The article argues for the existence of an elective affinity between the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann and German philosophical anthropology, affinity that would bring to light a 'blind spot' of the functionalism of the equivalence that is placed in the antithesis of the so called anti humanism in Luhmann. The question asked by the German sociologist: which self-projection of man is behind the assumptions of functionalist thinking? He responded: the man as problem solver in a transcendental sense. As well (...) as in Goethe elective affinity of a 'new' theoretical content with pre-existing materials, in the case that concerns us, such pre-existing materials would have had a known address, so that the originality of Luhmann would be in a new composition of categories. The new luhmannian composition takes shape, at least in the following arguments: the distinction from man/environment to the distinction system/environment; the turn from contingency to double contingency; complexity and its reduction in German philosophy to complexity and its reduction in systems theory; from categories of self-reference and self-observation to the theory of the observer; the offset of the human and the world to the offset of society; the functionalism of the German philosophy to the functionalism of the equivalence. El artículo postula la existencia de una afinidad electiva entre la Teoría de Sistemas de Niklas Luhmann y la Antropología Filosófica Alemana , afinidad que traería a la luz un ‘punto ciego’ del funcionalismo de la equivalencia que se coloca en la antítesis del mentado antihumanismo luhmanniano. A la pregunta que el mismo sociólogo alemán se planteaba: ¿qué autoproyección del hombre está detrás de las suposiciones del pensamiento funcionalista?, se respondía: el hombre como solucionador de problemas en un sentido trascendental. Tesis antropológica central de la AFA. Así como en Goethe afinidad electiva dice de una ‘nueva composición’ teórica con materiales prexistentes, en el caso que nos ocupa, tales materiales preexistentes tendrían domicilio conocido, de modo que la originalidad de Luhmann estaría en una nueva composición de categorías de una tradición antropológica muy desarrollada en su época y país. La nueva composición luhmanniana toma forma, al menos, en los siguientes desplazamientos argumentales: de la distinción hombre/entorno a la distinción sistema/entorno; del giro a la contingencia al giro a la doble contingencia; de la complejidad y su reducción en la AFA a la complejidad y su reducción en la teoría de sistemas; de las categorías de autorreferencia y de autoobservación a la teoría del observador; del descentramiento de lo humano y del mundo al descentramiento de la sociedad; del funcionalismo de la AFA al funcionalismo de la equivalencia. (shrink)

In the context of comparing linguistic profiles across neurodevelopmental disorders, Down syndrome has captured growing attention for its uneven profile. Although specific weaknesses in grammatical and phonological processing have been reported, research evidence on phonological development remains scarce, particularly beyond early childhood. The purpose of this study was to explore the phonological profiles of children and adolescents with Down syndrome. The profiles were based on the frequency and relative proportion of the processes observed by classes, and they were compared to (...) those of typically developing preschool children of similar verbal age. A complementary goal was to assess the effect of two different methods of elicitation: a test of articulation and spontaneous speech sampling. Finally, intergroup and intragroup differences in full match percentages between three positions at syllable-level were assessed. The results of the present study confirmed that the frequency of phonological processes in children and adolescents with DS is atypically high and is above what is expected for lexical age and at the same level as grammatical age. Highly increased frequency of processes, consistent in all kinds of processes and positions at the syllable-level, and asynchronous with verbal age and mental age suggest atypical developmental trajectories of phonological development in the Down syndrome population. (shrink)

Fricker shows that virtue epistemology provides a general epistemological idiom in which these issues can be forcefully discussed.

Pourquoi s'interroger sur la possibilité de l'existence d'une philosophie au Chili? Voici la question traitée ici, en prenant comme axe le travail intellectuel du philosophe chilien Jorge Eduardo Rivera, décédé en janvier 2017, après l'écriture de cet ouvrage. Jorge Eduardo Rivera représente parfaitement le travail philosophique et universitaire. Celui qui se réalise dans le plus grand silence, hors de toute stridence ou de toute mode. Etranger au raffut des bavardages qui nous inonde. Une méditation sobre, loin de toute bouffonnerie. Peut-être (...) est-ce cela qui amena Rivera à décrire simplement et profondément des zones inconnues, éclairées par une parole qui, sans être poétique, nous renvoie à l'être en tant que tel et sous toutes ses formes. Ce livre présente l'exercice philosophique de Jorge Eduardo Rivera sous un horizon de réflexion à la fois propre et inspiré de la tradition européenne. Il expose sa biographie et son histoire intellectuelle, les différents espaces dans lesquels sa pensée s'est formée, depuis son noviciat et son scolasticat chez les Pères Français, jusqu'à ses études philosophiques et théologiques en Allemagne et ses rencontres avec Heidegger, Gadamer, Fink, Welte, Von Herrmann et Xavier Zubiri. (shrink)

