In American philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century there was small interest in Empiricism and almost no interest in Realism.

Despite being an aristocrat and a woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu made herself a writer. Hard-hitting, eloquent, and often funny, this is a revised edition of her non-epistolary writings.

Criminal punishments are commonly imposed on those convicted of harming others, yet punishment is itself necessarily harmful. Although we suppose that there is a moral difference between the two types of harming, the precise nature of this difference is not at all obvious. The problem here can be approached by asking this question: in what situations is harming others most obviously morally justified? And the answer, intuitively, is that these are situations involving self-defense against culpable aggression. This intuition provides a (...) point of departure for explaining how criminal punishment is morally justifiable as an instrument of societal-defense. Developing this explanation requires identifying the principle of distributive justice that justifies harming others in individual self-defense, and then applying that principle to defensive actions by societies. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 94, Issue 3, pp 359 - 380 In this paper the author discusses and defends a theory of consciousness inspired by Franz Brentano, according to which every conscious experience involves a certain kind of immediate awareness of itself. All conscious experience is in a certain fundamental sense ‘self-intimating’—it constitutively involves awareness of that very awareness. The author calls this ‘the awareness of awareness thesis’, and she calls the phenomenon that it concerns ‘awareness of awareness’. The author attempts (...) to give a substantive description of what AOA consists in in two ways, first, by listing some of its positive features, and second, by comparing it and contrasting it with introspection. The idea is that there are many different ways we can be aware of our experiences, introspection being one way, AOA being another, distinct way. By clarifying the distinction between AOA and introspection, we can get a better grasp of both phenomena. (shrink)

Although people generally agree that innocent targets of culpable aggression are justified in harming the aggressors in self-defence, there is considerable disagreement regarding whether innocents are justified in defending themselves when their doing so would harm other innocent people. I argue in this essay that harming innocent aggressors and active innocent threats in self-defence is indeed justified under certain conditions, but that defensive actions in such cases are justified as permissions rather than as claim rights. This justification therefore differs from (...) that of self-defence against culpable aggressors, since defensive acts of the latter type are justified as claim rights rather than mere permissions. I argue, however, that the two justifications are alike in that both rest on considerations of distributive justice. (shrink)

The author argues that the proper use of analogy opens up reason to revelation. Drawing on ancient and medieval sources (Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas), he discusses the transcendental properties of being (unity, truth, goodness, and beauty) and their analogous application.

What is given to us in conscious experience? The Given is an attempt to answer this question and in this way contribute to a general theory of mental content. The content of conscious experience is understood to be absolutely everything that is given to one, experientially, in the having of an experience. Michelle Montague focuses on the analysis of conscious perception, conscious emotion, and conscious thought, and deploys three fundamental notions in addition to the fundamental notion of content: the (...) notions of intentionality, phenomenology, and consciousness. She argues that all experience essentially involves all four things, and that the key to an adequate general theory of what is given in experience lies in giving a correct specification of the nature of these four things and the relations between them. (shrink)

Even the most ardent defenders of a legal right to freedom of the press are likely to regard this right as having limitations; but how precisely the right should be limited is a matter of considerable disagreement. This issue is at least partly moral in character: it concerns the moral acceptability of laws which regulate or protect the activities of members of the press. I propose here to address this moral issue, and to do so within the broader framework of (...) considering whether establishing a legal right to freedom of the press—regardless of how it might be limited—is justifiable on moral grounds. In pursuing this investigation, I will devote special attention to familiar claims about the relation between press rights on the one hand, and “the people's right to know” on the other. (shrink)

'Propositionalism' is the widely held view that all intentional mental relations-all intentional attitudes-are relations to propositions or something proposition-like. Paradigmatically, to think about the mountain is ipso facto to think that it is F, for some predicate 'F'. It seems, however, many intentional attitudes are not relations to propositions at all: Mary contemplates Jonah, adores New York, misses Athens, mourns her brother. I argue, following Brentano, Husserl, Church and Montague among others, that the way things seem is the way (...) they are, and that propositionalism must be abandoned. (shrink)

I recently read through the most recent 24 issues of Environmental Health Perspectives—the National Institutes of Health journal of, among other issues, scientific research into how environmental contaminants impact animal and human health. It is a catalog of horrors from a public health perspective. Fish and frogs with their sex scrambled; deformed frogs with altered hormone levels in their blood; a nearly threefold increase in birth defects among Minnesota farm children exposed to pesticides; 2,4-D exposure reducing hormone levels in men; (...) insignificant levels of four environmental chemicals adding up to a significant dose; a third study reconfirming a 50% sperm decline in U.S. men, 1934–1996; phthalates elevated in the blood of Puerto Rican girls developing breasts before they are 8; some 6,000 chemicals declared candidates for study as hormone disrupters ; children living near incinerators having delayed sexual development; hypospadias linked to organochlorine levels in the blood of mink, otter, and polar bears; and “No living organism may be considered DDT-free.” Nothing definitive, but it all suggests that things are tending in a direction that is perfectly awful. (shrink)

