Argues that the only way to understand the Confucian vision of the consummate moral life is to take the tradition on its own terms.

The earliest Analects yet discovered, this work provides us with a new perspective on the central canonical text that has defined Chinese culture--and clearly illuminates the spirit and values of Confucius.

This paper argues for two theses: that degrees of belief are context sensitive; that outright belief is belief to degree 1. The latter thesis is rejected quickly in most discussions of the relationship between credence and belief, but the former thesis undermines the usual reasons for doing so. Furthermore, identifying belief with credence 1 allows nice solutions to a number of problems for the most widely-held view of the relationship between credence and belief, the threshold view. I provide a sketch (...) of a formal framework on which both theses are true. This is a modified Bayesian framework; I argue that despite making credences context-sensitive, the framework lets Bayesians hold on to their signature explanatory successes. The sort of context-sensitivity claimed for credences here mirrors the sort of context-sensitivity I have elsewhere claimed for outright belief: one's credences depend, in part, on the space of alternative possibilities one takes seriously in a context. (shrink)

Offers an in-depth exposition of the Confucian conception of persons as the starting point of Confucian ethics.

A comprehensive history of the human sciences -- psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science -- from their precursors in early human culture to the present.This erudite yet accessible volume in Norton's highly praised History of Science series tracks the long and circuitous path by which human beings came to see themselves and their societies as scientific subjects like any other. Beginning with the Renaissance's rediscovery of Greek psychology, political philosophy, and ethics, Roger Smith recounts how the human sciences (...) gradually organized themselves around a scientific conception of psychology, and how this trend has continued to the present day in a circle of interactions between science and ordinary life, in which the human sciences have influenced and been influenced by popular culture. (shrink)

Roger Ariew presents a new account of Descartes as a philosopher who sought to engage his contemporaries and society. He argues that the Principles of Philosophy was written to rival Scholastic textbooks, and considers Descartes' enterprise in contrast to the tradition it was designed to replace and in relation to the works of the first Cartesians.

This paper argues for a treatment of belief as essentially sensitive to certain features of context. The first part gives an argument that we must take belief to be context-sensitive in the same way that assertion is, if we are to preserve appealing principles tying belief to sincere assertion. In particular, whether an agent counts as believing that p in a context depends on the space of alternative possibilities the agent is considering in that context. One and the same doxastic (...) state may amount to belief that p in one context but not another. The second part of the paper gives a formal treatment of doxastic states, according to which belief is context-sensitive along just these lines. The model is applied to characterize (but not to refute) skeptical arguments. (shrink)

The Zhuangzi is a deliciously protean text: it is concerned not only with personal realization, but also with social and political order. In many ways the Zhuangzi established a unique literary and philosophical genre of its own, and while clearly the work of many hands, it is one of the finest pieces of literature in the classical Chinese corpus. It employs every trope and literary device available to set off rhetorically charged flashes of insight into the most unrestrained way to (...) live one's life, free from oppressive, conventional judgments and values. The essays presented here constitute an attempt by a distinguished community of international scholars to provide a variety of exegeses of one of the Zhuangzi's most frequently rehearsed anecdotes, often referred to as "the Happy Fish debate." The editors have brought together essays from the broadest possible compass of scholarship, offering interpretations that range from formal logic to alternative epistemologies to transcendental mysticism. Many were commissioned by the editors and appear for the first time. Some of them have been available in other languages—Chinese, Japanese, German, Spanish—and were translated especially for this anthology. And several older essays were chosen for the quality and variety of their arguments, formulated over years of engagement by their authors. All, however, demonstrate that the Zhuangzi as a text and as a philosophy is never one thing; indeed, it has always been and continues to be, many different things to many different people. (shrink)

In an influential recent paper, Hawthorne, Rothschild, and Spectre (“HRS”) argue that belief is weak. More precisely: they argue that the referent of believe in ordinary language is much weaker than epistemologists usually suppose; that one needs very little evidence to be entitled to believe a proposition in this sense; and that the referent of believe in ordinary language just is the ordinary concept of belief. I argue here to the contrary. HRS identify two alleged tests of weakness – the (...) neg-raising and weak upper bounds tests, as I call them – which they claim believe and think pass. But I identify several other expressions in ordinary English for attributing belief, all of which fail both tests. Therefore, even if HRS are correct that believe and think refer to a weak attitude, it does not follow that the ordinary concept of belief is weak. I conclude by raising some problems for the accounts of belief as guessing, building on HRS's arguments, due to Kevin Dorst, Matt Mandelkern, and Ben Holguín. (shrink)

