In this paper we shall consider whether John Rawls’s treatment of Ignatius of Loyola is a fair one. Rawls claims in A Theory of Justice that Catholic theology (and Ignatius’s theology in particular) aims at a “dominant end” of serving God that overrides other moral considerations. Rawls argues that dominant end views lead to a disfigured self and a disregard for justice. We do not question Rawls on the normative issue of whether dominant end conceptions are untenable, but rather on (...) his factual claim that Ignatian spirituality and Catholic theology in general presupposes a dominant end view as he defines it. The Loyola whom Rawls attacks in Theory of Justice is a straw-man. Ignatian spirituality and Catholic theology in general embraces something closer to an inclusive end view, since it argues that several different ways of virtuous living can lead to happiness. (shrink)

In this paper we shall consider whether John Rawls’s treatment of Ignatius of Loyola is a fair one. Rawls claims in A Theory of Justice that Catholic theology aims at a “dominant end” of serving God that overrides other moral considerations. Rawls argues that dominant end views lead to a disfigured self and a disregard for justice. We do not question Rawls on the normative issue of whether dominant end conceptions are untenable, but rather on his factual claim that Ignatian (...) spirituality and Catholic theology in general presupposes a dominant end view as he defines it. The Loyola whom Rawls attacks in Theory of Justice is a straw-man. Ignatian spirituality and Catholic theology in general embraces something closer to an inclusive end view, since it argues that several different ways of virtuous living can lead to happiness. (shrink)

In this book Jonathan Adler offers a strengthened version of evidentialism, arguing that the ethics of belief should be rooted in the concept of belief--that...

Research on theory of mind has primarily focused on demonstrating and understanding the ability to represent others' non‐factive mental states, for example, others' beliefs in the false‐belief task. This requirement confuses the ability to represent a particular kind of non‐factive content (e.g., a false belief) with the more general capacity to represent others' understanding of the world even when it differs from one's own. We provide a way of correcting this. We first offer a simple and theoretically motivated account on (...) which tracking another agent's understanding of the world and keeping that representation separate from one's own are the essential features of a capacity for theory of mind. We then show how these criteria can be operationalized in a new experimental paradigm: the “diverse‐knowledge task.”. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 99, Issue 3, Page 749-767, November 2019.

We review the state of the art in moral psychology to answer 6 questions: 1) Where do moral beliefs and motivations come from? 2) How does moral judgment work? 3) What is the evidence for the social intuitionist model? 4) What exactly are the moral intuitions? 5) How does morality develop? And 6) Why do people vary in their morality? We describe the intuitionist approach to moral psychology. The mind makes rapid affective evaluations of everything it encounters, and these evaluations (...) (intuitions) shape and push subsequent moral reasoning. This approach to moral judgment has a variety of implications for moral philosophy and for the law in that it questions common assumptions about the reliability and causal efficacy of private, conscious reasoning. (shrink)

The power of the positive moral emotions to uplift and transform people has long been known, but not by psychologists. In 1771, Thomas Jefferson's friend Robert Skipwith wrote to him asking for advice on what books to buy for his library, and for his own education. Jefferson sent back a long list of titles in history, philosophy, and natural science. But in addition to these obviously educational works, Jefferson advised the inclusion of some works of fiction. Jefferson justified this advice (...) by pointing to the beneficial emotional effects of great fiction: [E]very thing is useful which contributes to fix us in the principles and practice of virtue. When any... act of charity or of gratitude, for instance, is presented either to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with its beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and grateful acts also. On the contrary when we see or read of any atrocious deed, we are disgusted with its deformity and conceive an abhorrence of vice. Now every emotion of this kind is an exercise of our virtuous dispositions; and dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body, acquire strength by exercise. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Natural language semantics is heir to two formalisms. There is the extensional machinery of explicit variables traditionally used to model reference to individuals, and the intensional machinery of implicit index parameters traditionally used to model reference to worlds and times. I propose instead a simple and unified extensional formalism – explicit semantics – on which all sentences include explicit individual, world and time variables. No implicit index parameters are needed.

