There are a number of concepts of common-sense morality, what one must do, what one ought to do, the supererogatory, the minimum that duty allows, the morally optional and the morally indifferent, that philosophers have been hard-pressed to represent in an integrated conceptual framework. Indeed, many philosophers have despaired at the attempt and concluded that only a fragment of these concepts belong to that fundamental sphere of morality that is the central focus of the ethicist. For example, the traditional scheme, (...) with its triad of the obligatory, the forbidden and the permissible, pigeonholes all actions into three mutually exclusive and exhaustive classes: those which are obligatory, those which are forbidden and those which are optional. Hence, at best, it can represent exactly two of the six aforementioned concepts. For from the standpoint of this scheme, what one must do and what one ought to do can't be distinguished and hence they can't both be represented. Although the morally optional can be represented, the supererogatory, one of its subclasses, cannot be represented. Furthermore, the morally indifferent, another subclass of the optional--one which is obviously disjoint from the supererogatory--cannot be represented. Finally, the minimum that duty allows finds no distinctive place in the traditional scheme. Thus, on the face of it, the traditional scheme is radically incomplete. ;I present, motivate and defend a new conceptual scheme for common-sense morality in which these concepts are represented and systematically integrated. An intuitively motivated semantic framework underpinning this conceptual scheme is also presented. Such a scheme, along with the associated semantic framework, is motivated by reflecting on the supererogationist's objections to utilitarianism and to the traditional scheme. But in addition, a new integrated network of linguistic motivations for this conceptual scheme is uncovered, one which is completely independent of supererogationistic considerations. Hence, these two separate sources of evidence for the centrality of this new scheme to our pre-theoretic thinking corroborate one another--thus jointly boosting the evidence beyond the mere sum of their separate evidential values. (shrink)

Doubts are raised about Dretske’s assumption that an entity can't have a representational state that governs its behavior in virtue of its content unless that internal state has been acquired via appropriate interaction with its environment. The doubts hinge on a subtle distinction between a system's acquiring an internal representational state and a system's internal state acquiring the property of being representational. Employing this distinction, it is suggested that we can pre-load machines with states "destined" to acquire specific, predictable and (...) efficacious representational properties. The picture that results renders Dretske's general naturalistic approach to mental representation consistent with a tempered version of the classical dream in AI. (shrink)

My topic is personal identity, or rather, our identity. There is general, but not, of course, unanimous, agreement that it is wrong to give an account of what is involved in, and essential to, our persistence over time which requires the existence of immaterial entities, but, it seems to me, there is no consensus about how, within, what might be called this naturalistic framework, we should best procede. This lack of consensus, no doubt, reflects the difficulty, which must strike anyone (...) who has considered the issue, of achieving, just in one's own thinking, a reflective equilibrium. The theory of personal identity, I feel, provides a curious contrast. On the one side, it seems highly important to know what sort of thing we are, but, on the other, it is hard to find any answer which has a ‘solid’ feel. (shrink)

What kind of thing are we? Paul Snowdon's answer is that we are animals, of a sort. This view--'animalism'--may seem obvious but on the whole philosophers have rejected it. Snowdon argues that animalism is a defensible way of thinking about ourselves. Its rejection rests on the tendency when doing philosophy to mistake fantasy for reality.

In his middle and later periods one of Wittgenstein’s concerns was perception. This is, of course, precisely what one would expect given his obvious interest then in the notion of experience and in the language we employ to describe and express our experiences. However, the passage which has attracted most attention is the discussion in sec. XI of part II of Philosophical Investigations which is concerned with “seeing as”, or “aspect seeing”. In this paper the examples that Wittgenstein uses are (...) examined, and some puzzles about them raised. It is suggested that Wittgenstein’s aim is to discredit some supposedly mistaken accounts of what ‘seeing as’ is. These mistaken accounts are supposed to made by Gestalt psychologists such as Kohler, and traditional sense-datum theorists. It is further argued that Wittgenstein’s criticisms are not uniformly cogent. It is, though, conceded that this rich and original passage contains far more than the elements investigated here, so much more needs to be scrutinised. (shrink)