When we hope to explain and perhaps vindicate a practice that is internally diverse, philosophy faces a methodological challenge. Such subject matters are likely to have explanatorily basic features that are not necessary conditions. This prompts a move away from analysis to some other kind of philosophical explanation. This paper proposes a paradigm based explanation of one such subject matter: blame. First, a paradigm form of blame is identified—‘Communicative Blame’—where this is understood as a candidate for an explanatorily basic form (...) of blame. Second, its point and purpose in our lives is investigated and found to reside in its power to increase the alignment of the blamer and the wrongdoer's moral understandings. Third, the hypothesis that Communicative Blame is an explanatorily basic form of blame is tested out by seeing how far other kinds of blame can reasonably be understood as derivative, especially in respect of blame's point and purpose. Finally, a new and quasi-political worry about blame is raised. (shrink)

In this paper I respond to three commentaries on Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. In response to Alcoff, I primarily defend my conception of how an individual hearer might develop virtues of epistemic justice. I do this partly by drawing on empirical social psychological evidence supporting the possibility of reflective self-regulation for prejudice in our judgements. I also emphasize the fact that individual virtue is only part of the solution – structural mechanisms also have an essential role (...) in combating epistemic injustice. My response to Goldberg principally concerns my perceptual account of the epistemology of testimony, which I defend as being both well-motivated and best categorized as a species of non-inferentialism. I also explain its relation to the reductionism/non-reductionism contrast, and defend my resistance to casting it as any kind of default view. In response to Hookway, I contrast discriminatory with distributive forms of epistemic injustice, and defend the basic taxonomy I present in the book, which casts testimonial and hermeneutical injustice as the two fundamental discriminatory forms of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

There are two kinds of forgiveness that appear as radically different from one another: one presents forgiveness as essentially earned through remorseful apology; the other presents it as fundamentally non-earned—a gift. The first, which I label Moral Justice Forgiveness, adopts a stance of moral demand and conditionality; the second, which I label Gifted Forgiveness, adopts a stance of non-demand and un-conditionality. Each is real; yet how can two such different responses to wrongdoing be of one and the same kind? This (...) paper explains how, by showing that the basic role each plays in moral-social life is the same; and that one is conceptually and therefore historically prior to the other. The result is pluralism, with each kind of forgiveness represented as distinctive in both its psychology and its normativity; and yet an ordered pluralism—with Moral Justice Forgiveness revealed as the root kind, and Gifted Forgiveness a culturally contingent iteration. (shrink)

El concepto de igualdad articula el análisis de Agustín de Hipona en su diálogo De musica. Agustín comienza por el estudio técnico del ritmo de los versos latinos con la función de organizar los pies métricos de acuerdo con su cercanía a la igualdad. La cercanía a la igualdad es el criterio de la delectación, entendida como respuesta de los sentidos ante las proporciones simples. El análisis racional de la experiencia estética da lugar al ascenso del alma hacia Dios, identificado (...) como fundamento de la belleza y de la delectación por las cosas proporcionadas y bellas. Este pasaje de la teoría musical a la filosofía de la música con alcances teológicos articula una teoría estética que aborda la experiencia estética y la reflexión sobre esta experiencia. Sostendremos que los tres momentos del diálogo permiten comprender el concepto de aequalitas de acuerdo con tres perspectivas: aritmética, estética y teológica. La igualdad aritmética es la relación entre dos cantidades iguales. La igualdad estética refiere a las relaciones entre las cantidades de la realidad temporal en tanto que son percibidas y respecto de su belleza. Por último, la igualdad teológica es una igualdad suprema, divina y ajena a la multiplicidad. (shrink)

