Truth in the Making represents a sophisticated effort to map the complex relations between human knowledge and creative power, as reflected across more than half a millennium of philosophical enquiry. Showing the intimacy of this problematic to the work of Nicholas of Cusa, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Vico and David Lachterman, the book reveals how questions about creation apparently diluted by secularism in fact retain much of their potency today. If science could counterfeit or synthesize nature precisely from its (...) smallest nuts and bolts, as Descartes and Hobbes implied and as modern science increasingly suggests, would it create an identical world to that we live in now Robert C. Miner offers a precise genealogy of modern thought on truth and creation: from medieval theology's identification of human creativity with divine initiative to the radical Leibnizian contention that human ideas are 'not little copies of God's', and may at once exceed mimesis and produce things new, unpredictable and unseen. He considers how the theological importance given to creation interacts historically with the secularisation and instrumentalisation of modes of discovery and method, and asks how knowledge is understood between different disciplines, from the allegorical discipline of poetry to the constructible field of mathematics. The book is an eloquent reminder of the ways in which theology continues to fling a wild card at philosophical understandings of reality, countering theories of metaphysical equivalence of the 'real' and 'artificial' with theologies in which human making is always fallible, and strives only for approximate participation in divine truth. As a strenuous and informative breakdown of leading theories of knowledge, Truth in the Making shows the continuing influence of theological questions upon philosophical, scientific and aesthetic disciplines, whilst raising topical questions about the ultimate nature of our reality and our freedom to modify and define it. (shrink)

In the Questions on charity in the ST, Aquinas considers at length the vices opposed to charity, omitting altogether any Question on a vice opposed to mercy. What does the omission reveal about mercy and its difficulties? First, I reject ready-to-hand explanations of the omission. Second, I consider the relation between mercy and compassion, showing that for Thomas the primary impediments to compassion are less vices than psychological forces irreducible to any single vice. Third, I turn to a different set (...) of obstacles to mercy – acts that can arise from compassion, but do not help the person in need. Given these difficulties, how can Thomas take the practice of virtuous mercy to be generally possible? I conclude with a discussion of suffering and the gift of wisdom. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Verum-factum and Practical Wisdom in the Early Writings of Giambattista VicoRobert C. MinerAs several contemporary writers have noted, Giambattista Vico defends the idea of practical knowledge, a type of knowledge that cannot be fully expressed by propositions and defies reductions to method. 1 The defense of practical knowledge, against Descartes and the rise of objectifying science, is most clearly articulated in a group of Vico’s early writings: the oration (...) De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709), the metaphysical book De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710), and two rejoinders (Prima and Seconda risposte) to critics of the De antiquissima. In these texts Vico criticizes Cartesian method in terms that remind us of Aristotle, or at least the Aristotle of the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. “If you were to import the geometrical method into practical life, you would do no more than exhaust yourself in becoming a rational lunatic” (A 7.5). 2This comment and many others like it seem to suggest that Vico is an “Aristotelian,” but any simple classification is problematic. In the same text in which Vico defends the Aristotelian topos he also announces that “the true and the made are convertible” (verum et factum convertuntur). The emphasis on the [End Page 53] role of “making” in truth seems incompatible with the Aristotelian idea of phronesis, whose knowledge is associated with praxis and cannot be reduced to techne. It would be simpler if Vico distinguished between a realm in which the verum-factum principle applied and one in which prudentia was supreme. However, Vico not only situates mathematics and experimental science within the metaphysical framework governed by verum-factum, but also implies strong connections between making and ethics. The prominence Vico assigns to making in all areas of human endeavor gives him a distinctly modern appearance in the fashion of Bacon, Galileo, and Hobbes.This gives rise to both hermeneutical and philosophical problems. Is Vico simply hesitating between the old and new? Does he coherently balance an Aristotelian perspective with the “modern” emphasis on artifice? 3 Perhaps Vico is caught in the middle of the querelle des anciens et modernes, somewhat like John Dunn’s version of Locke, a “tragic figure” who cannot reconcile his epistemological discoveries with a noninstrumentalist view of practical reason. 4 The purpose of this essay is to provide a sympathetic interpretation of Vico’s early writings on prudentia and its links to both verum-factum and rhetoric.Vico contra Rule-based EthicsThe denial that ethics is well understood as a matter of following or justifying general rules has become a commonplace among contemporary Aris-totelians and Wittgensteinians. 5 Against the Enlightenment ambition to construct a universally valid moral science, recent virtue ethics has emphasized the irreducibly contingent aspects of human life, aspects which resist the clutches of “method.” Although Descartes wrote little about morals directly, his influence can be detected in the ethical writings of Hobbes, Kant, Mill, and Sidgwick. These examples of modern moral philosophy presuppose the correctness of the Cartesian diagnosis of ancient and medieval writing on virtue. In the Discourse on Method Descartes compares previous moral teaching to “the most proud and magnificent palaces built on nothing but sand or mud.” 6 Descartes himself did not provide a rational justification of ethics, but he has had no shortage of successors who have tried to complete his foundational project. Jusnaturalism, Kantian deontology, and utilitarianism, as different as they are from one another, share the desire to ground ethics in principles as universal and certain as [End Page 54] those of mathematics. Each of these variants of post-Cartesian ethics claim to have discovered and justified such a principle or set of principles. Maxims deduced from the principle, if not the principle itself, will arguably enable moral agents to discover the right course of action in a particular situation.Vico did not live to witness the most articulate expressions of a Cartesian approach to ethics, but he did apprehend the shift in focus from prudence to method. In the De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, an oration delivered at the University of Naples in 1708 and published the following year, Vico criticizes approaches that locate... (shrink)