The preface paradox does not show that it can be rational to have inconsistent beliefs, because preface writers do not have inconsistent beliefs. I argue, first, that a fully satisfactory solution to the preface paradox would have it that the preface writer's beliefs are consistent. The case here is on basic intuitive grounds, not the consequence of a theory of rationality or of belief. Second, I point out that there is an independently motivated theory of belief – sensitivism – which (...) allows such a solution. I sketch a sensitivist account of the preface writer's doxastic state. (shrink)

The Zhuangzi is a deliciously protean text: it is concerned not only with personal realization, but also with social and political order. In many ways the Zhuangzi established a unique literary and philosophical genre of its own, and while clearly the work of many hands, it is one of the finest pieces of literature in the classical Chinese corpus. It employs every trope and literary device available to set off rhetorically charged flashes of insight into the most unrestrained way to (...) live one's life, free from oppressive, conventional judgments and values. The essays presented here constitute an attempt by a distinguished community of international scholars to provide a variety of exegeses of one of the Zhuangzi's most frequently rehearsed anecdotes, often referred to as "the Happy Fish debate." The editors have brought together essays from the broadest possible compass of scholarship, offering interpretations that range from formal logic to alternative epistemologies to transcendental mysticism. Many were commissioned by the editors and appear for the first time. Some of them have been available in other languages—Chinese, Japanese, German, Spanish—and were translated especially for this anthology. And several older essays were chosen for the quality and variety of their arguments, formulated over years of engagement by their authors. All, however, demonstrate that the Zhuangzi as a text and as a philosophy is never one thing; indeed, it has always been and continues to be, many different things to many different people. (shrink)

Available for the first time in English, Roger's masterwork of intellectual history situates the life sciences within the larger context of French Enlightenment thought and the history of institutions.

Uses a comparative hermeneutical method to explain the most important terms in the classical Confucian philosophical texts, in an effort to allow the tradition to speak on its own terms.

Challenging commonly held biological, religious, and ethical beliefs, internationally well known historian of science Roger Smith boldly argues that human nature is not some "thing" awaiting discovery but is active in understanding itself. According to Smith, "being human" is a self-creation made possible through a reflective circle of thought and action, with a past and a future, and studying this "history" from a range of perspectives is fundamental to human self-understanding. Smith's argument brings together historical and contemporary debates concerning (...) materialism and human nature and the relations of the different fields of knowledge. He draws on classic writings from across the human sciences, touching on sociology, anthropology, brain sciences, history, philosophical hermeneutics, and critical theory, and demonstrates that there is no position outside history for an absolutely objective or eternally valid view of human nature. The question "what is human?" does not have and could not possible have one answer. Instead, there exists a variety of answers for different purposes, and there are good reasons for the many conceptions of what it is to be human. Smith does not treat human nature as only biological, economic, or moral, but as a multidimensional subject that should be considered in its proper historical context. By understanding this context, Smith believes, we can come to a truer understanding of ourselves. Persuasively and elegantly written, _Being Human_ takes an important new turn in the philosophical study of being human. (shrink)

A taxonomy of part‐whole or meronymic relations is developed to explain the ordinary English‐speaker's use of the term “part of” and its cognates. The resulting classification yields six types of meronymic relations: 1. component‐integral object (pedal‐bike), 2. member‐collection (ship‐fleet), 3. portion‐mass (slice‐pie), 4. stuff‐object (steel‐car), 5. feature‐activity (paying‐shopping), and 6. place‐area (Everglades‐Florida). Meronymic relations ore further distinguished from other inclusion relations, such as spatial inclusion, and class inclusion, and from several other semantic relations: attribution, attachment, and ownership. This taxonomy is (...) then used to explain cases of apparent intransitivity in merological syllogisms, and standard form syllogisms whose premises express different inclusion relations. The data suggest that intransitivities arise due to equivocations between different types of semantic relations. These results are then explained by means of the relation element theory which accounts for the character and behavior of semantic relations in terms of more primitive relational elements. The inferential phenomena observed are then explained by means of a single principle of element matching. (shrink)

