Das Gewissen gilt heute als eines der vorrangigen Kennzeichen der menschlichen Person. Bis heute sind die Bestimmungen des Thomas von massgeblicher Bedeutung fur sein Verstandnis. Der fur seine Gewisssenslehre bedeutendste Text de verritate 16-17 wird hier erstmals in einer vollstandigen zweisprachigen Ausgabe vorgelegt.

Hobbes’s views on free will and action were radically revisionary of a well-established scholastic theory of the ethical significance of freedom and of freedom’s relation to law. At the heart of this scholastic theory was an account of freedom as a multiway power to determine alternatives and of human action as a distinctively practical mode of exercising reason. The chapter explains this theory as developed by Suarez and, following Suarez, by Bramhall, and examines Hobbes’s attack on the theory’s basis—the theory (...) of freedom as a metaphysical power and of action as a distinctively practical mode of exercising reason. (shrink)

Findings in dynamic unit formation suggest that completion processes reflect the optics of our world. Dynamic unit formation may depend on patterns of motion signals that are consistent with the causes of optical changes. In addition, dynamic completion conforms to a local curvature minimization constraint. Such relational aspects of vision are important to consider in linking perceptual experience and neural activity.

This scenario-based study examines the perceptions of university students in the United States and Australia regarding the ethics and acceptability of various sales practices. Study results indicate several significant differences between U.S. and Australian university students regarding the perceptions of ethical and acceptable sales practices. These differences centered on company-salesperson and salesperson-customer relationships. The findings are significant for the employer, and have consequences for customers and competitors. They also have implications for recruiters and managers of salespeople, academics with an interest (...) in understanding cross-national differences in sales ethics, and educators preparing students for future careers as business professionals. (shrink)

Visual self-recognition is often controversially cited as an indicator of self-awareness and assessed with the mirror-mark test. Great apes and humans, unlike small apes and monkeys, have repeatedly passed mirror tests, suggesting that the underlying brain processes are homologous and evolved 14-18 million years ago. However, neuroscientific, developmental, and clinical dissociations show that the medium used for self-recognition (mirror vs photograph vs video) significantly alters behavioral and brain responses, likely due to perceptual differences among the different media and prior experience. (...) On the basis of this evidence and evolutionary considerations, we argue that the visual self-recognition skills evident in humans and great apes are a byproduct of a general capacity to collate representations, and need not index other aspects of self-awareness. (shrink)

Dans sa violente charge contre la Révolution française, Edmund Burke avait élevé le débat politique à un niveau philosophique. Son argument le plus profond consistait à reprocher aux révolutionnaires de pécher par apriorisme, en cherchant à déduire, comme des géomètres, une nouvelle constitution à partir des principes abstraits énoncés dans la Déclaration des droits de l’homme. Reprise par les disciples allemands de Burke, cette critique de la méthode adoptée par la Constituante tirait des postulats empiristes des Lumières anglo-écossaises toutes les (...) implications conservatrices que recelaient déjà les textes politiques et historiques de Hume. Or c’est d’emblée sur ce terrain spéculatif que se joue, chez Fichte, la défense du droit de révolution. Reprochant à l’empirisme de réduire l’esprit au « mécanisme aveugle de l’association des idées », passivement déterminé par une extériorité en soi, Fichte entend au contraire fonder l’expérience elle-même sur l’activité d’un « Moi-en-soi », absolument indépendant. Conçu comme causalité libre, pouvant donc s’affranchir des « conjonctions coutumières » humiennes pour commencer une nouvelle série dans l’ordre des phénomènes, l’homme, pour Fichte, n’a pas seulement la « faculté de se perfectionner », mais la loi de sa liberté lui en fait même un devoir. Au regard de cet impératif catégorique de perfectionnement, il n’y a pas de Common Law qui tienne. Aussi Fichte ne recule-t-il pas devant la révolution, si les institutions du passé font obstacle à la destination de l’homme. (shrink)

