This chapter contains sections titled: What's So Great About Sailing? Aristotle, Virtues, and Flourishing Is Sailing Virtuous? Is Sailing More Virtuous Than Other Pursuits? Conclusion.

Boredom has dominated discussions about longevity thanks to Bernard Williams’s influential “The Makropulos Case.” I reveal the presence in that paper of a neglected, additional problem for the long-lived person, namely alienation in the face of unwanted change. Williams gestures towards this problem but does not pursue it. I flesh it out on his behalf, connecting it to what I call the ‘curmudgeonly attitude to change.’ This attitude manifests itself in the tendency, amongst those getting on in years, to (...) observe that things are getting worse. Curmudgeonliness is typically met with dismissal because it often concerns changes that don’t radically inhibit the curmudgeon’s well-being or autonomy. I believe that taking the curmudgeonly attitude more seriously will provide insight into the longer-lived self and its relation to the future. Using Williams’s approach to longevity as the framework, I contend that—as with boredom—a sense of alienation born of curmudgeonliness can become terminal for the subject, rendering her unable to envision the future as a site of worthwhile activity. However, I also uncover ways in which this agential stasis is significantly distinct from boredom and constitutes a different worry and a different risk for the long-lived individual. (shrink)

Medical practice is animated by the intention to cure; it aims to relieve the immense variety of sufferings to which human beings are subject in virtue of the conditions of their embodied existence. My purpose here is to demonstrate how a philosophical analysis of the formal structures and kinds of human suffering provides an essential foundation for determining certain ethical dimensions of the physician's relation to his suffering patient. Can paternalism in medical practice be justified by the aim of relieving (...) suffering? What are the scope and limits of the patient's responsibility for his suffering, and what difference does this make in the physician's response to it? How is the suffering that medical treatment itself exacts in the name of cure to be justified? Such questions can be answered only by an analysis of the sense or value of suffering in human life. Keywords: suffering, sin, autonomy, paternalism, patient values CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Most properties have comparatives, which are relations. For instance, the property of width has the comparative relation denoted by `_ is wider than _'. Let us say a property is reducible to its comparative if any statement that refers to the property has the same meaning as another statement that refers to the comparative instead. Width is not reducible to its comparative. To be sure, many statements that refer to width are reducible: for instance, `The Mississippi is wide' means the (...) same as `The Mississippi is wider than most rivers'. But some statements that refer to width are not reducible: for instance, `Electrons have zero width' is not. A property is not reducible to its comparative if it has absolute degrees, and specifically an absolute zero. A property's comparative relation places things in an order from those that have the property least to those that have it most. If there is an absolute zero point somewhere in this ordering, the property is not reducible to its comparative. For width, there is an absolute zero at one end of the ordering, so width is not reducible. The property of goodness is reducible to its comparative, betterness. In particular, there is no absolute zero of goodness. Things are ordered by betterness – some things are better than others – but nothing is absolutely good or absolutely bad. This is an exaggeration. In certain applications, goodness does have absolute degrees of a sort, and an absolute zero. For instance, it makes sense to say an event is good, and another event bad. These are absolute degrees of a sort, but they are themselves reducible to betterness. To say an event is good simply means the event is better than what would otherwise have happened. The goodness of lives has a different sort of absolute zero. Lives are ordered by betterness; some lives are better than others. We can make sense of the question `Where in this ordering is the division between lives that are good and those that are bad?' The division between good and bad lives is again reducible to betterness. To say a person's life is good means it is better that the person should continue living, rather than that she should die. Or it may mean it is better that her life should be lived rather than that it should never have been lived at all. As it is often put: a good life is a life worth living. Derek Parfit appears to attach a different sense to the idea of a good life. He appears to mean a life that contains a preponderance of good things (such as pleasure) over bad things (such as pain). If a life contains no good things and no bad things, it has zero goodness in this sense. In this sense, absolute goodness and the absolute zero of goodness are not reducible to betterness. However, this is a naturalistic sense of goodness, and it is subject to the open-question objection. If a life contains no good things and no bad things, it is an open question whether it has zero goodness. It might, for instance, be a bad thing that this life should be lived. In discussing the evil of death, some philosophers seem to have been searching for an absolute goodness that is not reducible to betterness. Thomas Nagel speaks of an asymmetry between what is good about life and what is bad about death. But if a person's life is good, that only means it would be better that she should continue living than that she should die. And if a person's death would be bad, that only means it would be worse that she should die than that she should continue living. So there can be no asymmetry. (shrink)