The problems of environmental ethics are so basic that the exploration of an alternative metaphysics or attendant ethical theory is not a sufficiently radical solution. In fact, the assumptions entailed in adefinition of systematic philosophy that gives us a tradition of metaphysics might themselves be the source of the current crisis. We might need to revision the responsibilities of the philosopher and think in terms of the artist rather than the “scientific of first principles.” Taoism proceeds from art rather than (...) science, and produces an ars contextualis: generalizations drawn from human experience in the most basic processes of making aperson, making a community and making a world. This idea of an “aesthetic cosmology” is one basis for redefining the nature of the relatedness that obtains between particular and world-between tao and te. (shrink)

Henry Rosemont, Jr., in his Against Individualism has mounted a compelling argument that foundational individualism in its various iterations has become a malevolent ideology implicated in and aggravating many of the pressing problems of our time. The overall thrust of his thesis can be stated rather simply. The industrial democracies and most of the rest of the world are dominated by a corporate capitalism the interests of which are served largely by a procedural justice grounded in a foundational individualism that (...) compounds the benefits of a few and marginalizes the possibility of realizing a distributive justice for the many. Hence, the more that academic and political forces are successful in defending... (shrink)

The main question explored by the book is: How can cross-border access to human genetic resources, such as blood or DNA samples, be governed in such a way as to achieve equity for vulnerable populations in developing countries? The book situates the field of genomic and genetic research within global health and research frameworks, describing the concerns that have been raised about the potential unfairness in exchanges during recent decades. Access to and sharing in the benefits of human biological resources (...) are aspects not regulated by any international legal framework such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, which applies only to the exchange of plants, animals and microorganisms, as well as to associated traditional knowledge. Examples of genetic research perceived as exploitative are provided in order to illustrate the legal vacuum concerning the global governance of human genetic resources. The main conclusions drawn from the legal and ethical analysis are: - Benefit sharing is crucial in order to avoid the exploitation of developing countries in human genetic research. - With functioning research ethics committees, undue inducement is less of a concern in genetic research than in other areas of medical research (e.g. clinical trials). - Concerns remain over research involving indigenous populations; accordingly, recommendations are provided. In drawing these conclusions, the book addresses in detail a highly pressing topic in global bioethics and international law. In this regard, it combines bioethical arguments with jurisprudence, in particular with reference to the law of equity and the legal concepts of duress (coercion), unconscionable dealing, and undue inducement. (shrink)