Bernard Williams is a sceptic about the objectivity of moral value, embracing instead a qualified moral relativism—the ‘relativism of distance’. His attitude to blame too is in part sceptical. I will argue that the relativism of distance is unconvincing, even incoherent; but also that it is detachable from the rest of Williams's moral philosophy. I will then go on to propose an entirely localized thesis I call the relativism of blame, which says that when an agent's moral shortcomings by our (...) lights are a matter of their living according to the moral thinking of their day, judgements of blame are out of order. Finally, I will propose a form of moral judgement we may sometimes quite properly direct towards historically distant agents when blame is inappropriate—moral-epistemic disappointment. Together these two proposals may help release us from the grip of the idea that moral appraisal always involves the potential applicability of blame, and so from a key source of the relativist idea that moral appraisal is inappropriate over distance. (shrink)

I shall first briefly revisit the broad idea of ‘epistemic injustice’, explaining how it can take either distributive or discriminatory form, in order to put the concepts of ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ in place. In previous work I have explored how the wrong of both kinds of epistemic injustice has both an ethical and an epistemic significance—someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower. But my present aim is to show that this wrong can also have a political (...) significance in relation to non-domination, and so to freedom. While it is only the republican conception of political freedom that presents nondomination as constitutive of freedom, I shall argue that non-domination is best understood as a thoroughly generic liberal ideal of freedom to which even negative libertarians are implicitly committed, for non-domination is negative liberty as of right—secured non-interference. Crucially on this conception, non-domination requires that the citizen can contest interferences. Pettit specifies three conditions of contestation, each of which protects against a salient risk of the would-be contester not getting a ‘proper hearing’. But I shall argue that missing from this list is anything to protect against a fourth salient threat: the threat that either kind of epistemic injustice might disable contestation by way of an unjust deflation of either credibility or intelligibility. Thus we see that both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice can render a would-be contester dominated. Epistemic justice is thereby revealed as a constitutive condition of non-domination, and thus of a central liberal political ideal of freedom. (shrink)

Resumen Este escrito es fruto de una investigación documental y bibliográfica realizada en el Archivo General del Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano. Busca presentar una síntesis del impulso que ha realizado el CELAM en orden al diálogo interreligioso. Este no ha sido un camino fácil y aún hay mucho por hacer. No obstante, en el ámbito de la Iglesia Católica, el CELAM ha sido un permanente animador de las orientaciones de los obispos en esta temática, plasmadas en el Concilio Vaticano II y (...) las Conferencias Generales del Episcopado Latinoamericano.This paper is the product of documentary and bibliographic research in the General Archives of the Latin American Bishops’ Council and it endeavors to provide a synthesis of the efforts that CELAM has made in regard to interreligious dialogue. This has not been an easy path to follow and there is still much more yet to be done. However, in the context of the Catholic Church, CELAM has been a persistent dynamic force, encouraging bishops on this topic, according to the guidelines found in the documents of Vatican II and the General Conferences of Latin American Bishops. (shrink)

Interpreting Bernard Williams’s ethical philosophy is not easy. His style is deceptively conversational; apparently direct, yet argumentatively inexplicit and allusive. He is moreover committed to evading ready-made philosophical “-isms.” All this reinforces the already distinct impression that the structure of his philosophy is a web of interrelated commitments where none has unique priority. Against this impression, however, I will venture that the contours of his philosophy become clearest if one considers that there is a single, unchanging root conviction from which (...) his ethical philosophy grows. Despite the perpetual motion of his philosophical thought—its erudition, originality, range, and unceasing forward momentum—still, I contend, there is something unchanging at the heart of it. I will show this by reference to three signature theses: internal reasons, the relativism of distance, and the porous borders of philosophy and history. I will argue that the root conviction of which these are the fruits is the conviction that the constraints of universal rationality seriously underdetermine how one should live. This, I believe, is the vision of the human ethical condition that constitutes the largely inexplicit yet utterly fundamental presupposition beneath Williams’s ethical philosophy taken as a whole. I label the object of this root conviction ethical freedom, and thus portray Williams as a philosopher of ethical freedom. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene como objetivo dilucidar la función que cumple el temor reverencial en el Leviatán de Thomas Hobbes y en la Ciencia Nueva de Giambattista Vico como principio del mundo civil. Se centra la atención en la imaginación y en la religión como elementos fundantes de las instituciones humanas, analizando sus implicaciones.Palabras clave: Vico, Hobbes, política, temor, “terror”.This article aims to elucidate the role of ‘awe’ in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and in Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova as a principle of (...) civilian world. The focus is on imagination and religion as foundational elements of human institutions, analyzing its implications.Keywords: Vico, Hobbes, politics, fear, “awe”. (shrink)