The Reformed theological tradition has maintained that faith consists in trust, with that trust involving belief of certain doctrinal propositions. This paper has two aims. First, it contributes towards rehabilitating this conception of faith. I start, accordingly, by setting out the Reformers’ basic case: faith consists in trust because faith is a response to the promises of God, by which the Christian receives God’s forgiveness and is united with God. This argument is independent of any commitment to nondoxasticism or doxasticism (...) about faith. Second, it argues for a methodological commitment which the Reformers’ conception of faith-as-trust complies with, which I think is independently compelling, and which has significant implications for contemporary debates on faith: the kind of faith that matters is that which enables the individual to stand justified, or righteous, before God. Philosophical accounts of faith are unavoidably entangled with theological disputes about justification. (shrink)

Thomas Wheatland examines the influence of the Frankfurt School, or Horkheimer Circle, and how they influenced American social thought and postwar German sociology.

Introduction -- Nazi philosophy -- The expulsion of the invaders -- Philosophical method : virtue vs. vice -- The virtuous tradition : analysis, liberalism, englishness -- Epilogue.

Thomas Williams presents the most extensive collection of John Duns Scotus's work on ethics and moral psychology available in English. This accessible and philosophically informed translation includes extended discussions on divine and human freedom, the moral attributes of God, and the relationship between will and intellect.

Obsessed with the twin beliefs that misbehavior is a medical disorder and that the duty of the state is to protect adults from themselves, we have replaced criminal-punitive sentences with civil-therapeutic 'programs.' The result is the relentless loss of individual liberty, erosion of personal responsibility, and destruction of the security of persons and property - symptoms of the transformation of a Constitutional Republic into a Therapeutic State, unconstrained by the rule of law.

Social learning has been shown to be an evolutionarily adaptive strategy, but it can be implemented via many different cognitive mechanisms. The adaptive advantage of social learning depends crucially on the ability of each learner to obtain relevant and accurate information from informants. The source of informants’ knowledge is a particularly important cue for evaluating advice from multiple informants; if the informants share the source of their information or have obtained their information from each other, then their testimony is statistically (...) dependent and may be less reliable than testimony from informants who do not share information. In this study, we use a Bayesian model to determine how rational learners should incorporate the effects of shared information when learning from other people, conducting three experiments that examine whether human learners behave similarly. We find that people are sensitive to a number of different patterns of dependency, supporting the use of a sophisticated strategy for social learning that goes beyond copying the majority, and broadening the situations in which social learning is likely to be an adaptive strategy. (shrink)

In der 1970 gegründeten Reihe erscheinen Arbeiten, die philosophiehistorische Studien mit einem systematischen Ansatz oder systematische Studien mit philosophiehistorischen Rekonstruktionen verbinden. Neben deutschsprachigen werden auch englischsprachige Monographien veröffentlicht. Gründungsherausgeber sind: Erhard Scheibe (Herausgeber bis 1991), Günther Patzig (bis 1999) und Wolfgang Wieland (bis 2003). Von 1990 bis 2007 wurde die Reihe von Jürgen Mittelstraß mitherausgegeben.

Is there a justified presumption that a speaker is testifying sincerely? Anti-reductionism about testimony claims that there is, absent reasons to the contrary. Yet why believe this, given the actuality and prevalence of lies and deception? I examine one argument that may be appropriated to meet this challenge, David Lewis's claim that truthfulness is a convention. I argue that it fails, and that the supposition that there is a presumption of sincerity remains unsupported. The failure of Lewis's argument is instructive, (...) however, for it shows us a better way of approaching language use than the standard anti-reductionist treatment. As speech is an intentional action, so a presumption of the sincerity or otherwise of others' testimony must be explicable in the terms we normally use to explain action. (shrink)

This chapter concerns the ethics and metaphysics of occupations, such as teacher, waiter, and priest. It argues that teacher is a functional kind, but teachers are not functional objects. If you are a practising teacher, it is likely that you perform a function and serve a purpose, that of imparting knowledge and cultivating minds and skills. This is what teachers, generically, are for, and it is what your school is for. But it is not what you are for. Easily confused (...) senses of ‘job’ are distinguished: occupation, position, requirement, and function. The chapter explains that the requirements of your position and occupation do not entail ability, reasons, or fault (if not complied with), and that if you are not as your position and occupation require, you are not as you ought to be, but it does not follow that there is anything wrong with you. The chapter includes some metaphysical speculation about positions, and examines some sources of, and remedies for, workplace alienation and anxiety. (shrink)