In this analysis of his thought on friendship, I begin first by arguing that for Nietzsche friendship is undesirable or impossible with or between four human types. Insight on this point is valuable, because it provides clear vision of what friendship is not. Second, I will argue that Nietzsche takes superior friendship to be possible but rare, since it requires its participants to balance three pairs of opposing qualities that are difficult to keep in equilibrium. Third, I will show that (...) Nietzsche takes friendship in its highest form to aim at a goal, appropriately named "truth." Here I draw upon both "middle-period" texts and Beyond Good and Evil, the latter to show that a concern for friendship pervades Nietzsche's oeuvre. Fourth, I show that Nietzsche differs most from ancient authors in his uncompromising insistence that if friendship is to serve truth rather than comfort or illusion, it is necessarily agonistic. A final section argues that if true friendship is to be nourished rather than destroyed by opposition, the virtue of "sympathy" must be present. Sympathy in Nietzsche's sense cannot be conflated with pity, since it is related to the "shared joy" that he identifies as the crown of friendship. (shrink)

A fresh translation of _quaestiones_ from the _Summa theologiae _of Thomas Aquinas, edited by Robert Miner. This volume provides direct access to the medieval theologian’s deepest thinking about the supreme goal of human life—blessedness—and the virtue most intimately related to this goal—charity. The edition also contains Aquinas’s treatment of charity’s effects—love, joy, peace, and mercy—and the vices opposed to them, such as hatred, envy, and war. Featuring five supplementary essays by noted Aquinas scholars, the volume will enable readers (...) to engage more thoroughly with the thought of Thomas Aquinas. (shrink)

ExcerptAfter emigrating to the United States, Leo Strauss taught political philosophy for thirty years, first at the New School for Social Research in New York and then at the University of Chicago, before retiring at St. John's College. Richard Wolin observes that he “seems to have deeply mistrusted day-to-day politics—a very strange stance, to be sure, for someone who made his living teaching political philosophy.”1 But is it really so strange? What in his German Gymnasium education, or his participation in (...) the Zionist movement, would have prepared him for the peculiarities of day-to-day American politics? Strauss did not underestimate the…. (shrink)

Can God be the efficient cause of himself (causa sui,)? It is well known that Descartes answers this question in the affirmative, but it is considerably less clear why. The main contention of the essay is that Descartes advances the causa sui doctrine because he came to think that the ontological proof of Meditation V required it. We argue these contentions through a close analysis of Descartes' initial articulation of causa sui in response to Caterus, followed by attention to the (...) reformulation of the doctrine in response to the logical objections posed by Arnauld. Our understanding of causa sui as a move made within the horizon of the ontological proof not only illuminates why Descartes would have defended a doctrine as conceptually problematic as causa sui, but also provides an alternative to Jean-Luc Marion's view that causa sui constitutes a third, distinct proof for the existence of God. /// Pode Deus ser a causa eficiente de si mesmo (causa sui,)? É bem sabido que Descartes responde aflrmativamente a esta questão, mas é consideravelmente menos claro porquê. O principal conteúdo do ensaio é que Descartes apresenta a doutrina da causa sui porque pensou que a prova ontológica da Meditação V precisava dela. Demonstramos estas afirmações através de uma análise rigorosa da articulação inicial de Descartes da causa sui em resposta a Caterus, seguida de uma atenção à reformulação da doutrina em resposta às objecções logicas apresentadas por Arnauld. A nossa compreensão da causa sui como proposta feita no horizonte da prova ontológica não ilumina apenas porque é que Descartes teria defendido uma doutrina conceptualmente tão problemática como a causa sui, mas também providencia uma alternativa ao ponto de vista de Jean-Luc Marion de que a causa sui constitui a terceira, prova distintapara a existência de Deus. (shrink)

