Michael Rosen’s The Shadow of God illustrates a distinctive way of understanding the relationship between ideas and history, while posing several connected questions. Among these are how the human condition of alienation may be overcome in a way that is ethically and intellectually defensible; how the search for reconciliation may generate, paradoxically, further alienation, and inspire terrible inhumanity; and whether a meaningful and good human life can be lived without the assurance of future justice—or, indeed, future existence. Rosen evokes (...) the emotional pull of the quest for reconciliation, and reveals the argumentative richness it has generated; yet reflection on human evil and suffering should chasten our aspirations to attain historical reconciliation or rational understanding. We may have good reason to turn away from both the project of theodicy, and the tendency to identify human value in something detached from living individuals, in favor of a reaffirmation of the value of the personal. Rosen’s own work illustrates how a reaffirmation of the personal, and respect for the freedom of others, may be practiced in and through the history of ideas. (shrink)

History, as we all know, is written by the victors. But in political theory the writing of history is a part of the struggle. Joshua Cherniss’s Liberalism in Dark Times makes a distinguished additi...

The Shadow of God combines history and philosophy in a way that is, unlike Hegel, fundamentally pluralistic. It presents the period of German Idealism as a time when philosophers aimed to bring faith and reason together through the idea of autonomy. At the same time, the tensions endemic in that process led to a transfer of individual hope from an afterlife of reward or punishment to participation in a collective, historical process. This article responds to a series of critical questions: (...) Does the book assimilate consolation and reconciliation? Does it sufficiently distinguish knowledge and justification? Does it open the possibility for a reaffirmation of the individual? Does it underestimate the potential for a secularized Kantian philosophy to bring together equality, justification, and community? Does its interpretation of Kant give a place for his account of historical progress? Is awareness of the way in which theodicy came to be historicized helpful in understanding contemporary democracy and its discontents? (shrink)

Today, liberals face a predicament: how to defend liberal principles, when adherence to them seems to constitute a fatal disadvantage against unprincipled opponents. The challenge is not new. In the early years of the twentieth century, liberalism was attacked, by critics on both the right and, especially, the left for being hypocritical, naïve, irresponsible, and impotent. It couldn't, for example (anti-liberalists thought), address the acute inequality of imperial rule, racial segregation, and socio-economic poverty. These issues of social justice it was (...) claimed by critics required a politics marked by an uncompromising commitment to ultimate ends, and an unrelenting use of power. Faced with such sentiments and the practical successes of anti-liberal ideologies (i.e. Fascism, Nazism, and Communism) liberals felt pressure to silence their scruples and doubts, and embrace the confidence, ruthlessness, and intransigence exhibited by their opponents. But doing so seemed tantamount to abandoning liberal hopes for, and commitments to, human freedom and all they valued in the first place. In Liberalism for Dark Times, Cherniss tells the story of the liberal response to this challenge in the twentieth century. Through a close study of five leading intellectuals engaged in these debates-Max Weber, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Isaiah Berlin-Cherniss reconstructs a distinctive, neglected strand of liberal thought. This strand defines and defends liberalism as a political ethos: a complex of dispositions, temperament, and sensibility and style-which include skepticism; openness to experience; and careful, discriminating judgment-that shape how individuals make choices, meet challenges, understand and pursue possibilities, and conduct themselves toward others in the course of political struggle. In reconstructing the history of, what he calls, a tempered liberalism, and formulating it as a distinctive political perspective, Cherniss offers an alternative to the prevalent ways of thinking about both, liberalism's history and the intellectual resources available to it today. (shrink)

Plato's lectures: a hypothesis for an enigma.--Speusippus, Xenocrates, and the polemical method of Aristotle.--The Academy: orthodoxy, heresy, or philosophical interpretation?

This book defends a form of ethical intuitionism, according to which (i) there are objective moral truths; (ii) we know some of these truths through a kind of immediate, intellectual awareness, or "intuition"; and (iii) our knowledge of moral truths gives us reasons for action independent of our desires. The author rebuts all the major objections to this theory and shows that the alternative theories about the nature of ethics all face grave difficulties.

Liberalism in Dark Times seeks to reconstruct an ethically oriented form of liberalism that is demanding, skeptical, and non-perfectionist. My friendly, astute interlocutors appropriately hold me t...