This paper raises the question of the prominence and use of statistical graphs in science, and argues that their use in problem solving analysis can best be understood in an ‘interactionist’ frame of analysis, including bio-emotion, culture, social organization, and environment as elements. The frame contrasts both with philosophical realism and with social constructivism, which posit two variables and one way causal flows. We next posit basic differences between visual, verbal, and numerical media of perception and communication. Graphs are thus (...) seen as key interactive sites where different media are transformed into more interpretable forms. Examples are taken from Limnology where numbers are transformed into graphs to find patterns in them, and thus, by implication in the environmental materials from which the numerical measurements were taken. Their revisualization by passes a human cognitive limitation, for the direct analysis — interpretation of lists and tables of numbers, visual imaging being a cognitive strength. Sense of problem, conceptual repertoire, and social relations are seen to direct this pattern search and interpretive process. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:First Order Relationality and Its Implications:A Response to David ElsteinRoger T. Ames (bio)David Elstein has asked a series of important questions about Human Becomings that provide me with an opportunity to try to bring the argument of the book into clearer focus. Let me begin by thanking David for his always generous and intelligent reflection on not only my new monograph [End Page 181] but also on Henry Rosemont's (...) and my best efforts to expand upon the idea of "role ethics" as a productive way to read Confucian ethics.David asks: Is relationality truly a part of original Confucian thought? Does relationality rule out any notion of essential human nature, and does it necessarily imply or entail role ethics? Is relationality true or merely a useful way of thinking (if these can be distinguished)? Do we know that it's useful?I think the answer to these questions turns on two very different ways of understanding relationality, namely the doctrines of first and second order relationality. The term 'ontology' as "the science of being per se or in itself" gives us a doctrine of external, second order relations. Ontology was introduced into our philosophical vocabulary as a new term for an old way of thinking at the beginning of the seventeenth century by two German philosophers.1 For the classical Greeks, "the science of being per se" (to on he on) was posited as their "first philosophy" with all of its implications for metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, philosophy of religion, and so on. Ontology is that branch of metaphysics that seeks to classify and explain the things that exist, with its underlying assumption that there are unchanging substances or essences internal to things that are available to us to classify them as this and not that. Ontology privileges "being per se" with its categorical language and its "substance" and "attribute" dualism, giving us a grammar of substances as property-bearers and properties that are borne, respectively.Such ontological thinking animates Plato's pursuit of formal, "real" definitions in his quest for certainty (that is, definitions not of words but of what really is), and underlies Aristotle's taxonomical science of knowing "what is what." For these classical Greek philosophers, only what is real and is thus true can be the proper object of knowledge, giving us a logic of the changeless. Corollary to ontology is causal thinking, formal definitions, and, important for David's question, a doctrine of external, second order relationality in which relations conjoin discrete and self-sufficient things, such as human "beings." As the contemporary philosopher Zhao Tingyang 趙汀陽 avers, this kind of substance ontology defining the real things that constitute the content of an orderly and structured cosmosprovides a "dictionary" kind of explanation of the world, seeking to set up an accurate understanding of the limits of all things. In simple terms, it determines "what is what," and all concepts are footnotes to "being" or "is."2In the Book of Changes, we find a vocabulary making explicit cosmological assumptions that stand in stark contrast to this substance ontology and that brings with it a doctrine of first order, constitutive relations. This alternative "first philosophy" has prompted me to create the neologism "zoetology," with the Greek zoe- "life" and -logia "discourse," as my own new term for an old way of thinking that we might translate into modern Chinese as shengshenglun 生生論: "the art of living." The starting point in this zoetological cosmology, then, is that nothing does anything by [End Page 182] itself; association is a fact. Since the very nature of life is associative and transactional, the vocabulary appealed to in defining Confucian cosmology is irreducibly dyadic and collateral: always multiple, never one.And further, it is the nature of life itself that it seeks to optimize the available conditions for its continuing growth, where such growth has a persistent existential and thus intentional aspect. "Life" is the productive correlation between organism and environment that gives rise to correlative, relational, ecological thinking that many of our best sinologists (Marcel Granet, David Keightley, Tang Junyi, K. C. Chang, A. C. Graham, and many others) would ascribe to the earliest semblances of Chinese... (shrink)

‘To translate’ means quite literally ‘to carry across, to bring across,’ that is, ‘to remove from one place to another.’ The questions I want to address in this essay are: To what extent have we been successful in, first, understanding the Chinese philosophical narrative and, then, in ‘carrying it across’ into the western academy? To what extent have we been able to grow and ‘appreciate’ our own philosophical parameters by engaging with this antique tradition? The self-conscious strategy of translation, then, (...) must be to go beyond word-for-word translation and attempt to enable students of Chinese philosophy to read the seminal texts by providing them with a means of developing their own sophisticated understanding of a set of critical Chinese philosophical terms. The premise is that there is no real alternative but to cultivate a nuanced familiarity with the key Chinese vocabulary itself. It is in this effort to take Chinese philosophy on its own terms, then, that we must begin from the interpretive context by taking into account the tradition’s own indigenous presuppositions and its own evolving self-understanding. We must be aware of the ambient, persistent assumptions that have given the Chinese philosophical narrative its unique identity over time. (shrink)