One of the central concepts in Charles Taylor’s philosophy is that of strong evaluation. What is strong evaluation? The crucial idea is that human relations to the world, to self and to others are value-laden. In the first subsection the central features of the concept of strong evaluation are discussed, namely qualitative distinctions concerning worth and the role of strong evaluation for identity. The nature of strong evaluations both as background understandings and explicit judgements is clarified. It is also (...) claimed that strong evaluation is not precisely a matter of second-order desires, but of evaluative beliefs. In subsection 1.2, some additional and less central characterizations are scrutinized: contingent conflicts, articulacy, discriminacy, reflectivity, depth. The claim is that most of these are not criterial for the distinction between strong and weak evaluations. In the third subsection various criticisms are taken up (from Ernst Tugendhat, Jurgen Habermas, Owen Flanagan, Joel Anderson), which are relevant for defining strong evaluations and assessing the role strong evaluation has in ethics. The terminological solutions are here connected to substantive issues in moral theory. I will defend Taylor against three aspects of a Kantian critique that the notion of strong evaluation is too broad, and overlooks crucial distinctions. Should one distinguish between moral and other values more clearly? Should one distinguish between categorical and optional goods more sharply? Should one distinguish between the whole “moral map” and one’s own orientation more clearly? I think these are indeed essential questions, but they are to be answered within the realm of qualitative distinctions concerning worth. The Kantian attempts to segregate one type of issue as involving strong evaluation and another type of issue as not involving it are misguided. In the fourth subsection I put forward three critical claims in an attempt to show that the notion of strong evaluation as Taylor defines it is too narrow (or at least ambivalent about how narrow it is). These critiques are inspired by more comprehensives approaches to ethics (e. g. by Joseph Raz or Paul Ricoeur). First, is strong evaluation restricted strictly to second-order self-evaluation (as some formulations by Taylor seem to suggest), or does it cover value-judgement in general (as some other formulations by Taylor seem to suggest)? In the broad sense, strong evaluations also include first-order judgements made in various different situations, and background commitments to goods. I suggest that the broad sense be adopted. Second, how does the distinction between strong and weak evaluations relate to “small” values? Third, can self-evaluation succeed without the deontic layer of reasons and norms and if not, does the concept of strong evaluation cover that as well? I defend a different line from Taylor on the issues of small values and the deontic realm. This will lead to a suggestion of “strong evaluation in an extended sense”. (shrink)

Discussion of political and legal citizenship requires attention to social solidarity. Current approaches to citizenship, however, tend to proceed on abstract bases, neglecting this sociological dimension. This is partly because a tacit understanding of what constitutes a `society' has been developed through implicit reliance on the idea of `nation'. Issues of social belonging are addressed more directly in communitarian and multiculturalist discourses. Too often, however, different modes of solidarity and participation are confused. Scale is often neglected. The model (...) of `nation' again prefigures the ways in which membership and difference are constructed. The present paper suggests the value of maintaining a distinction among relational networks, cultural or legal categories, and discursive publics. The first constitute community in a sense quite different from either of the second and third. Categories, however, are increasingly prominent in largescale social life. But the idea of the public is crucial to conceptualizing democratic participation. (shrink)