We can describe certain actions as defective in a particular virtue, for example, as “unjust” or “intemperate.” We can take the additional step of describing such actions as “morally wrong” or “contrary to moral obligation.” A key claim of Elizabeth Anscombe's “Modern Moral Philosophy” is that if we choose to describe virtue-defective actions as “morally wrong,” because we are “obliged” or “bound” or “required” not to do them, we are in fact taking an additional step and that this step stands (...) in need of explanation. Just what, if anything, is added to the description of an action as “unjust” when we say there is an obligation not to do it? Anscombe thinks “the answer is in history: between Aristotle and us came Christianity, with its law conception of ethics.” 1 In this paper, I shall confront this question in two parts. First, I will consider the possibility, argued for by Simon Blackburn, that Anscombe's historical explanation cannot answer this question because her history is based on the false premise that the Greeks do not possess the “moral ought.” Describing an action as contrary to obligation may still add something to “unjust,” but historical genealogy of Anscombe's sort will not shed any light on the question. Since I think that Blackburn's arguments, although important, are not conclusive, I will proceed to consider the implications of Anscombe's own view of what talk about obligation adds to descriptions of actions as defective in virtue. This will require elaboration of her cryptic Wittgensteinian remark that “it really does add something to the description ‘unjust’ to say there is an obligation not to do it; for what obliges is the divine law—as rules oblige in a game.” 2. (shrink)

Do not be put off by the cumbersome title of this book. Underneath a huge mass of erudition lies a simple yet powerful thesis. The thinkers of the high Middle Ages did not imagine themselves as contributors to metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, or any of the autonomous but interconnected “spheres of philosophical inquiry” that most post-Enlightenment historians of medieval philosophy take for granted. In very different ways, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham use the materials of philosophy to describe and illuminate the (...) movement of the human creature in via. The result may occasionally remind us of “doing philosophy,” but Inglis suggests that the similarities are mostly superficial. If we care about understanding medieval thought on its own terms, we will pay attention to the differences between the projects of modern philosophy and those of medieval theology—differences that are no less marked even when the latter self-consciously appropriates the insights of pagan philosophy. (shrink)

This book is of great service to anyone who desires to think historically about ethics, but particularly to those wanting to learn more about the forms assumed by Aristotelian moral discourses during the Renaissance. For it is these forms that are typically overlooked and neglected, even by contemporary theorists who have persuasively argued that we should pay attention to the historical tradition of Aristotelian ethics.

This collection includes essays by contemporary scholars on a range of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century thinkers.

—The main claim of this book is that if we situate Nietzsche’s thought within the historical context of nineteenth-century theories of evolution and degeneration, our comprehension of Nietzsche will significantly improve. Moore begins by questioning Heidegger’s dismissal of Nietzsche’s “alleged biologism.” He contends that Heideggerian approaches not only rest upon a false dichotomy between the metaphysical and the biological, but that they also can never make sense of “why Nietzsche mobilizes a wide array of biological metaphors, and from an early (...) stage in his intellectual development, consistently situates his thought within the dominant discourse of the second half of the nineteenth century”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this analysis of his thought on friendship, I begin first by arguing that for Nietzsche friendship is undesirableor impossible with or between four human types. Insight on this point is valuable, because it provides clear vision of what friendship is not. Second, I will argue that Nietzsche takes superior friendship to be possible but rare, since itrequires its participants to balance three pairs of opposing qualities that are difficult to keep in equilibrium. Third, I will show that Nietzsche (...) takes friendship in its highest form to aim at a goal, appropriately named “truth.” Here I draw upon both “middle-period” texts and Beyond Good and Evil, the latter to show that a concern for friendship pervadesNietzsche’s oeuvre. Fourth, I show that Nietzsche differs most from ancient authors in his uncompromising insistence that if friendship is to serve truth rather than comfort or illusion, it is necessarily agonistic. A final section argues that if true friendship is to be nourished rather than destroyed by opposition, the virtue of “sympathy” must be present. Sympathy in Nietzsche’s sense cannot be conflated with pity, since it is related to the “shared joy” that he identifies as the crown of friendship. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging philosophical work, Koons takes on two powerful dogmas--anti-realism and materialism.