Part I: The representation of life -- Can life be given a real definition? -- The representation of the living individual -- The representation of the life-form itself -- Part II: Naive action theory -- Types of practical explanation -- Naive explanation of action -- Action and time -- Part III: Practical generality -- Two tendencies in practical philosophy -- Practices and dispositions as sources of the goodness of individual actions -- Practice and disposition as sources of individual action.

The first edition of The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy took the dialogue of science and philosophy from Aristotle through to Newton. This second edition adds eight chapters, taking the dialogue through the Enlightenment and up to Darwin. This anthology is an attempt to help bridge the gap between the history of science and the history of philosophy.

Isaiah Berlin was a central figure in twentieth-century political thought. This volume highlights Berlin's significance for contemporary readers, covering not only his writings on liberty and liberalism, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Russian thinkers and pluralism, but also the implications of his thought for political theory, history, and the social sciences, as well as the ethical challenges confronting political actors, and the nature and importance of practical judgment for politics and scholarship. His name and work are inseparable from the revival of (...) political philosophy and the analysis of political extremism and defense of democratic liberalism following World War II. Berlin was primarily an essayist who spoke through commentary on other authors and, while his own commitments and allegiances are clear enough, much in his thought remains controversial. Berlin's work constitutes an unsystematic and incomplete, but nevertheless sweeping and profound, defense of political, ethical, and intellectual humanism in an anti-humanistic age. (shrink)

Virtually all philosophers agree that for a belief to be epistemically justified, it must satisfy certain conditions. Perhaps it must be supported by evidence. Or perhaps it must be reliably formed. Or perhaps there are some other "good-making" features it must have. But does a belief's justification also require some sort of awareness of its good-making features? The answer to this question has been hotly contested in contemporary epistemology, creating a deep divide among its practitioners. Internalists, who tend to focus (...) on scientific or theoretical beliefs as the ideal, insist that such awareness is required for justification. Externalists, who think children's ordinary beliefs in obvious facts are paradigm cases of justified belief, say it isn't required. Michael Bergmann's book offers a decisive refutation of internalism and a sustained defense of externalism. (shrink)

Externalist theories of justification create the possibility of cases in which everything appears to one relevantly similar with respect to two propositions, yet one proposition is justified while the other is not. Internalists find this difficult to accept, because it seems irrational in such a case to affirm one proposition and not the other. The underlying internalist intuition supports a specific internalist theory, Phenomenal Conservatism, on which epistemic justification is conferred by appearances.

At the University of Sheffield during 2011 and 2012, a leading group of philosophers, psychologists, and others gathered to explore the nature and significance of implicit bias. The two volumes of Implicit Bias and Philosophy emerge from these workshops. Each volume philosophically examines core areas of psychological research on implicit bias as well as the ramifications of implicit bias for core areas of philosophy. Volume I: Metaphysics and Epistemology is comprised of two parts: “The Nature of Implicit Attitudes, Implicit Bias, (...) and Stereotype Threat,” and “Skepticism, Social Knowledge, and Rationality.” The first part contains chapters examining the relationship between implicit attitudes and “dual process” models of the mind; the role of affect in the formation and change of implicit associations; the unity (or disunity) of implicit attitudes; whether implicit biases are mental states at all; and whether performances on stereotype-relevant tasks are automatic and unconscious or intentional and strategic. The second part contains chapters examining implicit bias and skepticism; the effects of implicit bias on scientific research; the accessibility of social stereotypes in epistemic environments; the effects of implicit bias on the self-perception of members of stigmatized social groups as rational agents; the role of gender stereotypes in philosophy; and the role of heuristics in biased reasoning. (shrink)

In this engaging and spirited text, Michael Lynch argues that truth does matter, in both our personal and political lives. He explains that the growing cynicism over truth stems in large part from our confusion over what truth is.