The Pasadena game invented by Nover and Hájek raises a number of challenges for decision theory. The basic problem is how the game should be evaluated: it has no expectation and hence no well-defined value. Easwaran has shown that the Pasadena game does have a weak expectation, raising the possibility that we can eliminate the value gap by requiring agents to value gambles at their weak expectations. In this paper, I first prove a negative result: there are gambles like the (...) Pasadena game that do not even have a weak expectation. Hence, problematic value gaps remain even if decision theory is extended to take in weak expectations. There is a further challenge: the existence of a ‘value gap’ in the Pasadena game seems to make decision theory inapplicable in a number of cases where the right choice is obvious. The positive contribution of the paper is a theory of ‘relative utilities’, an extension of decision theory that lets us make comparative judgements even among gambles that have no well-defined value. (shrink)

Fish proposes that we need to elucidate what 'disjunctivism' stands for, and he also proposes that it stands for the rejection of a principle about the nature of experience that he calls the decisiveness principle. The present paper argues that his first proposal is reasonable, but then argues, in Section II, that his positive suggestion does not draw the line between disjunctivism and non-disjunctivism in the right place. In Section III, it is argued that disjunctivism is a thesis about the (...) special nature of perceptual experience, and the thesis as elucidated here is then distinguished from and related to certain other ideas about perception, namely, direct realism and also McDowell's epistemological disjunctivism. (shrink)

Originally published by Rand McNally & Company in 1969, this volume provides a discussion of the Gilded Age, the decades between the end of the Civil War and the closing of the Spanish-American War. Many aspects of this period are examined, including the transition from a rural-agrarian federation to an industrial, urban nation-state. An intensive study of ideas, this volume fulfills the need for an informative and highly readable work of the intellectual and cultural developments in an important era of (...) American History. (shrink)

Ein eben erschienenes Buch „Der Typenbegriff im Lichte der neuen Logik“ (von C. Hempel und P. Oppenheim) wird zum Anlass genommen, methodologische Probleme der Verwendung von Typenbegriffen zu diskutieren. Drei verschiedene Arten von Attributen werden unterschieden : klassifizierende Merkmale, abstufbare Merkmale und Massgrössen. Abstuf- bare Begriffe können standardisiert werden. So entstandene Standards werden als Quasi-Typen bezeichnet. Echte Typen entstehen aus Merkmalkombinationen. Diese Kombinationen werden in einem Merkmalsraum vorgenommen mit Hilfe sogenannter Reduktionen. Drei Arten von Reduktionen werden unterschieden. Die für die (...) empirische Sozialforschung wichtigste Reduktion ist die pragmatische : sie fasst Klassen von Merkmalkombinationen so zusammen, wie es ein vorliegendes Erhebungsproblem erfordert. Im allgemeinen werden Typen intuitiv gebildet, und erst nachher wird die ihnen entsprechende Merkmalskombination aufgedeckt. Dieses Verfahren heisst Substruktion. An Beispielen wird seine Bedeutung für die Praxis dargestellt. Es wird betont, dass die typologischen Operationen (Reduktion, Substruktion und Transformationen) nichts darüber aussagen, was ein Typus ist und wie er gefunden wird. Sie weisen nur gewisse formale Eigenschaften auf, die allen typologischen Systemen gemeinsam sind.Un livre récemment paru „Le concept de type à la lumière de la nouvelle logique“ (de C. Hempel et P. Oppenheim : „Der Typenbegriff im Lichte der neuen Logik“ ) fournit Toccasion de discuter quelques-uns des problèmes que pose l'emploi des concepts de type. On distingue trois catégories de caractères : caractères classificatoires, caractères gradués et mesures de grandeur. Les concepts gradués peuvent être standardisés de telle manière que naissent des standards que l'on peut qualifier de quasi-types. Les types authentiques naissent par combinaison de caractères. Ces combinaisons s'opèrent dans un „lieu de caractères“ (Merkmalsraum) à l'aide d'un procédé nommé réduction. On distingue trois sortes de réduction. La réduction la plus importante pour la recherche sociale est la réduction pragmatique : elle embrasse des classes de caractères combinés en fonction des exigences d'une enquête donnée. En général, les types sont formés intuitivement, ensuite seulement on découvre la combinaison de caractères correspondante. Cette démarche s'appelle substruction. On en montre la signification pour la pratique dans une série d’exemples. On souligne que les opérations typologiques (réduction, substruction, transformations) ne nous permettent nullement de dire ce qu'est un type et comment il a été découvert. Elles indiquent seulement certains caractères formels qui sont communs à tous les systèmes typologiques. (shrink)