Este artigo tem como objetivo fazer uma reflexão sobre uma metodologia para analisar a relação entre pós-modernidade e comunicação. Com isso, busca fortalecer um método que pode auxiliar na compreensão da organização da sociedade pós-moderna, relacionada ao uso de dois meios de comunicação. Para atender a esses objetivos, pretendemos partir das visões de Marshall Mcluhan, estudamos dois meios de comunicação; Michael Foucault, sua Arqueologia do Saber constitui dois paradigmas de uma época; e por Giorgio Agamben e seu método baseado na (...) relação entre paradigma, arqueologia e matéria. Este debate torna-se relevante para que seja possível desenvolver um método científico das Ciências da Comunicação que questione o contexto contemporâneo de dois saberes académicos. (shrink)

We gain information from collective, often institutional bodies all the time—from the publications of committees, news teams, or research groups, from web sites such as Wikipedia, and so on—but do these bodies ever function as genuine group testifiers as opposed to mere group sources of information? In putting the question this way I invoke a distinction made, if briefly, by Edward Craig, which I believe to be of deep significance in thinking about the distinctiveness of the speech act of testimony. (...) The distinction is that between somebody’s functioning as a ‘good informant’ and their functioning merely as a ‘source of information’. The difference between these has, as he remarks, a crucial ethical aspect: What I have in mind is the special flavour of situations in which human beings treat each other as subjects with a common purpose, rather than as objects from which services, in this case true belief, can be extracted. In this paper I shall try to bring out the distinctive nature of the role of good informant in a way that helps to clarify what is at stake in asking whether there can be group testimony in the sense of genuinely collective testimony—that is to say, where the group testifier is a collective and not merely a sum of individuals testifying in one or another form of aggregated chorus. (shrink)

The dual aim of this article is to reveal and explain a certain phenomenon of epistemic injustice as manifested in testimonial practice, and to arrive at a characterisation of the anti–prejudicial intellectual virtue that is such as to counteract it. This sort of injustice occurs when prejudice on the part of the hearer leads to the speaker receiving less credibility than he or she deserves. It is suggested that where this phenomenon is systematic it constitutes an important form of oppression. (...) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]. (shrink)

Faced with an Alexandrian (Arian) anthropology of Neoplatonic inspiration, Eustathius adopts a strong position in several statements that is similar to astoic Aristotelianism of the 4th century. Nevertheless, Eustathius's reflection is more genuinely theological, than it is reflective of any particular philosophical trend. For him, the human body is a dynamic concept which finds its full meaning in light of the history of salvation, wherein the incarnate and glorified Logos, the second Adam, brings to completion the perfection and incorruptibility of (...) the humble body formed from clay in the first Adam, the protoplast. (shrink)

This paper explores the relation between rational authority and social power, proceeding by way of a philosophical genealogy derived from Edward Craig's Knowledge and the State of Nature. The position advocated avoids the errors both of the 'traditionalist' (who regards the socio-political as irrelevant to epistemology) and of the 'reductivist' (who regards reason as just another form of social power). The argument is that a norm of credibility governs epistemic practice in the state of nature, which, when socially manifested, is (...) likely to imitate the structures of social power. A phenomenon of epistemic injustice is explained, and the politicizing implication for epistemology educed. (shrink)

Aristotle famously distinguishes between merely doing a virtuous action and acting in the way in which a virtuous person would. Against an interpretation prominent in recent scholarship, I argue that ‘acting virtuously,’ in the sense of exercising a virtue actually possessed, is prior to ‘virtuous action,’ understood generically. I propose that the latter notion is best understood as a derivative abstraction from the former, building upon a reading of a neglected distinction between per se and coincidentally just action in Nicomachean (...) Ethics 5, and thus shed light on the meaning and philosophical significance of the priority of acting from virtue. (shrink)