Has inquiry into the meaning of life become outmoded in a universe where the other-worldiness of religion no longer speaks to us as it once did, or, as Nietzsche proposed, where we are now the creators of our own value? Has the ancient question of the "good life" disappeared, another victim of the technological world? For Luc Ferry, the answer to both questions is a resounding no. In What Is the Good Life? Ferry argues that the question of the (...) meaning of life, on which much philosophical debate throughout the centuries has rested, has not vanished, but at the very least the question is posed differently today. Ferry points out the pressures in our secularized world that tend to reduce the idea of a successful life or "good life" to one of wealth, career satisfaction, and prestige. Without deserting the secular presuppositions of our world, he shows that we can give ourselves a richer sense of life's possibilities. The "good life" consists of harmonizing life's different forces in a way that enables one to achieve a sense of personal satisfaction in the realization of one's creative abilities. (shrink)

A common dictum or assumption in contemporary scientific and philosophical circles is that, if values are at all verifiable in any significant sense, they are less verified and less verifiable than facts. Esthetic and moral values in particular are regarded as less verifiable than scientific facts. It is frequently said that esthetic and moral “facts” and values are essentially and finally a matter of private preference or arbitrary social agreement whereas scientific facts are in the last analysis determined and underwritten (...) by the actual nature of events and relations themselves. Yet in opposition to what may thus appear to be the chief current of contemporary opinion, some thinkers follow mainly in the tradition of Kant, Lotze, and Ritschel. They claim for values, including moral and esthetic values, a unique objectivity and validity. (shrink)

Descartes’ accounts of sensory perception have long troubled his interpreters, for their lack of clear and explicit statements on some fundamental issues. His readers have wondered whether he allows spatial sensory ideas (spatial qualia); whether sensory ideas such as color or pain are representations and, if so, what they represent; and what cognitive value Descartes attributed to sense perception. Recent discussions take differing stands on the questions just mentioned, and also disagree over Descartes’ account of the externalization of (...) sensory qualities, on the origin and correct analysis of the “material falsity” he attributes to some sensory ideas, and on the value of the “teachings of nature.” Such disagreement should not be surprising, for although sensory perception was an important topic for Descartes, his treatment of these particular issues is not systematic – or at least not apparently so. Generally, there are no proof texts that unequivocally settle questions about Descartes’ views on spatial qualia, the representationality of sensory ideas, their cognitive value, externalization, material falsity, and the status of the teachings of nature. Yet these questions and topics naturally arise from matters about which Descartes is explicit and (reasonably) consistent, regarding the role of the senses in philosophy and everyday life and concerning the nature of minds and ideas. It is, therefore, worthwhile to ask what his positions might have been. This chapter develops answers by considering Descartes’ systematic doctrines on the nature of the mind and its ideas and by combing his statements on sensation and perception for hints about how to apply such principles. The first section reviews some key texts. Succeeding sections develop positions on representationality, cognitive value, externalization, material falsity, and the teachings of nature. Ultimately, I favor an interpretation in which, for Descartes, all sensory ideas represent by resemblance, different kinds of sensory ideas vary in cognitive value, externalization arises through spatial localization, and, with sensory ideas of color and the like, as materially false they do not intrinsically misrepresent but afford occasion for false judgments, which arise as merely apparent, and so not actually legitimate, teachings of nature. (shrink)

What is street art? This paper offers a definition of street art as an art kind or art form based on its essential value: its subversiveness. It argues that street art is essentially subversive in virtue of using public space as a technical resource. By hijacking a portion of the urban landscape with its colourful forms and witty designs, street art challenges familiar ways of practising the city, while creating a ‘temporary autonomous zone’ of free expression. There, corporate control (...) over the city’s visible surfaces is ridiculed and people reclaim their right to use the city. In this sense, street art functions as a carnivalesque tactic of social resistance, favouring the emergence of alternative ways to imagine our urban life and our uses of public space. By considering its subversiveness, one can also explain how street art (i) significantly differs from official public art; (ii) includes graffiti as its original and most radical style. (shrink)

