detail or on the medical and psychosexual import of his life and writing, Klossowski's reading was concerned with the intertwined figures of law and transgression in Sade's work. After Sade mon prochain French intellectuals and writers... (shrink)

As the expansion of the Internet and the digital formatting of all kinds of creative works move us further into the information age, intellectual property issues have become paramount. Computer programs costing thousands of research dollars are now copied in an instant. People who would recoil at the thought of stealing cars, computers, or VCRs regularly steal software or copy their favorite music from a friend's CD. Since the Web has no national boundaries, these issues are international concerns. The contributors-philosophers, (...) legal theorists, and business scholars, among others-address questions such as: Can abstract ideas be owned? How does the violation of intellectual property rights compare to the violation of physical property rights? Can computer software and other digital information be protected? And how should legal systems accommodate the ownership of intellectual property in an information age? Intellectual Property is a lively examination of these and other issues, and an invaluable resource for librarians, lawyers, businesspeople, and scholars. (shrink)

This paper offers an overview of the philosophical work on epistemic injustices as it relates to psychiatry. After describing the development of epistemic injustice studies, we survey the existing literature on its application to psychiatry. We describe how the concept of epistemic injustice has been taken up into a range of debates in philosophy of psychiatry, including the nature of psychiatric conditions, psychiatric practices and research, and ameliorative projects. The final section of the paper indicates future directions for philosophical research (...) of epistemic injustices and psychiatry, concerning neurocognitive disorders, identity prejudices in psychiatric illness, concepts of epistemic privilege in psychiatry, and the prospects for combining phenomenological psychopathology and epistemic justice. We argue that much remains to be done in the conceptualization of these epistemic injustices and suggest that this future work should be multidisciplinary in character and sensitive to the phenomenology of psychiatric conditions. (shrink)

This paper offers an analysis of the structure of epistemic vice-charging, the critical practice of charging other persons with epistemic vice. Several desiderata for a robust vice-charge are offered and two deep obstacles to the practice of epistemic vice-charging are then identified and discussed. The problem of responsibility is that few of us enjoy conditions that are required for effective socialisation as responsible epistemic agents. The problem of consensus is that the efficacy of a vice-charge is contingent upon a degree (...) of consensus between critic and target that is unlikely or impossible where vice-charging is most likely to be provoked. It emerges that a robust critical practice of vice-charging is possible in principle, but very difficult in practice. (shrink)

Some of the most problematic human behaviors involve vices of the mind such as arrogance, closed-mindedness, dogmatism, gullibility, and intellectual cowardice, as well as wishful or conspiratorial thinking. What sorts of things are epistemic vices? How do we detect and mitigate them? How and why do these vices prevent us from acquiring knowledge, and what is their role in sustaining patterns of ignorance? What is their relation to implicit or unconscious bias? How do epistemic vices and systems of social oppression (...) relate to one another? Do we unwittingly absorb such traits from the process of socialization and communities around us? Are epistemic vices traits for which we can blamed? Can there be institutional and collective epistemic vices? This book seeks to answer these important questions about the vices of the mind and their roles in our social and epistemic lives, and is the first collection of its kind. Organized into three parts, chapters by outstanding scholars explore the nature of epistemic vices, specific examples of these vices, and case studies in applied vice epistemology, including education and politics. Alongside these foundational questions, the volume offers sophisticated accounts of vices both new and familiar. These include epistemic arrogance and servility, epistemic injustice, epistemic snobbishness, conspiratorial thinking, procrastination, and forms of closed-mindedness. Vice Epistemology is essential reading for students of ethics, epistemology, and virtue theory, and various areas of applied, feminist, and social philosophy. It will also be of interest to practitioners, scholars, and activists in politics, law, and education. (shrink)

I offer a new interpretation of Feyerabend’s ‘conquest of abundance’ narrative. I consider and reject both the ontological reading as implausible and the ‘historical’ reading as uncompelling My own proposal is that the ‘conquest of abundance’ be understood in terms of an impoverishment of the richness of human experience. For Feyerabend, such abundance is ‘conquered’ when individuals internalize distorting epistemic prejudices including those integral to the theoretical conceptions associated with the sciences. I describe several ways, identified by Feyerabend, in which (...) individuals can be led to occlude the richness of their experience in ways that are existentially impoverishing. (shrink)

I argue that a main theme Feyerabend's philosophical work was a critique of scientism. This devolves into two sub-critiques - a critique of conceptions of science's self-understanding and a critique of scientific cultures. The former is more compelling and more aligned with mainstream themes in Anglophone analytical philosophy of science, the latter is less developed but more resonant with themes in feminist, postcolonial and 'continental' forms of philosophy of science.