[T]he dominated live in a world structured by others for their purposes — purposes that at the very least are not our own and that are in various degrees inimical to our development and even existence.We are perhaps used to the idea that there are various species of oppression: political, economic, or sexual, for instance. But where there is the phenomenon that Nancy Hartsock picks out in saying that the world is “structured” by the powerful to the detriment of the (...) powerless, there is another species of oppression at work, one that has not been registered in mainstream epistemology: epistemic oppression. The word ‘structured’ may be read materially, so as to imply that social institutions and practices favour the powerful, or ontologically, so as to imply that the powerful somehow constitute the world. But for present purposes I am interested only in an epistemological reading, which implies that the powerful have some sort of unfair advantage in “structuring” our understandings of the social world. I will try to present an account of what this initially vague idea involves. I hope thereby to explain an exact sense in which the powerful can have a kind of epistemic advantage that means the powerless are epistemically oppressed. (shrink)

La concepción de _disciplina_ y la reflexión sobre las disciplinas liberales en la filosofía temprana de Agustín se encuentran mayormente en su obra _De ordine_. Allí, el Hiponense describe la sabiduría de las artes liberales como modesta y sucinta, de modo más prescriptivo que descriptivo. Por otra parte, en _Retractationes_, el autor reseña su proyecto de volver a pensar las disciplinas liberales dedicando una obra a cada una de ellas. Esta empresa inconclusa dio lugar a una obra sobre la gramática, (...) perdida en tiempos de Agustín, y otra sobre la música. En _De musica_, Agustín describe el funcionamiento de la sensibilidad y su articulación con la racionalidad que culmina en el reconocimiento de Dios en el alma. Intentaremos mostrar cómo la dimensión psicológica del funcionamiento de la sensibilidad permite volver sobre el concepto de disciplina y comprender las disciplinas liberales mediante el desarrollo de una de ellas en particular tomando como eje el acercamiento a lo divino por la vía racional. (shrink)

Aristotle’s soul is a first principle (an ‘efficient cause’) of every vital change in an animal, in the way that a craft is a cause of its product’s coming-to-be. We argue that the soul’s causal efficacy cannot therefore be reduced to the formal constitution of vital phenomena, or to discrete interventions into independently constituted processes, but involves the exercise of vital powers. This reading does better justice to Aristotle’s conception of craft as a rational productive disposition; and it captures the (...) soul’s continuous causal role as that which brings about all forms of vital change and underwrites their unity. (shrink)

The thirteen specially-commissioned essays in this volume are written by philosophers at the forefront of feminist scholarship, and are designed to provide an accessible and stimulating guide to a philosophical literature that has seen massive expansion in recent years. Ranging from history of philosophy through metaphysics to philosophy of science, they encompass all the core subject areas commonly taught in anglophone undergraduate and graduate philosophy courses, offering both an overview of and a contribution to the relevant debates. Together they testify (...) to the intellectual value of feminism as a radicalizing energy internal to philosophical inquiry. This volume will be essential reading for any student or teacher of philosophy who is curious about the place of feminism in their subject. (shrink)

El presente artículo discute acerca de la actualidad de la filosofía del deseo inaugurada con El anti-Edipo. Para ello, en primer lugar, se analiza el pragmatismo que inaugura esta obra, estableciendo un contrapunto con las filosofías de Kant y Marx y mostrando sus resonancias con la filosofía nietzscheana. En segundo lugar, comprendiendo este pragmatismo a partir de la invención de su método, el esquizoanálisis, que funciona en el diagnóstico de la perversión del deseo gregario. Por último, describiendo brevemente las derivas (...) del esquizo-análisis desde su formulación en El anti-Edipo hasta ¿Qué es la filosofía?, estableciendo así sus posibles usos para pensar el presente. La hipótesis de este trabajo es que el esquizoanálisis muestra especial eficacia al reactivar el componente clínico que está en la base de su formulación, permitiendo recomprender la noción de deseo más allá de las nociones tradicionales metafísicas de sujeto y de lo humano. (shrink)

The critique of images is seen as a set-up’s critique for the emergency ofcritical thinking in the era of the proliferation of information and communication systems, imposed due to their apparent objectivity. This article discusses in seven paragraphs the link among montage, image and event according to the thoughts ofGilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière.