The prime concern of education is to evolve the good, the true and the divine in man so as to establish a moral life in the world. It should essentially make a man pious, perfect and truthful. The welfare of humanity lies neither in scientific or technological advancements nor in acquisition of material comforts. The main function of education is to enrich the character. What we need today more than anything else is moral leadership founded on courage, intellectual integrity (...) and a sense of values. Since education is a powerful instrument of social change and human progress, it is also a powerful tool to cultivate values in an individual. Therefore all the educational institutes have greater responsibility to impart learning and cultivation of values through education. For inculcating values many educationists have suggested different ideas such as : provision of value based curriculum, designing special orientation program for teachers, value based foundation courses, publication of literature based on values, necessity to develop code of conduct for teachers and students, inculcation of philosophical viewtowards life among teachers and students. Further to cultivate values among the new generations we are to design a curriculum from out of our accumulated cultural heritage. (shrink)

There has been in recent years a huge surge of interest in the so-called extended Wigner’s friend scenario (EWFS). In short, a series of theorems (with some variation in detail) puts pressure on the ability of different agents in the scenario to account for each of the others’ measured outcomes: the outcomes cannot be assigned single well-defined values while also satisfying other reasonable physical assumptions. These theorems have been interpreted as showing that there can be no absolute, third-person, ‘God’s (...) eye’ description of our reality. The focus of this paper is the strongest of these no-go theorems, the ‘local friendliness’ theorem of Bong et al. (2020, _Nature Physics_, _16_, 1199–1205), which gives earnest consideration to the possibility of a measurement that unitarily reverses an entire lab system, including a conscious agent, thereby erasing the agent’s memory. The purpose of this paper is to begin the philosophical conversation regarding key questions concerning this process: Are the events in the lab merely ‘erased’, or do they in some sense not exist at all? What would it be like to be unitarily reversed? Should an agent care about any experiences they have inside the lab before they are reversed? This analysis employs a parallel case of memory erasure, to which this case can be contrasted, arising in the context of drug-induced amnesia as a result of administering anaesthesia during medical procedures (Carbonell, 2014, _Bioethics_, _28_(5), 245–254). I argue that the consequences of unitarily reversing an agent are much more dramatic than simply memory erasure—the set of events themselves, and the personal timeline of the agent, leave no record at all inside or outside the lab. I consider the ramifications of this for the picture of reality that arises from the EWFS. (shrink)

This paper has a negative and a positive claim. The negative claim is that the Frege-Russell account of existence as a higher-order predicate is mistaken and should be abandoned, even with respect to general statements of existence such as “Flying mammals exist” (where statements of this sort are supposed to be best accommodated by the account). The Frege-Russell view seems to be supported by two ideas. First, the idea that existence is entirely expressed by the existential quantifier of standard predicate (...) logic. Second, the idea that the existential quantifier is a higher-order predicate, a predicate of predicates, not of individuals. I think that both ideas are wrong but will focus on the latter. By construing prima facie first-order statements such as “Flying Mammals exist” as higher-order predications such as “The Fregean Concept Flying Mammal maps at least one individual onto the True”, the Frege-Russell view commits one - merely on the basis of the meaning it assigns to the existence predicate – to abstract objects such as concepts (Gottlob Frege), or propositional functions (Bertrand Russell), or classes (Rudolf Carnap), or properties, kinds, and so on. This cannot be right, I think. The positive claim of the present paper is that, at least in the context of first-order discourse, the existence predicate is just what it seems to be: a bona fide first-order predicate (pace Kant, Hume, Frege, Russell and others). Three important ideas about existence are shared with the Frege-Russell conception of existence, though. (1) Being and existence are one and the same thing: there is no difference between “Unicorns are not”, or “There are no unicorns”, and “Unicorns do not exist”, or “There exist no unicorns”. (2) To be is to be the value of a bound variable, to belong to a domain of quantification (Willard Quine). (3) Anti-Meinongianism, the idea that there are no non-existent objects (Russell). However, we diverge from the Frege-Russell tradition with respect to the following claim. (4) The best concept of existence, in the sense of the one that is best understood and best enables us to formulate ontological disputes, is a purely logical first-level concept defined in terms of existential quantification and identity. First-order statements of existence and non-existence like “Flying Mammals exist” and “Unicorns do not exist” are accordingly taken at face value and analyzed in terms of a logical first-order predicate of existence, the predicate “is (identical to) something”. Reasons are given to prefer this notion of existence to other first-order non-logical notions that have been proposed in the literature, notions characterized in terms of predicates such as “is in space-time”, “is concrete”, “is causally efficacious”, “is actual”, “is real”, etc. (shrink)