Was kann Naturalismus in der gegenwärtigen Erkenntnistheorie heißen? Wie können wir antinaturalistische Argumente in der Erkenntnistheorie aus naturalistischer Sicht bewerten und klassifizieren? Hat der radikale Naturalist Quine etwa Recht mit seiner Provokation, dass Erkenntnistheorie angewandte Naturwissenschaft ist? "Die Studie enthält viele großartige Bausteine. Sukopp bietet ein Panorama von beeindruckender Breite und Tiefe. Ihre wichtigste Leistung liegt darin, dass sie es nicht bei Darstellungen und Gegenüberstellungen bewenden lässt, sondern sich durchgehend auf Argumente einlässt, auf fremde und eigene. Darin sehe ich die (...) eigentliche philosophische Leistung. Wer sich nicht nur über ein Spektrum von Meinungen informieren möchte, sondern über Argumente Pro und Kontra und über ihre Haltbarkeit, der wird hier nicht nur fündig: Er wird reich belohnt." Gerhard Vollmer. (shrink)

Migration and diversity are important factors in education of teachers around the globe. From an intercultural perspective, we shall analyse how metaphysical and religious assumptions overlap and enable teachers to motivate pupils from different religious-cultural backgrounds to understand in greater detail the facets of (minimal) universalism, relativism and other concepts that obtain in more or less open societies. We argue for a concept of Intercultural Human Rights Education that uses different texts in philosophy classes, includes controversial positions from different cultures, (...) and is methodologically versatile. According to this concept, we think that a) human dignity (as a typically Western concept) and human rights and b) one tradition of interpreting the Qur’an (renunciation of force and the Indian concept of ahimsā (nonviolence)), can motivate teachers to discuss the efforts and also the limits of an overlapping consensus about the intercultural perspective. Finally, we provide the outlines of a teaching unit plan in accordance with our theoretical insights. (shrink)

Conspiracy theories are currently all the rage in philosophy and broader intellectual culture. One of the most common background assumptions in the discourse on conspiracy theories is that conspiracy theorists exhibit certain epistemic vices in the sense of cognitive misconduct. This epistemic vice is mostly seen as a form of irrationality; the corresponding “remedy”, as suggested by some commentators, is a return to the ideals of the Enlightenment. This article argues that this idea is wrongheaded. Upon closer inspection, it becomes (...) clear that conspiracy theorists are actually motivated by the rational Enlightenment ideal of self-thinking in the first place. In contrast to the standard discourse, the article posits that conspiracism is based on a certain form of social scepticism, according to which conspiracy theorists radically mistrust a certain form of expert testimony, namely “official” statements. This form of social scepticism in turn facilitates a naive appropriation of the Enlightenment ideal of self-thinking. The article closes by drawing connections to the ethical and epistemological debate on trust and offers the pessimistic assessment that there are no easy solutions based on individual epistemic virtues. (shrink)

After setting out in part 1 Scotus's libertarian account of the will, I shall discuss two of the most important implications Scotus understood his account to have. First, according to Scotus, the Thomist understanding of the will as intellective appetite is inadequate to provide a libertarian account of freedom. Scotus therefore rejects that understanding and offers an alternative moral psychology. In part 2 of the paper I therefore draw attention to the passages in which Scotus offers his reasons for rejecting (...) Aquinas's account in order to show that they arise directly out of the libertarian account of the will I stated in part 1. I then ask whether Scotus is in fact justified in supposing that Aquinas's conception of will is incompatible with freedom as Scotus understood it. In parts 3 and 4 of the paper I shall argue that he is, since Aquinas's conception of possibility at best allows him to make room for diachronic alternatives, whereas Scotus insists on synchronic alternatives. -/- The second implication of Scotus's libertarian understanding of freedom is his distinctive conception of choice and of rationality in action. In part 5 of the paper I explain this conception and show why Scotus associates it with a libertarian understanding of freedom. (shrink)