Acontece en la actualidad una escisión que se asume como insoslayable. Específicamente, para el caso de Valparaíso, la escisión se establecería entre la representación de la ciudad y la ciudad “real” e “histórica”. La falta de cohesión entre una y otra forma pareciera manifestarse como el síntoma de la degeneración y corrupción de la cultura entreverada, característica de la ciudad-puerto del pasado, cuya peculiar construcción espacial fue el resultado de la acción de los distintos grupos e individuos que se agenciaban (...) un lugar en ella. Sin embargo, como intentaremos mostrar en este artículo, resulta importante llevar a cabo un análisis de esta escisión desde distintas perspectivas, que de cuenta de los diferentes aspectos del problema, trabajo que implica una crítica de la representación de la ciudad y que conlleva, a la postre, una crítica de la idea de patrimonio. (shrink)

La objeción que Simmias formula en el Fedón (85e-86d) responde al tercer argumento presentado por Sócrates acerca de la inmortalidad del alma, a saber, el argumento de la afinidad (78b-84b). Allí Simmias sugiere que el alma es una especie de armonía. Como la armonía desaparece tras la destrucción de la lira, entonces hay que afirmar que el alma desaparece tras la destrucción del cuerpo. O bien, habría que afirmar que la armonía sobrevive a la destrucción de la lira, lo cual (...) es absurdo. Ante la objeción, Sócrates formula tres refutaciones que se dirigen específicamente contra la tesis del alma como armonía. Proponemos que ἁρμονία debe entenderse como afinación para comprender el sentido de la objeción de Simmias y de las refutaciones de Sócrates. Esta tesis del alma como ἁρμονία fue atribuida mayormente al pitagorismo, especialmente a Filolao. No obstante, si se entiende el término ἁρμονία como afinación, se presentan problemas teóricos para aceptar la atribución. (shrink)

In order to discuss the relations between history and theory on Aristotle, this paper analyses the internal structure of an Aristotle’s work, The Athenian Constitution, and tries to evaluate – in this same work (but also with regard to Aristotle’s Politics) – which kind of bonds between history and theory turn out to be seen if one speculates the formation of the theory based on political facts and, conversely, the arrangement of the facts based on political theorizing. This frame enables (...) the author to conclude that Aristotle formulates his political theory taking into account historical evidences and that he incorporates them in his considerations on the natural and social evolution of the Polis. (shrink)

I consider Katherine Hawley's commitment account of interpersonal trustworthiness alongside her sceptical challenge regarding the value of philosophically modelling institutional trustworthiness as distinct from reliability. I argue, pace Hawley's challenge, that there would be significant diagnostic and explanatory loss if we were to content ourselves with ideas of institutional (un)reliability alone; and I offer an illustrative case where institutional unreliability is only the half of it, indicating that when it comes to certain kinds of institutional dysfunction, we do need philosophical (...) models of institutional ‘distrustworthiness’ if we are to achieve a proper diagnosis. (shrink)

Widespread conceptions of practical reasoning confront us with a choice between its practicality and its objectivity: between its efficacious, world-changing character and its accountability to objective rational standards. This choice becomes unnecessary, I argue, on an alternative view embodied by the thesis that the conclusion of practical reasoning is an action. I lay bare and challenge the assumptions underlying the rejection of that thesis and outline a defense of its picture of practical reasoning against common objections. On such a picture, (...) practical reasoning provides a principle not externally imposed upon an action but rather constitutive of it. (shrink)

She was to a degree the tool of her husband. However, despite the fact she was under his influence to a degree she cannot escape if the Bank took all reasonable steps to ensure that she had appreciated and understood what she was signing. It may be that Mrs Wright-Bailey did not have an adequate comprehension of the nature of the charge... [E]ven if she did not, the Bank did take all reasonable steps.

At least for those who uphold the rationality of morality, ethics and practical reason are not two distinct topics: an ethically sound agent is one whose practical reason functions as it should. Take, for instance, the greatest historical figures. Aristotle claimed that no virtue of character can exist without practical wisdom—the excellence of practical, deliberative reason. And Kant thought that the categorical imperative, the ultimate moral principle that governs a good will, was at the same time the fundamental principlof practical (...) reasoning because the will simply ispractical reason. Even before any philosophical theory of the connection between acting well and the exercise of a rational power is in view, our moral practices strongly suggest that there is one. For we take it for granted that, in an important range of cases, when an agent fails to act as she should, something has gone awry with the agent and not just with her acts, and, furthermore, that the agent herself may be held responsible for this. In calling an agent who acts unethically "irrational," we are saying these two things. (shrink)