Contingent valuation surveys generally elicit stated preferences by asking how much a respondent would be willing to pay for an environmental improvement. By drawing on linguistic theory, we propose that the modal phrasing of this question establishes a particular type of commitment towards a hypothetical payment, namely a subjective want or desire. Based on the idea that beyond subjective desires, considerations about what is morally adequate may guide expressed values and that elicitation of these can be linguistically facilitated, we (...) employ an experimental framework to investigate the effects of different modals ( willing, should and appropriate) in the elicitation question on stated preferences. We find that elicited amounts with appropriate are higher than those elicited with willing and should for environmental improvements more associated with use values, while differences are non-significant for environmental improvements more associated with non-use values. We discuss the implications of our findings for stated preference studies, as well as the potential broader theoretical implications that our study entails regarding linguistic representations of the moral entrenchment of environmental values. (shrink)

Has inquiry into the meaning of life become outmoded in a universe where the other-worldiness of religion no longer speaks to us as it once did, or, as Nietzsche proposed, where we are now the creators of our own value? Has the ancient question of the "good life" disappeared, another victim of the technological world? For Luc Ferry, the answer to both questions is a resounding no. In _What Is the Good Life? _Ferry argues that the question of the meaning (...) of life, on which much philosophical debate throughout the centuries has rested, has not vanished, but at the very least the question is posed differently today. Ferry points out the pressures in our secularized world that tend to reduce the idea of a successful life or "good life" to one of wealth, career satisfaction, and prestige. Without deserting the secular presuppositions of our world, he shows that we can give ourselves a richer sense of life's possibilities. The "good life" consists of harmonizing life's different forces in a way that enables one to achieve a sense of personal satisfaction in the realization of one's creative abilities. (shrink)