1. IntroductionA popular view in metaphysics is that which propositions are true depends upon how the world is . In more evocative language, truth requires ground. This thought then gets used to do some serious work. As Sider has it, ‘[t]he point of … the principle that truth supervenes on being is to rule out dubious ontologies’. Here, I argue that ‘dubious’ ontologies are theoretically virtuous.

The first major reassessment of the Western Enlightenment for a generation. Continuing the story he began in Radical Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel now focuses on the first half of the eighteenth century. He traces to their roots the core principles of Western modernity: the primacy of reason, democracy, racial equality, feminism, religious toleration, sexual emancipation, and freedom of expression.

Lawrence Kohlberg slayed the two dragons of twentieth-century psychology—behaviorism and psychoanalysis. His victory was a part of the larger cognitive revolution that shaped the world in which all of us study psychology and education today. But the cognitive revolution itself was modified by later waves of change, particularly an ‘affective revolution’ that began in the 1980s and an ‘automaticity revolution’ in the 1990s. In this essay I trace the history of moral psychology within the broader intellectual trends of psychology and (...) I explain why I came to believe that moral psychology had to change with the times. I explain the origins of my own social intuitionist model and of moral foundations theory. I offer three principles that I think should characterize moral psychology in the twenty-first century: (1) Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second, (2) There’s more to morality than harm and fairness and (3) Morality binds and blinds. (shrink)

According to some critics, traditional armchair philosophical methodology relies in an illicit way on intuitions. But the particular structure of the critique is not often carefully articulated—a significant omission, since some of the critics’ arguments for skepticism about philosophy threaten to generalize to skepticism in general. More recently, some experimentalist critics have attempted to articulate a critique that is especially tailored to affect traditional methods, without generalizing too widely. Such critiques are more reasonable, and more worthy of serious consideration, than (...) are blunter critiques that generalize far too widely. I argue that a careful (empirical!) examination of extant philosophical practices shows that traditional philosophical methods can meet these more reasonable challenges. (shrink)

What does it mean to see someone as human, as a member of humankind? What kind of call for justice is it to demand that a group be seen as human beings? This article explores a fundamental kind of injustice: one of perception and how we respond to our perceptions. Drawing on Cavell, Wittgenstein and Rancière, we elucidate “soul blindness” as a distinct and basic form of injustice. Rancière’s police orders and Cavell’s soul blindness are mutually constitutive; the undoing of (...) police orders entails a politics of soul dawning. Soul dawning entails acknowledging the humanity of others without erasing difference. In the concluding section, we consider white obliviousness to the Black Lives Matters movement as a case of soul blindness. Part of the political import of BLM is its capacity to illustrate how practices of soul blindness in the United States constitute whiteness in a racialized police order. (shrink)

According to some views of reality, some objects are fundamental and other objects depend for their existence upon these fundamental objects. In this article, I argue that we have reason to reject these views.

Eighteenth-century theologian_Jonathan Edwards remains a significant influence on modern religion, and this book constitutes his most important contribution to Christian thought. Edwards_raises timeless questions about desire, choice, good, and evil, contrasting the opposing Calvinist and Arminian views of free will and addressing issues related to God's foreknowledge, determinism, and moral agency.

The knowability paradox threatens metaphysical or semantical antirealism, the view that truth is epistemic, by revealing an awful consequence of the claim [i] that all truths are knowable. Various attempts have been made to find a way out of the paradox.

In a recent article in this journal, Schaefer et al. argue that it might be possible to enhance autonomy through the use of cognitive enhancements. In this article, I highlight an example that Schaefer et al. do not acknowledge of a way in which we already seem to be using pharmacological agents in a manner that can be understood as enhancing an agent’s autonomy. To make this argument, I begin by following other theorists in the philosophical literature in claiming that (...) impulsivity can serve to undermine an agent’s autonomy. I then explain that we are already able to reduce impulsivity through the use of pharmacological interventions, as is evidenced by the use of Methylphenidate in the treatment of ADHD. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that presentism —the view that only present objects exist—can be motivated, at least to some degree, by virtue of the fact that it is more quantitatively parsimonious than rival views.