Dignity plays a central role in current thinking about law and human rights, but there is sharp disagreement about its meaning. Combining conceptual precision with a broad historical background, Michael Rosen puts these controversies in context and offers a novel, constructive proposal. “Penetrating and sprightly...Rosen rightly emphasizes the centrality of Catholicism in the modern history of human dignity. His command of the history is impressive...Rosen is a wonderful guide to the recent German constitutional thinking about human dignity...[Rosen] is in (...) general an urbane and witty companion, achieving his aim of accessibly written philosophy.” —Samuel Moyn, The Nation “[An] elegant, interesting and lucid exploration of the concept of dignity...Drawing on classical, liberal and Catholic traditions, Rosen hopes to rehabilitate dignity to its rightful place near the centre of moral thought...Rosen's admirable book deserves wide attention from political theorists, jurisprudes and political philosophers.” —Simon Blackburn, Times Higher Education “Dignity deserves to be widely read, not only for its intrinsic interest, but also as a corrective to the habit of discussing such topics in abstraction from their social context. Whether or not one agrees with Rosen's arguments, there can be no doubt he has widened our horizons.” —Rae Langton, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

edition (unseen), $12.95. traditions, bringing into being new modes of understanding. Paper Anthropology, and particularly ethnography, is torn between two quests, one to capture the diversity of social life and the other to discover universal principles structuring that diversity. Jackson examines these quests within the context of ethnographic fieldwork, focusing on the relationship between ethnographers and the people they study. He is concerned with defining the anthropological project as something more than the projection of the anthropologist's traditions and concerns onto (...) an alien culture. Rather, he would have the project open a genuine dialogue between people from different cultures or Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

At the heart of ethics reside the concepts of good and bad; they are at work when we assess whether a person is virtuous or vicious, an act right or wrong, a decision defensible or indefensible, a goal desirable or undesirable. But there are many varieties of goodness and badness. At their core lie intrinsic goodness and badness, the sort of value that something has for its own sake. It is in virtue of intrinsic value that other types of value (...) may be understood, and hence that we can begin to come to terms with questions of virtue and vice, right and wrong, and so on. This book investigates the nature of intrinsic value: just what it is for something to be valuable for its own sake, just what sort of thing can have such value, just how such a value is to be computed. In the final chapter, the fruits of this investigation are applied to a discussion of pleasure, pain, and displeasure and also of moral virtue and vice, in order to determine just what value lies within these phenomena. (shrink)

While philosophers hold that it is patently absurd to blame robots or hold them morally responsible [1], a series of recent empirical studies suggest that people do ascribe blame to AI systems and robots in certain contexts [2]. This is disconcerting: Blame might be shifted from the owners, users or designers of AI systems to the systems themselves, leading to the diminished accountability of the responsible human agents [3]. In this paper, we explore one of the potential underlying reasons for (...) robot blame, namely the folk's willingness to ascribe inculpating mental states or "mens rea" to robots. In a vignette-based experiment (N=513), we presented participants with a situation in which an agent knowingly runs the risk of bringing about substantial harm. We manipulated agent type (human v. group agent v. AI-driven robot) and outcome (neutral v. bad), and measured both moral judgment (wrongness of the action and blameworthiness of the agent) and mental states attributed to the agent (recklessness and the desire to inflict harm). We found that (i) judgments of wrongness and blame were relatively similar across agent types, possibly because (ii) attributions of mental states were, as suspected, similar across agent types. This raised the question - also explored in the experiment - whether people attribute knowledge and desire to robots in a merely metaphorical way (e.g., the robot "knew" rather than really knew). However, (iii), according to our data people were unwilling to downgrade to mens rea in a merely metaphorical sense when given the chance. Finally, (iv), we report a surprising and novel finding, which we call the inverse outcome effect on robot blame: People were less willing to blame artificial agents for bad outcomes than for neutral outcomes. This suggests that they are implicitly aware of the dangers of overattributing blame to robots when harm comes to pass, such as inappropriately letting the responsible human agent off the moral hook. (shrink)

In previous work I have argued against internalism by means of a dilemma intended to force all internalists to accept one of two undesirable options: either their internalism is unmotivated or it is saddled with vicious regress problems. Recently it has been argued that Phenomenal Conservatism—a theory of justification according to which justification depends on seemings—is a kind of internalism that can escape this dilemma. In this paper, I argue that Phenomenal Conservatism cannot escape my dilemma for internalism. In order (...) to do this, it is helpful to get clear on what Phenomenal Conservatism is saying, and for that reason I begin, in section I, by examining in some detail what seemings are. I then argue, in the remainder of the paper, that, whichever horn of the dilemma for internalism they take, Phenomenal Conservatives are in trouble. (shrink)