This chapter charts various ways that religious persons and groups can be perpetrators and victims of epistemic injustice. The practices of testifying and interpreting experiences take a range of distinctive forms in religious life, for instance, if the testimonial practices require a special sort of religious accomplishment, such as enlightenment, or if proper understanding of religious experiences is only available to those with authentic faith. But it is also clear that religious communities and traditions have been sources of epistemic injustice, (...) for instance, by conjoining epistemic and spiritual credibility in ways disadvantageous to ‘deviant’ groups. I focus mainly on the major monotheistic religions, culturally dominant in the modern West. (shrink)

Background: The use of therapeutic untruths raises a number of ethical issues, which have begun to be explored to some extent, particularly in dementia care services, where their use has been found to be high. Little is known, however, about their use by health professionals working in learning disability services. Research question: The study aimed to explore the frequency of use of therapeutic untruths by student learning disability nurses, and by their colleagues; how effective the students perceived them to be (...) as a means of responding to behaviours that challenge; and their level of comfort with using them. Research design: A correlational design was used to gather data from an online version of the Best Interest Scale, adapted for a learning disability context. Participants were 30 learning disability student nurses studying at a university in the North-East of England. Ethical considerations: The study was reviewed and received ethical approval from the first author’s university ethics committee. Findings: Overall, 96% of participants reported using therapeutic untruths. ‘Omission’ was the most frequently used type of therapeutic untruths, the most effective and the type that the students felt most comfortable using. Frequency of use of therapeutic untruths correlated significantly and positively with perceived effectiveness and the level of comfort that the students felt when using them, for all types of therapeutic untruths. Conclusion: The use of therapeutic untruths by the student nurses was consistent with that found in research in dementia care services in the United Kingdom and abroad. Further research to explore the generalisability of the results to the wider context of learning disability services is needed. The study highlights that there may be a need for more formal guidance and educational input to student nurses in the use of therapeutic untruths with people with a learning disability. (shrink)

This outstanding reference source to epistemic injustice is the first collection of its kind. Over thirty chapters address topics such as testimonial and hermeneutic injustice and virtue epistemology, objectivity and objectification, implicit bias, gender and race.

A rhetoric of refuge and escape is a consistent feature of the world’s great garden traditions. The connections between a desire for escape, need for refuge and disquieting sense that life is no longer what it ought to be gestures to a complex conception of garden appreciation. I explore these connections using Christian, Islamic, and Chinese garden traditions. In them one finds a conception of certain gardens as places of moral refuge from the corruption and failings of the mainstream world.

In the era of information and communication, issues of misinformation and miscommunication are more pressing than ever. _Epistemic injustice - _one of the most important and ground-breaking subjects to have emerged in philosophy in recent years - refers to those forms of unfair treatment that relate to issues of knowledge, understanding, and participation in communicative practices. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject. The first collection (...) of its kind, it comprises over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, divided into five parts: Core Concepts Liberatory Epistemologies and Axes of Oppression Schools of Thought and Subfields within Epistemology Socio-political, Ethical, and Psychological Dimensions of Knowing Case Studies of Epistemic Injustice. As well as fundamental topics such as testimonial and hermeneutic injustice and epistemic trust, the Handbook includes chapters on important issues such as social and virtue epistemology, objectivity and objectification, implicit bias, and gender and race. Also included are chapters on areas in applied ethics and philosophy, such as law, education, and healthcare. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice is essential reading for students and researchers in ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, feminist theory, and philosophy of race. It will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as cultural studies, sociology, education and law. (shrink)

These 17 essays covers all aspects of Bernard Stiegler's work, from poststructuralism, anthropology and psychoanalysis to his work on the politics of memory, 'libidinal economy', technoscience and aesthetics, keeping a focus on his key theory of technics throughout. Stiegler brings together key concepts from Plato, Freud, Derrida and Simondon to argue that the human is 'invented' through technics rather than a product of purely biological evolution. Stiegler is a thinker at the forefront of our contemporary concerns with consumerism, technology, inter-generational (...) division, political apathy and economic crisis. His ambitious project is to go beyond these sources of social distress to uncover and examine precisely 'what makes life worth living'. Contributors include: Stephen Barker, University of California Irvine and translator of Steigler; Richard Beardsworth, American University of Paris and translator of Stiegler; Miguel de Beistegui; University of Warwick; Marc Crepon, Ecole normale superieure and co-founder of Stiegler's think tank, Ars Industrialis and Daniel Ross, co-director of 'The Ister', the award-winning film on Heidegger, and translator of Stiegler. (shrink)