Some of the most interesting works in virtue ethics are the detailed, perceptive treatments of specific virtues and vices. This chapter aims to develop such work as it relates to intellectual virtues and vices. It begins by examining the virtue of intellectual humility. Its strategy is to situate humility in relation to its various opposing vices, which include vices like arrogance, vanity, conceit, egotism, grandiosity, pretentiousness, snobbishness, haughtiness, and self-complacency. From this list vanity and arrogance are focused on in particular. (...) Humble persons are not distinguished from arrogant persons by being unaware of or unconcerned with entitlements; rather, they lack the arrogance that entails a specific kind of motivation called ‘ego-exalting potency’. Humble people are motivated by pure interests regarding entitlements given their ability to serve as means to some valuable purpose or project. The chapter ends by considering a wide variety of ways intellectual humility can promote the acquisition of epistemic goods. (shrink)

Five dimensions of amusement are ethically searched: incongruity, perspectivity, dissociation, enjoyment, and freshness. Amusement perceives incongruities and virtues are formally congruities between one's character and one's nature. An ethical sense of humor is a sense for incongruities between people's behavior and character, and their telos. To appreciate any humor one must adopt a perspective, and in the case of ethical amusement this is the standpoint of one who possesses the virtues. In being amused at the incongruity of some human foible, (...) one is dissociated from it, and adopts a ?higher? perspective. Thus a sense of humor about one's own foibles is a capacity of character?transcendence; but character?transcendence is basic to the very concept of a moral virtue. The prima facie moral dubiousness of enjoying failures of human fulfilment leads to placing certain restrictions on such enjoyment: a sense of humor cannot be a virtue unless allied with compassion and hope. Finally, amusement implies a certain vivacity of perception of the incongruity in question. It is thus a way, not merely of knowing or judging that certain things are fitting and others not, but of ?seeing? that. (shrink)

It is here argued that functionalist constraints on psychology do not preclude the applicability of classic forms of reduction and, therefore, do not support claims to a principled, or de jure, autonomy of psychology. In Part I, after isolating one minimal restriction any functionalist theory must impose on its categories, it is shown that any functionalism imposing an additional constraint of de facto autonomy must also be committed to a pure functionalist--that is, a computationalist--model for psychology. Using an extended parallel (...) to the reduction of Mendelian to molecular genetics, it is shown in Parts II and III that, contrary to the claims of Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, there is no inconsistency between computational models and classical reductionism: neither plurality of physical realization nor plurality of function are inconsistent with reductionism as defended by Ernest Nagel. Employing the results of Part I, the conclusions of Parts II and III are generalized in Part IV to cover any version of functionalism whatsoever; thus, functionalism and reductionism are shown to be consistent. It is urged in conclusion that although a de facto form of autonomy is defensible, there are sound methodological grounds for unconditionally rejecting any principled version of the autonomy of psychology. (shrink)

Following David Hitchcock and Stephen Toulmin, this paper takes warrants to be material inference rules. It offers an account of the form such rules should take that is designed (a) to implement the idea that an argument/inference is valid only if it is entitlement preserving and (b) to support a qualitative version of evidence proportionalism. It attempts to capture what gives warrants their normative force by elaborating a concept of reliability tailored to its account of the form such rules should (...) take. (shrink)

Argumentation involves offering and/or exchanging reasons – either reasons for adopting various attitudes towards specific propositional contents or else reasons for acting in various ways. This paper develops the idea that the force of reasons is through and through a normative force because what good reasons accomplish is precisely to give one a certain sort of entitlement to do what they are reasons for. The paper attempts to shed light on what it is to have a reason, how the sort (...) of entitlement arising from reasons differs from other species of entitlement and how the norms by which such entitlement is assessed obtain their status as norms. (shrink)