Infantile physical morphology—marked by its “cuteness”—is thought to be a potent elicitor of caregiving, yet little is known about how cuteness may shape immediate behavior. To examine the function of cuteness and its role in caregiving, the authors tested whether perceiving cuteness can enhance behavioral carefulness, which would facilitate caring for a small, delicate child. In 2 experiments, viewing very cute images (puppies and kittens)—as opposed to slightly cute images (dogs and cats)—led to superior performance on a subsequent fine-motor dexterity (...) task (the children’s game “Operation”). This suggests that the human sensitivity to those possessing cute features may be an adaptation that facilitates caring.. (shrink)

György Márkus’s Culture, Science, Society: The Constitution of Cultural Modernity is the most sophisticated attempt among contemporary philosophies to proffer a radical critical theory of culture based upon a Marxian philosophical anthropology and an emphatically post-metaphysical re-interpretation of the paradigm of production. In this paper, I aim to evince how the content of Márkus’s published writings is related to the cultural form of his philosophical practice that he describes as ‘orientation in thought’. First, I provide an overview of several key (...) features appertaining to Márkus’s heuristic conceptual framework. Second, I clarify the theoretical and practical horizons of his project through a schematic characterization of the three categories of studies that Márkus has not included in his theory of cultural modernity. In conclusion, I raise the question of the exclusion of religion from high culture and propose some counter-arguments. (shrink)

D. M. Armstrong famously claims that deterministic laws of nature are contingent relations between universals and that his account can also be straightforwardly extended to irreducibly probabilistic laws of nature. For the most part, philosophers have neglected to scrutinize Armstrong’s account of probabilistic laws. This is surprising precisely because his own claims about probabilistic laws make it unclear just what he takes them to be. We offer three interpretations of what Armstrong-style probabilistic laws are, and argue that all three interpretations (...) are incompatible either with some feature of Armstrong’s broader metaphysics or with essential features of his account of laws (or both). (shrink)

In the newly-discovered “On Principles and Matter”—we can definitely ascertain by Porphyry—the author concludes that there must be two principles responsible for all beings, or at least all sensible beings: God (the active cause) and matter (the passive cause). In large part this agrees with Atticus’ position, which the text also quotes, and which we also know Porphyry engaged with vigorously, from Proclus’ Timaeus Commentary. However there is a something odd about this text’s Porphyry: we seem to have a positive (...) argument for much of Antiochus’ framework of two principles, while in Proclus’ testimony we have a negative argument for the very same position. In this paper I analyze in detail the positive argument for the two principles given in “On Principles”, and I consider the degree to which Porphyry may be supplying a dialectical argument at this point in the text, before eventually criticizing the same view elsewhere (as in Proclus’ testimony). I also consider other points of contact for the text’s two-principles framework with Porphyry’s other extant works and show some consequences for Porphyry’s overall position. (shrink)

This paper looks at Gregory of Nyssa's so-called "bundle theory" sensible individuals and matter (as recently argued by Gerd Van Riel and Thomas Wauters in a 2020 article) amidst the broader context of Gregory's view of created beings and his reception of Neoplatonist, Stoic, and Aristotelian conceptions of particulars and matter. I argue that Gregory's position is closer to an Aristotelian position, despite the parallels to Plotinus and other contemporaneous bundle theory positions: in arguing against prime matter, and insofar as (...) he emphasizes the identity of each kind of created being with its material substrate—understood as a "bundle" of properties—Gregory inadvertently upholds a reading of Aristotle that refutes an ontological notion of prime matter. (shrink)

