The uncertainty response adds an important new dimension to conventional animal learning and memory studies. Although the uncertainty response by monkeys and dolphins resembled that of humans, parsimony alone does not necessarily indicate that the monkeys and dolphins had a full self-awareness. However, the uncertain response may be an index of an evolutionary precursor to full self-awareness of uncertainty and a theory of mind.

Whether the sensible knave can take pride in herself is a question not merely curious but potentially devastating for Hume's moral theory. Hume assuredly classifies knavery a vice, but given his doctrine that it belongs to virtue to produce pride, then if she can take pride in herself qua knave, the knave is positioned to claim that knavery is, and ought to be recognized as, a virtue. And if this is true, then either Hume is mistaken to have classified knavery (...) as a vice or, if he is not mistaken, his moral theory yields incoherencies— the same quality being both a virtue and a vice. (shrink)

Starting in the mid-seventies down through 1991, John Rawls made Kant the centerpiece of his undergraduate ethics course. Class notes prepared and updated by Rawls or by his assistants were made available privately to students. Barbara Herman has edited and published those notes and added two lectures on Hegel based on Rawls’ personal notes. The result is quite suitable for use as a textbook on Kant’s ethics.

Richetti finds Locke, Berkeley, and Hume to be appropriate for a literary study on his claim that for these three philosophers writing was itself a special problem. Since their works were still addressed to a general, not a professional audience, each gave much consideration to the manner of the presentation of his thought, attempting to close the emerging gap between literary creation and technical writing. Further, because these authors dealt in the abstruse, sometimes in the paradoxical, finding a literary voice (...) that establishes community with the reader without abandoning the demands of philosophic discourse posed a sizable challenge. (shrink)

Current scholarship has focused on analyzing how Arendt's storytelling corresponds to her political arguments. In following up this discussion, I offer a closer examination of the unusual myth Arendt uses to explain the condition of the modern age, a myth she refers to as the ?political nature of history.? I employ literary terms along with the standard vocabulary of political theory in shaping this reading of Arendt. Following Robert C. Pirro, I also consider Arendt's story as a tragedy, but in (...) the broadest sense, that of a collision of two goods, freedom and security. By describing Arendt's thought in this manner, I hope to reveal another way in which Arendt represents the call to action that she believes so crucial to humanity, as a summons to we flawed antiheroes through the device of a heroic myth. (shrink)

Although many portions of this book have been published previously, their collection here, with some re-editing by the author, is valuable not only because the journals and studies in which they appeared are unlikely to be accessible but because they combine to make a smooth flowing, unified and well written book. Hart's mastery of the entire opus is as befits an editor in the new series of Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. His focus on jurisprudence and philosophy of law affords (...) both a wealth of information about Bentham's under-appreciated contributions, and the insights of the foremost contemporary expositor of this emerging discipline. The book also includes a critical assessment of the work of recent writers in the field--e.g., Lyons, Hacker and of course Dworkin. (shrink)

The following essay involves a discussion of four theories about lying and their application to a specific circumstance, the Nazi-Jew situation, as found in Kant, Aquinas, Pruss, and Guervin. By examining their thoughts on this particular situation, we may draw out, by the use of “right reason,” ways to handle everyday situations that causes us to face the tragic choice between two goods that lying presents. The argument is that, if approached in a certain way, the tragic choice lying presents (...) may be avoided. (shrink)

THE SOCRATIC ELENCHUS has the potentiality of occasioning a fundamental reorientation in an individual's values which, using Callicles' image, might even be likened to a moral conversion. In this connection the question arises, what does the individual who would remake himself morally do regarding his past? Should he, for instance, condemn his prior life? Excuse it? Ignore it? It appears that self-blame would be a very natural response on the part of the morally serious person toward the life he led (...) previous to the radical reorientation in his values. I claim that self-blame constitutes an unnoticed problem in the Socratic project of inducing men to pursue virtue. In what follows I sketch out this problem and investigate whether the doctrines commonly associated with Socrates afford him the resources for meeting it. My thesis is that to understand the Socratic treatment of the problem of self-blame we must add to the moral theory traditionally counted as Socratic. But like many would-be innovations, this one turns out to have been before our eyes all along, for it is possible to show that one of the formulations of the Socratic Paradox maps quite satisfactorily onto the terms of the problem of self-blame. Thus, the addition I propose we make to Socratic moral theory is not a new doctrine but a new interpretation of an old doctrine, one which renders a paradox perhaps a little less paradoxical. (shrink)

In addition to complexity deriving from the notion of the possibility of a ‘better world,’ the anti-theist argument from evils may possess the appearance of greater effectiveness than critical analysis should recognize it. If the moral language employed in the argument is accepted according to some forms of emotive, intuitive or theonomous interpretations, the so-called problem will vanish - and the question of the existence or nonexistence of God (so far as it is thought to depend on this argument) will (...) be found to be settled, or at least appear settled, on the grounds simply of the usages involved. If it is stated in utilitarian language, on the other hand, the problem of evil has the logical status of a genuine problem. Since we are to affirm that the question: Is it evil that there are evils? is a legitimate question, we shall do best, I believe, to interpret the question in utilitarian language. So interpreted, the problem is such that both the theist and anti-theist should have to work at proving their respective claims regarding the evils in the world. Whether either should ever succeed, it seems that the meta-ethician will profit by analyzing the language in which the attempt (more strenuous for the theist, I should think) will be made. (shrink)

In 1941 Norman Kemp Smith argued that Hume was not a sceptic but a proponent of a doctrine of natural belief. He supported this thesis by saying that Hume embraced Hutcheson's doctrine of the the subordination of reason to passion in the area of morals and extended it to all matters of belief. Against this unified interpretation Norton contends that there are in effect two Humes: a sceptic in matters of belief but not a sceptic in moral matters. Norton develops (...) his interpretation through historical research on the problems to which Hume was responding in his philosophical writings. The first Hume opposed the Hobbesian negation of real moral standards with his positive, commonsense based moral theory; the second Hume opposed the dogmatisms of his day with a thoroughgoing philosophical scepticism. (shrink)