This paper challenges the view that arguments are (by definition, as it were) attempts to persuade or convince an audience to accept (or reject) a point of view by presenting reasons for (or against) that point of view. I maintain, first, that an arguer need not intend any effect beyond that of making it manifest to readers or hearers that there is a reason for doing some particular thing (e.g., for believing a certain proposition, or alternatively for rejecting it), and (...) second that when an arguer is in fact trying to induce an effect above and beyond rendering a reason manifest, the effect intended—the use to which his or her argument is put—need not be that hearers do what the stated reasons are reasons for doing. Where the actual or intended effect of making a reason R for doing X manifest is something other than doing X, I call it an oblique—as opposed to a direct—effect of making that reason manifest. The core of the paper presents an overview or map of the main categories of effect which arguments can have, and the main sub-types within each category, calling attention to the points at which such effects can be indirect or oblique effects. The purpose of that typology is to make it clear (i) how oblique effects can come about and (ii) how important a role they can play in the conduct of argumentation. (shrink)

Multiple realization was once taken to be a challenge to reductionist visions, especially within cognitive science, and a foundation of the “antireductionist consensus.” More recently, multiple realization has come to be challenged on naturalistic grounds, as well as on more “metaphysical” grounds. Within cognitive science, one focal issue concerns the role of neural plasticity for addressing these issues. If reorganization maintains the same cognitive functions, that supports claims for multiple realization. I take up the reorganization involved in language dysfunctions to (...) deal with questions concerned with multiple realization and neural plasticity. Beginning with Broca’s case for localization and the nineteenth century discussion of “reorganization,” and returning to more recent evidence for neural plasticity, I argue that, in the end, there is substantial support for multiple realization in cognitive systems; I further argue that this is wholly consistent with a recognition of methodological pluralism in cognitive science. (shrink)

Emotions enter into the structure of Christian virtues in especially central ways because of special features of the Christian virtues-system. Four kinds of virtues can be distinguished-emotion virtues, behavioral virtues, virtues of will power, and attitudinal virtues. A detailed examination of an example of a Christian virtue from each of the last three classes discloses the structural dependency of these virtues on the Christian emotions.

Emotions are pivotal in the manifestation and functioning of character traits. Traits such as virtues and vices involve emotions in diverse but connected ways. Some virtues are exemplified, in important part, by feeling emotions. Others are exemplified in managing, bypassing, or even eliminating emotions. And one virtue at least is exemplified in not-feeling a certain range of emotions. Emotions are a kind of perceptual state, namely construal, involving concern or caring about something, in which the elements of a situation are (...) organized and understood in terms of their significance or import. Emotional understanding can be morally right or wrong. As such construals, emotions can be morally excellent or perverse. Emotions thus have a logic or grammar that is crucial to their entering into, or being set upon by, or simply not occurring because of, virtues. The virtuous person is attuned, implicitly or reflectively, to this grammar, and that attunement constitutes one of the major dimensions of practical wisdom. An associationist psychology attempts to reduce the conceptual and intentional richness of emotions to mere associations or correlations of pleasant or unpleasant “affect” with various things. Such a psychology is fundamentally unfit to represent practical wisdom, and thus the moral life. We sketch an account of the generation and degeneration of character traits using the above conceptual framework and contrasting it with an associationist framework. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 23 Emotions are pivotal in the manifestation and functioning of character traits. Traits such as virtues and vices involve emotions in diverse but connected ways. Some virtues are exemplified, in important part, by feeling emotions. Others are exemplified in managing, bypassing, or even eliminating emotions. And one virtue at least is exemplified in _not_-feeling a certain range of emotions. Emotions are a kind of perceptual state, namely _construal_, involving concern or caring about something, in which the (...) elements of a situation are organized and understood in terms of their significance or import. Emotional understanding can be morally right or wrong. As such construals, emotions can be morally excellent or perverse. Emotions thus have a logic or grammar that is crucial to their entering into, or being set upon by, or simply not occurring because of, virtues. The virtuous person is attuned, implicitly or reflectively, to this grammar, and that attunement constitutes one of the major dimensions of practical wisdom. An associationist psychology attempts to reduce the conceptual and intentional richness of emotions to mere associations or correlations of pleasant or unpleasant “affect” with various things. Such a psychology is fundamentally unfit to represent practical wisdom, and thus the moral life. We sketch an account of the generation and degeneration of character traits using the above conceptual framework and contrasting it with an associationist framework. (shrink)