This article analyses the phenomenon of epistemic injustice within contemporary healthcare. We begin by detailing the persistent complaints patients make about their testimonial frustration and hermeneutical marginalization, and the negative impact this has on their care. We offer an epistemic analysis of this problem using Miranda Fricker's account of epistemic injustice. We detail two types of epistemic injustice, testimonial and hermeneutical, and identify the negative stereotypes and structural features of modern healthcare practices that generate them. We claim that these stereotypes (...) and structural features render ill persons especially vulnerable to these two types of epistemic injustice. We end by proposing five avenues for further work on epistemic injustice in healthcare. (shrink)

Throughout the writings of Paul Feyerabend, there are constant references to the historical contingency of the scientific enterprise, often accompanied by philosophical claims about the significance of that contingency. This paper presents those contingentist claims, situates them in the context of more recent work on the contingency of science, and offers an interpretation of their significance. I suggest that Feyerabend’s sense of contingency was connected to his defences of pluralism, and also to the ‘conquest of abundance’ narrative developed in the (...) very late writings. (shrink)

I argue that philosophical studies of the virtues of creativity should attend to the ways that our conceptions of human creativity may be grounded in conceptions of human nature or the nature of reality. I consider and reject claims in this direction made by David Bohm and Paul Feyerabend. The more compelling candidate is the account of science, creativity, and human nature developed by the early Marx. Its guiding claim is that the forms of creativity enabled by the sciences are (...) ultimately valuable insofar as they advance our emancipation from a state of existential alienation. I end by encouraging future investigations of such vertical explanations of the significance of certain virtues in the context of scientific enquiry. (shrink)

I argue that, although education should have positive effects on students’ epistemic character, it is often actually damaging, having bad effects. Rather than cultivating virtues of the mind, certain forms of education lead to the development of the vices of the mind - it is therefore epistemically corrupting. After sketching an account of that concept, I offer three illustrative case studies.

I offer a working analysis of the concept of 'epistemic corruption', then explain how it can help us to understand the relations between epistemic vices and social oppression, and use this to motivate a style of vice epistemology, inspired by the work of Robin Dillon, that I call critical character epistemology.

I argue that we can profitably understanding Feyerabend’s work in at least the latter half of his career in terms of a series of experiments with ways of conceptualising and criticising scientism, under the aegis of a ‘critique of scientific reason’. The critique of science’s self-understanding was the more sophisticated and successful, while the critique of scientific modernity was more erratic and less effective, due mainly to the failure to take up the necessary resources.

This chapter offers a virtue epistemological framework for making sense of the common complaint that scientism is arrogant, dogmatic, or otherwise epistemically vicious. After characterising scientism in terms of stances, I argue that their components can include epistemically vicious dispositions, with the consequence that an agent who adopts such stances can be led to manifest epistemic vices. The main focus of the chapter is the vice of closed-mindedness, but I go on to consider the idea that arrogance and dogmatism are (...) ‘cooperative vices’, ones liable to be activated by closed-mindedness. I conclude that determining whether or not any given stance is vicious will require sensitivity to the ontology of that stance and the psychology of the agents who adopt them. This would be contribute to our understanding both of scientism and of epistemic virtuous and vicious characters or psychologies. (shrink)

I note the ambivalence of contemporary attitudes towards pessimism, then offer a way of thinking about philosophical forms of pessimism, intended to encourage us to take pessimism seriously as a stance on the human condition.

This book approaches Hobbes's philosophy from a completely new perspective: his creativity. Creativity is the production of something which experts consider to be original, valuable and of high quality. James Hamilton explores Hobbes's creativity by focusing on his development, personality, and motivation in the context of his culture and environment, and on the ways in which he thought creatively, as inferred from his writings. Identification of the ideas which Hobbes drew upon is an important part of the study (...) for two reasons. First, they are necessary to determine which of Hobbes's ideas and theories are original and which are not. Second, analysis of his creativity requires an understanding of the ideas from which he drew. Hamilton concludes that Hobbes became a great philosopher because of his creative virtuosity. (shrink)

This paper argues for the diversification of university-level philosophy curricula. I defend the ideal of expansionist pluralism and connect it to metaphilosophical myopia – problematically limited or constrained visions of the range of forms taken by philosophy. Expansively pluralist curricula work to challenge metaphilosophical myopia and one of its costs, namely, a specific kind of hermeneutical injustice, perpetrated against the communities and traditions shaped by the occluded forms of philosophy.