Several essays, articles, and papers have appeared during the last fifteen years which have shed light on the place and function of science in the intellectual life of eighteenth-century Scotland. Some have concentrated on ideological factors such as the increasing concerns with polite culture, improvement, and the reaction of the Scottish élite to the Act of Union. Others have noted the roles of Jacobites and Whigs in the production of a culture which was unique to Scotland. The generalist educational ideals (...) held by Scots have been explored, as have their philosophical, methodological, and mathematical traditions. Another set of papers has fruitfully examined ‘the social role of knowledge’ and has attempted through studies of the politics of Scottish science and a consideration of its audience to show how the characteristics of local provincial society could influence if not ‘determine scientific activity, its social organization or intellectual structure’. Concerns with the institutionalization of scientific activities and the acceptance of new values have also led to studies of the universities, medical corporations, and societies which provided focuses for scientific enquiry. All of these studies have emphasized the aspects of science north of the Tweed between about 1690 and 1830 which seem uniquely Scottish. No one would deny the value of these works but perhaps it is now time to redress the balance and to notice how typical much of the scientific work of the Scots was, and how easily it and the institutions through which it was pursued can be fitted into the wider context of the European Enlightenment. (shrink)

This special issue of Philosophy East and West is dedicated to the inaugural meeting of the World Consortium for Research in Confucian Cultures, convened at the University of Hawai‘i and the East-West Center, October 8-12, 2014, on the theme “Confucian Values in a Changing World Cultural Order,” to explore the contributions of Confucian thought to world culture. The conference brought together leading scholars from partner institutions around the world to explore critically the meaning and value of Confucian culture in the (...) twenty-first century. The purpose of this initial meeting was to address the questions “What is the contemporary form of ‘Confucian’ culture?” “What are its historical failings and limitations?”... (shrink)

The problems of environmental ethics are so basic that the exploration of an alternative metaphysics or attendant ethical theory is not a sufficiently radical solution. In fact, the assumptions entailed in adefinition of systematic philosophy that gives us a tradition of metaphysics might themselves be the source of the current crisis. We might need to revision the responsibilities of the philosopher and think in terms of the artist rather than the “scientific of first principles.” Taoism proceeds from art rather than (...) science, and produces an ars contextualis: generalizations drawn from human experience in the most basic processes of making aperson, making a community and making a world. This idea of an “aesthetic cosmology” is one basis for redefining the nature of the relatedness that obtains between particular and world-between tao and te. (shrink)

Discussing the history of universal human rights and Confucian values, Ames asserts that a growing dialogue between China and the United States would benefit China in terms of political and individual rights and the United States in terms of a greater sense of civic virtue.

For many philosophers working in the area of Population Ethics, it seems that either they have to confront the Repugnant Conclusion , or they have to confront the Non-Identity Problem . To them it seems there is no escape, they either have to face one problem or the other. However, there is a way around this, allowing us to escape the Repugnant Conclusion, by using what I will call Negative Average Preference Utilitarianism – which though similar to anti-frustrationism, has some (...) important differences in practice. Current “positive” forms of utilitarianism have struggled to deal with the Repugnant Conclusion, as their theory actually entails this conclusion; however, it seems that a form of Negative Average Preference Utilitarianism easily escapes this dilemma. (shrink)

Key ideas in the work of Michel Foucault are explored and applied to the organized pursuit of knowledge in higher education. His association of power and knowledge accounts for deeply rooted practices in higher education that would need to be mediated or overcome for there to be a revolution in inquiry to occur, such as the one advanced by Nicholas Maxwell. Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power and bio-power, and how they act to manage the behavior of free citizens, are described. (...) These concepts are then applied to free inquiry, to show how the activity of individual inquirers is managed and how critical inquiry is controlled. The management of inquiry involving four norms, two of them intrinsic to inquiry and the other two extrinsic, is explained. The potential of Foucault’s concept of discursive formations is introduced as a means of reconceiving inquiry to overcome these impediments to a revolution in inquiry. (shrink)