In this response piece, I argue that the ‘coercive paternalism’ that Sarah Conly endorses in her book Against Autonomy veers towards a back-door perfectionism. Although Conly points out that coercive paternalism does not mandate the imposition of alien values upon us in the same way that perfectionism does, I argue that coercive paternalism might yet impose an alien weighting of our own values; this, I suggest, means that coercive paternalism remains perfectionist in spirit, if not in letter. I go on (...) to concede to Conly that coercive paternalism might be warranted in preventing actions that threaten health and that are only carried out on the basis of cognitive error. However, I conclude by claiming that we must take great care about what we presume that people are consuming only on the basis of cognitive error. More specifically, I suggest that it is crucial that we avoid defining our terms in such a manner that it becomes impossible for agents to choose some action that poses a risk to their health without them being accused of making a cognitive error in weighing their values in that way. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of the role of intuition in physics. The ways in which intuition is appealed to in physics are not well understood. To the best of my knowledge, there is no analysis of the different contexts in which we might appeal to intuition in physics, nor is there any analysis of the different potential uses to which intuition might be put. In this paper I look to provide data that goes some way to giving a sense (...) of the different contexts in which intuition is appealed to in physics. As I note in the conclusion, there is still much work to be done but I hope that the work here provides us with a first step in the journey to properly understand the use to which intuitions are put in physics and science more generally. (shrink)

A republican theory of social justice specifies how republican freedom should be distributed. The goal of this paper is to assess the plausibility of two recently proposed principles of republican social justice: an aggregative maximizing principle defended by Philip Pettit in Republicanism and a sufficiency principle of republican social justice offered by Pettit in On the People’s Terms. The maximizing principle must be rejected because it permits under-protecting vulnerable members of society in favor of increasing the freedom of the powerful. (...) The sufficiency principle avoids the most basic objection to the maximizing principle, but it is at best an incomplete theory of social justice. Social justice requires principle(s) for determining the justice of distributions above the sufficiency threshold and republican theory does not determine which principle(s) should govern distributions above the threshold. Republicans must decide whether they will incorporate an independent commitment to equality within their theory of social justice. (shrink)