Linda Martín Alcoff and others have emphasised that the discipline of philosophy suffers from a ‘demographic problem’. The persistence of this problem is partly the consequence of various forms of resistance to efforts to address the demographic problem. Such resistance is complex and takes many forms and could be responded to in different ways. In this paper, I argue that our attempts to explain and understand the phenomenon of resistance should use a kind of explanatory pluralism that, following Quassim Cassam, (...) I call multidimensionalism. I describe four general kinds of resistance and consider varying explanations, focusing on those focused on vices and social structures. I argue that vice-explanations and structural- explanations are both mutually consistent and mutually entailing. If so, there is no need to choose between vice explanations and structural explanations or any other kinds of explanation. We can and should be multidimensionalists: using many together is better. (shrink)

Ill persons suffer from a variety of epistemically-inflected harms and wrongs. Many of these are interpretable as specific forms of what we dub pathocentric epistemic injustices, these being ones that target and track ill persons. We sketch the general forms of pathocentric testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, each of which are pervasive within the experiences of ill persons during their encounters in healthcare contexts and the social world. What’s epistemically unjust might not be only agents, communities and institutions, but the theoretical (...) conceptions of health that structure our responses to illness. Thus, we suggest that although such pathocentric epistemic injustices have a variety of interpersonal and structural causes, they are also sustained by a deeper naturalistic conception of the nature of illness. (shrink)

I argue that Hánfēizǐ can be understood as a philosophical pessimist.

I reject both (a) inevitabilism about the historical development of the sciences and (b) what Ian Hacking calls the "put up or shut up" argument against those who make contingentist claims. Each position is guilty of a lack of humility about our epistemic capacities.

I introduce the concept pathophobia, to capture the range of morally objectionable forms of treatment to which somatically ill persons are subjected. After distinguishing this concept from sanism and ableism, I argue that the moral wrongs of pathophobia are best analysed using a framework of vice ethics. To that end I describe five clusters of pathophobic vices and failings, illustrating each with examples from three influential illness narratives.

I propose that Confucianism incorporates a latent commitment to the closely related epistemic virtues of curiosity and inquisitiveness. Confucian praise of certain people, practices, and dispositions is only fully intelligible if these are seen as exercises and expressions of epistemic virtues, of which curiosity and inquisitiveness are the obvious candidates. My strategy is to take two core components of Confucian ethical and educational practice and argue that each presupposes a specific virtue. To have and to express a ‘love of learning’ (...) requires the virtue of curiosity, while the normative practice of good questioning requires exercise of the virtue of inquisitiveness. Taken together, people engaging in the foundational Confucian project of moral self-cultivation must desire and acquire a range of epistemic goods, a set of dispositions that manifest in the virtues of curiosity and inquisitiveness, possession of which is admirable and excellent. Such, at least, is the claim defend in this chapter, which is an exercise in cross-cultural virtue epistemology. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the relationship of virtue, argumentation, and philosophical conduct by considering the role of the specific virtue of intellectual humility in the practice of philosophical argumentation. I have three aims: first, to sketch an account of this virtue; second, to argue that it can be cultivated by engaging in argumentation with others; and third, to problematize this claim by drawing upon recent data from social psychology. My claim is that philosophical argumentation can be conducive to the (...) cultivation of virtues, including humility, but only if it is conceived and practiced in appropriately ‘edifying’ ways. (shrink)

Although the discipline of vice epistemology is only a decade old, the broader project of studying epistemic vices and failings is much older. This paper argues that contemporary vice epistemologists ought to engage more closely with these earlier projects. After sketching some general arguments in section one, I then turn to deep epistemic vices: ones whose identity and intelligibility depends on some underlying conception of human nature or the nature of reality. The final section then offers a case study from (...) a vice epistemic tradition that emerged in early modern English natural philosophy. (shrink)

Animals and War: Confronting the Military-Animal Industrial Complex is the first book to examine how nonhuman animals are used in war and the military. Animals and War contributes significantly to the fields of social justice, animal rights, and anti-war/peace activist communities. This book also will be read by peace, conflict, social justice, and critical animal studies scholars, students, and practitioners.

Since subjection to harm is an intrinsic feature of our social and epistemic lives, there is a perpetual need for individual and collective agents with the virtue of epistemic courage. In this chapter, I survey some of the main issues germane to this virtue, such as the nature of courage and of harm, the range of epistemic activities that can manifest courage, and the status of epistemic courage as a collective and as a professional virtue.

In this paper we argue that ill persons are particularly vulnerable to epistemic injustice in the sense articulated by Fricker. Ill persons are vulnerable to testimonial injustice through the presumptive attribution of characteristics like cognitive unreliability and emotional instability that downgrade the credibility of their testimonies. Ill persons are also vulnerable to hermeneutical injustice because many aspects of the experience of illness are difficult to understand and communicate and this often owes to gaps in collective hermeneutical resources. We then argue (...) that epistemic injustice arises in part owing to the epistemic privilege enjoyed by the practitioners and institutions of contemporary healthcare services—the former owing to their training, expertise, and third-person psychology, and the latter owing to their implicit privileging of certain styles of articulating and evidencing testimonies in ways that marginalise ill persons. We suggest that a phenomenological toolkit may be part of an effort to ameliorate epistemic injustice. (shrink)