The Philosophical Society of Edinburgh which had flourished for a few years after 1738 was as good as dead in 1748. Lord Morton, its President, now lived most of the time in London whence he wrote to Sir John Clerk in 1747 that he regarded the Society as ‘annihilated’, apparently thinking that the death of Colin MacLaurin in 1746 and the temporary retirement to the countryside of its other Secretary, Andrew Plummer, had put an end to it. Sir John had (...) hoped to revive it through association with the Royal Society of London, but Morton did not encourage him in this scheme, about which he had ‘great doubts’. The Society needed a mathematician and an experimenter who could carry on the consulting work which MacLaurin had done, but Morton glumly wondered if ‘the new professor of Mathematics [Matthew Stewart] will be as zealous as MacLaurin had been.’ The Society's other officers, Dr John Clerk and Alexander Lind, are not known to have tried to revive the Society. Perhaps they were discouraged by the fact that ten of the members of the Society were dead, and that six more had left the kingdom. At least three others were likely to have been habitually absent from meetings because they lived some distance from Edinburgh. Of the remaining forty-five known members in 1748, nine were over sixty-one years of age with four being between seventy-one and seventy-six. In 1737 the average age of thirty-eight of the founders had been 46.0, but by 1748 it had risen to 53.9 for the thirty-three men for whom it can be calculated. Disruption, death, and age had diminished enthusiasm for the Society and jeopardized its survival. Only two meetings are known to have been held in 1746. Sir John's letter to Morton about affiliation with the Royal Society is the only clear sign of life in 1747. We may well ask why this floundering body survived, to whom and to what it owed its revival? The answers to these questions tell us something about the intellectual needs and interests of the Edinburgh intelligentsia of the mid-eighteenth century. (shrink)

This paper shows that in late seventeenth-century Scotland there existed a sizeable virtuoso community whose leaders were abreast of European developments in philosophy, history and science. Moreover, by c. 1700, Sir Robert Sibbald was attempting to organize a learned society modelled upon those he knew in Europe and upon London's Royal Society. The interests of the virtuosi and their attempts to institutionalize their pursuits laid much of the ground work for the Scottish Enlightenment. The Royal Society of Scotland which Sir (...) Robert hoped to found never became a reality, but the academic ideals which he propounded came to fruition in the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh and later bodies such as the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. The intellectual inquiries and achievements of Sir Robert and his friends, particularly those in medicine and natural history, continued to be of interest to later Scots. They, thanks in part to the influence of the Newtonian physician Archibald Pitcaire, improved upon Sibbald's naïve Baconianism, but to a surprising degree their concerns had also been his. (shrink)

The story of the end of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh in 1783, is linked with that of the founding of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and the Royal Society of Edinburgh , both of which were given Royal Charters sealed on 6 May 1783. It is a story which has been admirably told by Steven Shapin. He persuasively argued that the P.S.E. was a casualty of bitter quarrels rooted in local Edinburgh politics, in personal animosities and in disputes (...) about the control of cultural property and intellectual leadership. In all this he was surely correct just as he was in finding the principal actors in this controversy to be: David Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan; the Reverend Dr John Walker, Professor of Natural History in Edinburgh University; Dr William Cullen, Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Vice-President of the P.S.E.; Mr William Smellie, Printer to the Society of Antiquaries; Henry Home, Lord Kames, S.C.J. and President of the P.S.E.; Sir George Clerk-Maxwell, Vice-President of the P.S.E.; John Robison, Professor of Natural Philosophy and Secretary to the P.S.E.; Edinburgh University's Principal, William Robertson; the Curators of the Advocates Library: Ilay Campbell, Robert Blair, Alexander Abercromby, Alexander Fraser Tytler, Professor of Public Law; Henry Dundas, Lord Advocate and M.P. for Midlothian. In a peripheral way, the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons were probably also involved; so too were Lord Buchan's brothers, Henry and Thomas Erskine, Foxite Whigs who opposed Dundas politically. Henry Erskine displaced Dundas as Lord Advocate in August 1783. After the change of ministry on 18 December 1783 he was ousted, but became Dean of the Faculty of Advocates in 1785. National as well as burgh politics touched these disputes and gave the parties of the Erskines and Dundas and his friends some leverage in London. (shrink)

Manipulation cases are usually seen as a problem for compatibilists, and a strength for incompatibilist theories. I present a new case of indirect manipulation, which I claim does not interfere with the manipulated agent's freedom under libertarian criteria. I argue that the only promising libertarian response to my case would undermine Widerker's response to Frankfurt cases, which I take to be the best libertarian strategy for dealing with Frankfurt-type manipulation. I outline a satisfactory compatibilist explanation of my case.