In this paper I consider Franz Brentano’s theory of emotion. I focus on three of its central claims: (i) emotions are sui generis intentional phenomena; (ii) emotions are essentially evaluative phenomena; (iii) emotions provide the basis of an epistemology of objective value. I argue that all three claims are correct, and I weave together Brentano’s arguments with some of my own to support them. In the course of defending these claims, Brentano argues that ‘feeling and will’ are united into the (...) same fundamental class. I summarize two of his arguments for this claim, what I call ‘the nature of desire’ argument and ‘the transition’ argument. I show how a central plank of these arguments relies crucially on Brentano’s epistemology of value. (shrink)

I reject the contention that an important theoretical difference exists between formal and natural languages.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AQUINAS ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY MONTAGUE BROWN Saint Anselm College Manchester, New Hampshire THERE HAS BEEN much discussion in recent years bout whether or not the Christian doctrine of the resurection of the body can be rationally defended. The question "What happens after we die?" seems to have been raised by philosophers in every tradition. Materialists have answered that the corruption of the body is the (...) annihilation of the individual. Idealists or spiritualists have answered that the soul lives on without the body. Christians have traditionally held that the body is to be resurrected. Do Christians have any evidence, outside of the faith, for holding that there will be a resurrection? If the answer is no, then the doctrine of the resurrection of the body might rightly be ignored by anyone who is not a Christian. If the answer is yes, what is the evidence? There seem to be three basic ways of applying reason to questions about life after death and hence to the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. One way is parapsychology. Through recording information from mediums and from those who have had experiences of being dead and reviving, statistical evidence is gathered to support the theory that there is life after death, and a description of what that life might be like is drawn up. Here the attempt is made to apply the scientific method of hypothesis and verification to the issue. A second way of applying reason to the issue is to assume through faith that the resurrection of the body is true and then try to show that such a position is not incoherent. 165 166 MONTAGUE BROWN This position attempts to show that it is not impossible to conceive of God resurrecting the body, that is, the concept does not involve a contradiction. A third way is to try to show, not only that the resurrection of the body is a coherent concept, but that it is true, that there is evidence upon which to base an argument which leads to the conclusion that the resurrection of the body is the best answer to what happens to us after death. This third position is that of St. Thomas Aquinas and will be the position defended in this paper. Let me just briefly sketch Thomas's position at this point. Thomas arrives at his position on the resurrection of the body by considering evidences which are discovered in reflecting on what it is to be human. On the one hand, we exercise an immaterial activity, thinking, which means that we have a faculty whose operation transcends the body and therefore is not corrupted when the body is. Thus, the rational soul is an incorruptible substance. On the other hand, this incorruptible substance is the form of the body, naturally requiring the body for its perfection. It is I who thinks and senses, not my soul in one case and my body in the other. Instead of reading this pair of evidences as mutually exclusive options requiring a choice (which choice would entail absurdly denying one or the other of these fundamental aspects of human nature), Aquinas acknowledges both evidences and finds in them reason to affirm the resurrection of the body. The structure of the paper will be as follows. In the first section of this essay I shall examine the current literature on the reasonableness of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. In the second part I shall look at the philosophical arguments which establish the apparently contrary evidences indicating that the human being has an incorruptible soul and yet is a unity of body and soul. Part three will involve an examination of Aquinas's reasons for affirming the resurrection of the body. And in the fourth and final section, some fundamental objections will be entertained concerning difficulties in holding that the body is AQUINAS ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 167 to be resurrected, particularly the problems of the continuity of the individual and the possible encroachment of philosophy into the realms of theology and grace. I As has been said, there appear to be three ways to apply reason to what happens after we die... (shrink)

Does thought have distinctive experiential features? Is there, in addition to sensory phenomenology, a kind of cognitive phenomenology--phenomenology of a cognitive or conceptual character? Leading philosophers of mind debate whether conscious thought has cognitive phenomenology and whether it is part of conscious perception and conscious emotion.

My concern in this paper is with the intentionality of emotions. Desires and cognitions are the traditional paradigm cases of intentional attitudes, and one very direct approach to the question of the intentionality of emotions is to treat it as sui generis—as on a par with the intentionality of desires and cognitions but in no way reducible to it. A more common approach seeks to reduce the intentionality of emotions to the intentionality of familiar intentional attitudes like desires and cognitions. (...) In this paper, I argue for the sui generis approach. (shrink)

It has been maintained that we need not tolerate such entities as pains, events, tasks, and obligations. They are indeed not required in connection with sentences like ‘Jones has a pain’, ‘the event of the sun’s rising occurred at eight’, ‘Jones performed at eight the task of lifting a stone’, or ‘Jones has the obligation to give Smith a horse’, which can be paraphrased without reference to the entities in question—for instance, in the case of the second example, as ‘the (...) sun rose at eight’. (shrink)

Freedom, Philosophy, and Faith: The Transformational Role of Freedom in the Thought of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas highlights the essential role freedom plays in the Catholic intellectual tradition. Montague Brown argues that that freedom, taken in its most essential form as understood by the Judeo-Christian tradition, has been transformative in all aspects of human thought, from metaphysics to politics.

In this paper I respond to Martina and Wimmer’s review of The Given, focusing on their criticisms of the awareness of awareness thesis.