The scope and audacity of Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita’s contributions to Sanskrit grammar has made him one of early-modern India’s most influential, if not controversial, intellectuals. Yet for as consequential as Bhaṭṭoji’s has been for histories of early-modern scholasticism, his extensive corpus of non-grammatical writings has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. This paper examines Bhaṭṭoji’s work on Vedānta, the Tattvakaustubha, in order to gage how issues of language became an increasingly important site of inter-religious critique among early-modern Vedāntins. In the Tattvakaustubha, Bhaṭṭoji (...) reproaches Madhvācārya, the founder of the eponymous Mādhva or Dvaita Vedānta system, for his use of ungrammatical words. In extending his accusations of grammatical negligence to include Madhva’s early commentator Jayatīrtha, Bhaṭṭoji sought to undermine Mādhva claims to authoritative scriptural exegesis. Bhaṭṭoji’s provocation impelled later Mādhva scholars like Rāghavendratīrtha to bring a sharper set of grammatical tools to core commentarial works. Where others have pointed to Vyāsatīrtha as a turning point for Mādhva scholastic discourse in the areas of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā and Navya Nyāya, this paper suggests that it was the post-Bhaṭṭoji scholar Rāghavendratīrtha who brought a hitherto unrivaled grammatical expertise to Mādhva writings. That both Mādhva and Advaita Vedāntins wielded grammatical legitimacy as a cudgel against the other raises important socio-historical questions about the relationship between text-criticism, conceptions of scholastic legitimacy, and inter-religious contestation in early-modern South Asia. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.2 (2006) 450-470 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Romantic Love: A Literary Universal?Jonathan Gottschall Washington and Jefferson College (JG)Marcus Nordlund * Göteborg University (MN)ITo love someone romantically is—at least according to innumerable literary works, much received wisdom, and even a gradually coalescing academic consensus—to experience a strong desire for union with someone who is deemed entirely unique. It is to idealize this person, to think constantly (...) about him or her, and to discover that one's own life priorities have changed dramatically. It is to care deeply for that person's well-being and to feel pain or emptiness when he or she is absent.But is this intense emotional experience a universal experience, something that is characteristically and quintessentially human, or is it merely a sociocultural construct that belongs to a particular time and place? On this point there is less agreement, both within and between different academic disciplines. The audacious question we want to raise in the pages that follow is whether literature—or more specifically, a large-scale, multiple-coder content analysis of thousands of folk tales drawn from different parts of the planet—can contribute something to this difficult question about love, culture, and human nature.Let us first look briefly at the theoretical problem that we aim to address. A widespread view among literary scholars and social scientists over the last decades has been that romantic love is a social construction specific to Western culture. This is part of a relentless skepticism [End Page 450] toward assumptions that important categories of human psychology and emotion—romantic and parental love, gender, sexual orientation, and so on—are "natural" rather than constructed. This position is often, if not always, linked to an ideological concern to demystify (or at least problematize) what is perceived as an essentially destructive or oppressive emotion or belief. Taking her cue from Simone de Beauvoir, Marilyn Friedman gives no less than ten reasons why it may be problematic for women to fall in love with men. 1Of course, no argument of any kind can be strictly ideological in nature since it always involves empirical assumptions—either explicit or implicit—about the nature of things. For example, the psychoanalyst E. S. Persons opines that the "best evidence that romantic love is not hard-wired into the emotional repertoire of humanity but is a cultural construct is the fact that there are so many cultures in which it is virtually absent." 2 Another frequent argument for love's constructedness has been that "there is no definition that describes love throughout the ages or across cultures." 3In some literary-critical accounts, it is even argued that romantic love is a cultural invention that can be traced back with precision to the courtly troubadour culture of twelfth-century France. 4 According to yet another school, represented by the influential literary theorist Jonathan Culler, "the notion of romantic love (and its centrality to the lives of individuals) is arguably a massive literary creation." 5While the social constructivist position on romantic love typically involves a strong commitment to cultural specificity, a weaker version is held even by some cognitive theorists who grant more to biology and panhuman traits. From the perspective of their communicative theory of emotion, Philip Johnson-Laird and Keith Oatley argue that the "components [of romantic love] exist separately in different societies, but their integration into a recognizable complex is a cultural accomplishment [by the West]." 6At the other end of the romantic love continuum we find those who argue that this emotion belongs to a universal human nature: or, more specifically, that it can be attributed to specialised neural circuits whose ultimate purpose is to enhance reproductive success. Not surprisingly, this has been a favorite position among evolutionary psychologists, and it has recently received some support from neuroscientific studies.For example, the neuroscientists Andreas Bartels and Samir Zeki claim to have uncovered a "functionally specialised system" that lights up in fMRI (magnetic resonance) scans of brains whose owners claim to... (shrink)

Accession Number: ATLA0001788507; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 278-291.; Language(s): English; General Note: Revised from an essay first published at .; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

This paper considers the conception of the Triune God, soteriology and eschatology in Anne Conway’s metaphysics. After outlining some of the key features of her thought, including her account of a timeless God who is nevertheless intimately present in creation, I will argue that her conception of the Trinity offers a distinctive role for Christ and the Holy Spirit to play in her philosophical system. I also propose an interpretation of Conway’s eschatology, in which time is understood as grounded in (...) a never-ending soteriological process of the overall movement of creatures towards perfection and a state of spirituality. (shrink)

There is a growing need to increase our understanding of ethical decision making in U.S. based organizations. The authors examine the complexity of creating uniform ethical standards even when the meaning of ethical behavior is being debated. The nature of these controversies are considered, and three important dimensions for ethical decision making are discussed: leaders with integrity and a strong sense of social responsibility, organization cultures that foster dialogue and dissent, and organizations that are willing to reflect on and learn (...) from their actions. Leaders with integrity demonstrate consistency between vision and action that promotes trust, regularly concern themselves with developing moral standards, and are proactive agents of change in an increasingly complex world. Organizational cultures that support dialogue suspend judgments and increase their capacity to think together towards new levels of understanding. Ethical concepts evolve in these organizational cultures, and actions are informed and responsible. Organizations that reflect on their actions engage in double loop learning so that the time taken to reflect on the past and present leads to a more judicious and ethical future. In essence, the authors point to organizational guidelines for ethical decision making that lead to an increase in members' capacity to think and act ethically. (shrink)