The authors argue that the time is ripe for national and corporate leaders to move consciously towards the development of global ethics. This papers presents a model of global ethics, a rationale for the development of global ethics, and the implications of the model for research and practice.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A "Hypostatic Union" of Two Practices but One Person?Paul F. KnitterThis is going to be an awkwardly personal reflection. But that, I understand, is what the assignment given to the members of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies panel "Constructing Buddhist Identities in the West" called for: I was asked to reflect upon "How I as a Western Christian have appropriated Buddhist practice and teachings into my religious identity." (...) I'm grateful for this invitation, because it has provided me with the occasion to realize, quite startlingly, that what I have thought and written about my "Buddhist-Christian identity" in the past really isn't quite accurate.But first let me offer a bird's eye, and therefore limited, view of my two-faced identity: I was born into a traditional, not very critical, Catholic family in the Chicago of seventy-three years ago. At thirteen, I decided (against my parents' wishes) to enter a minor seminary in order to become a priest, and went through the whole fourteen years of training. For the last four years of that training I had the profoundly good fortune to be sent to Rome, arriving there in 1962, two weeks before more than two thousand bishops marched into St. Peter's Basilica to start the Second Vatican Council (the renewing effects of which were much more lasting, it seems, in my psyche than in the psyche and structures of the Vatican!). Ordained a priest in 1966 and animated with Vatican II's new openness to other religions, I did a dissertation at the University of Marburg, Germany, on Christian theologies of religions. When I returned to the United States in 1972, I taught theology at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, and when I decided to leave the Catholic priesthood in 1975, I moved to Xavier University in Cincinnati, where I continued teaching theology for some twenty-eight years.It was during those years, in the 1980s, that I began not only to teach courses on Buddhism but also to practice daily Zen meditation. Gradually, I came to realize that Buddhism, its theory and practice, was seeping into and coloring the way I understood and practiced my Christian creed—to the point that in 2007 I took refuge in the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition and since then have been under the guidance of my teacher, Lama John Makransky. It was around this time that I faced the need to figure out just what or who I was—a Buddhist Christian or a Christian Buddhist. So, typical academic that I am, I wrote a book. [End Page 19]In Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian, I declared and defended my primary identity as a Christian who was thoroughly drenched in Buddhism.1 But when I recently read Rose Drew's penetrating analysis of various ways of blending dual religious belonging in her Christian or Buddhist? An Exploration of Dual Religious Belonging, I started to wonder.2 From her ethnographic study of actual dual belongers, she found that (a) some have a primary religious identity (the group to which I thought I belonged), (b) some alternate between both primary identities, (c) some cannot attribute primacy to either or any identity, and (d) some are too bewildered by it all to say anything.3 As I pondered Drew's description and analysis of her interviewees' meanderings back and forth across religious lines, I had to admit that I wasn't sure where I belonged. So when the request for this paper came along, I saw it as an opportunity to help myself sort things out.An Inappropriate AnalogyMy problem is that as my Christian and Buddhist practices have continued over these recent five to ten years, more and more, I cannot keep them apart. They remain clearly distinct, but unlike Roger Corless, of blessed memory, I have not been able to honor their distinct identities by practicing them, as Roger apparently did, separately: being a Buddhist from Monday to Thursday, and a Christian from Friday to Sunday (and then waiting to see what would happen). Rather, for me, when I am at Mass, I hear the words of the Scripture readings or of... (shrink)