Donnellan and Predelli have both responded to accusations that in virtue of involving intentions in their accounts of reference they are committed to ‘Humpty Dumpty’ theories of reference. I examine their responses and argue that they do not succeed in escaping this accusation. Corazza et al. (2002) propose an alternative to Predelli’s account involving linguistic conventions instead of intentions. I argue that Predelli’s responses to Corazza et al. are unsatisfactory and that the intentional theorist is obliged either to accept the (...) Humpty Dumpty conclusion or to adopt the conventional picture, thus relegating intentions to a less significant role in their reference theory. (shrink)

The works of György Márkus and Hannah Arendt represent two irreconcilable tendencies of contemporary radical philosophy. Whereas Márkus’s critical theory of culture actively refrains from attributing metaphysical significance to its heuristic concepts and the mutable practices they contingently designate, Arendt’s phenomenological methodology attempts to elucidate the constitution of the modern world in order to evince the ontological significance of the political. Due to the inimical nature of their respective projects, Márkus’s writings largely consign its references to Arendt to marginalia. In (...) this article, I consider the exception by taking as my point of departure Márkus’s only substantive comments about Arendt in ‘Beyond the Dichotomy: Poiesis and Praxis’. From a culturological perspective, I then reconstruct the ambivalent conceptions tacitly inhering in Arendt’s principal accounts of culture. In doing so, I reaffirm that Arendt denigrates poiesis, but also show that she regards culture and cultural reception as derivative to the political and praxis. The purpose of this exposition is not to resolve the dispute in one or the other direction, but to render perspicuous the fundamental choice evident in their opposition. (shrink)

Phylogenetic information is often necessary to distinguish between evolutionary scenarios. Recently, some prominent proponents of evolutionary psychology have acknowledged this, and have claimed that such evidence has in fact been brought to bear on adaptive hypotheses involving complex human psychological traits. Were this possible, it would be a valuable source of evidence regarding hypothesized adaptive traits in humans. However, the structure of the Hominidae family makes this difficult or impossible. For many traits of interest, the closest extant relatives to the (...) human species are too phenotypically different from humans for such methods to provide meaningful data. While phylogenetic information can be useful for testing adaptive hypotheses in humans, these generally involve traits that are not widely shared in the species or fairly widely shared in the Hominidae family, and hence likely of a lower order of complexity than the sorts of traits evolutionary psychology has so far been interested in. (shrink)

SummaryAccording to Ernst Mayr, most geneticists were not particularly interested in or well informed about macro-evolutionary processes and thus did not make major contributions to the evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s. Although this characterization applies to many American geneticists of the period, it does not fit their German counterparts. German geneticists' active interest in evolutionary mechanisms can be clearly seen in the German debates of the 1920s and 1930s over the significance of cytoplasmic inheritance. While morphologists celebrated the (...) evidence for cytoplasmic heredity as a basis for neo-Lamarckian mechanisms, those geneticists who actually studied cytoplasmic inheritance regarded it as a way of strengthening the case for natural selection. This German-American contrast suggests that our understanding of the evolutionary synthesis would benefit from an analysis of the institutional circumstances of the various contributing disciplines. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that access internalism should replace preservationism, which has been called “a received view” in the epistemology of memory, as the standard position about memorial justification. My strategy for doing so is two-pronged. First, I argue that the considerations which motivate preservationism also support access internalism. Preservationism is mainly motivated by its ability to answer the explanatory challenges posed by the problem of stored belief and the problem of forgotten evidence. However, as I will demonstrate, access (...) internalism also has the resources to provide plausible solutions to those problems. Second, I argue that preservationism faces a couple of problems which access internalism avoids. Doing so, I present a new scenario which, on the one hand, functions as a counterexample to preservationism, and, on the other hand, provides intuitive support for access internalism. Moreover, I also demonstrate how preservationism, in light of recent research in cognitive psychology, is vulnerable to skepticism about memorial justification, whereas access internalism remains unthreatened. (shrink)