In ‘Of Sensory Systems and the “Aboutness” of Mental States’, Kathleen Akins (1996) argues against what she calls ‘the traditional view’ about sensory systems, according to which they are detectors of features in the environment outside the organism. As an antidote, she considers the case of thermoreception, a system whose sensors send signals about how things stand with themselves and their immediate dermal surround (a ‘narcissistic’ sensory system); and she closes by suggesting that the signals from many sensory systems (...) may not in any familiar sense be about anything at all. Her presentation of the issues, however, overlooks resources available to ‘the traditional view’—or so I shall argue. Akins’s own thumbnail sketch of what is wrong with the traditional view is that it asks, concerning a given sensory system, ‘what is it detecting?’, when we should instead be asking ‘what is it doing?’ (352). Her point is that on the traditional view the function of a sensory system—what it's ‘for’—is to detect or indicate (values of) features of the outside environment. But at least on one version of the traditional view—namely Ruth Millikan’s—this would never be the sole or main proper function of a sensory system. (Akins does not list Millikan as a traditionalist, but Millikan fits squarely Akins’s description of them, since she believes in a naturalistic theory of aboutness and thinks it should begin with the senses.) For Millikan (1989, 1993), the proper function of a sensory system is in the first instance enabling behavioural systems—in the simplest case, motor routines—to perform their proper function. This they do, roughly, by switching on and steering the behavioural routines. Where features of the outside environment come in is as Normal (= assumed-by-the-design) conditions for the successful performance of the sensory system's proper function. That is, the only strategy for switching on and steering that is simple enough for evolution to have hit upon it, and reliable enough for evolution to have liked it, is a strategy which gears the steering to (values of) features of the outside environment. But as soon as one starts fleshing out the details of this story, one notices that they are probably quite different in the case of thermoreception from how they are with ‘distance’ senses such as vision and olfaction--a point which Akins overlooks.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 105-112 [Access article in PDF] Philosophy of Art Today:Calling Frameworks into QuestionBeyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays, by Noël Carroll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 450 pp., $29.00. Merit: Aesthetic And Ethical, by Marcia Eaton. Oxford University Press, 2001, 252 pp., $52.00. But Is It Art? by Cynthia Freeland. Oxford University Press, 2001, 231 pp., $11.95. In his magisterial study of modern aesthetics, The (...) Theory of the Arts, Francis Sparshott observed that while "normal science" is what T.S. Kuhn called "hackwork" because it is carried out within a framework it never calls into question, there is — in that same sense — no such thing as "normal art" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). The twenty years since thepublication of Sparshott's book have done nothing but underscore this point. No theme in the arts has been more prominent than the challenging of existing frameworks. Equally, no project in the philosophy of art has proven more important than the remapping and expanding of prior conceptual boundaries. In both the arts and the philosophy of art, the new norm is the foreswearing of the normal. And just as contemporary art challenges the concept we have of art itself, contemporary aesthetics challenges the traditional notion we have of aesthetics. Of late, this challenge has been vigorous, persistent, heated. Yet, although it has produced some affronts to establishedsensibilities, it has not led to the wholesale undoing of prior advances in aesthetic theory, as many had feared.It is this development, rather than any particular movement or advance within the field, that stands out as the distinguishing characteristic of aesthetics today. Similar assaults on basic assumptions, disciplinary borders, and theoretical frameworks have raged in neighboring academic domains where they have inspired debilitating internecine conflict and conceptual disarray. Postmodernist attacks on the very possibility of theoretical coherence have been the most notorious, but far from the exclusive, examples of effects of this sort. Similar skeptical developments have proven corrosive in disciplines from anthropology to theology. Yet the field of aesthetics has generally welcomed framework challenge. It has not been driven by it into warring camps, and has taken this challenge as a positive contribution to the field's strength and importance.Three excellent recent works illustrate different ways in which the a-normality of contemporary aesthetics is being played out, and demonstrate [End Page 105] why it is both constructive and worthwhile. Cynthia Freeland's But Is It Art? is presented as an introduction to art theory, but it is really a provocative analysis of ways in which the visual arts have blown out their parameters and the demands this development places on intelligent response. Noël Carroll's Beyond Aesthetics takes as its theme the idea that, to make proper sense of the present world of aesthetic phenomena, we must "reach beyond aesthetic theories of art and their various prohibitions." And Marcia Eaton's Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical argues that the truly important issues we encounter in making sense of aesthetic experience require an integration of normative considerations formerly thought of as discretely ethical or aesthetic. Each of these works looks at the ways art and aesthetics have forced us to think differently about both of them, due to the way each has recently evolved. Yet none of them takes the radical view that all of what happened before is rendered insignificant by the revolutionary novelty of current work. Instead, these works are syncretic in just the way that contemporary philosophy of art is syncretic; they show how apparent discontinuities can be squared with the general thrust of the best historical work.The picture that emerges from these (as well as many other recent works) is this: Aesthetics today is a discipline pleased both to rethink its own basic concepts and to examine its connections to a variety of regions of concern not traditionally regarded as its province. A century ago, aestheticians were content to think of themselves as custodians of grand and noble values — principally the values of beauty and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 78-88 [Access article in PDF] Remembering Beauty:Reflections on Kant and Cartier-Bresson for Aspiring Photographers Stuart Richmond In the past few decades beauty has become something of an endangered species in the Western art world. Indeed, beauty has never been a central aim of contemporary art, which has tended to focus on meaning and politics rather than formal values, conceptual art being a (...) case in point. Feminist artists and critics, reacting to the objectification of women in society have rendered attention to women's beauty, especially the nude, impolitic. This is perhaps understandable given the persuasive emphasis on beauty in marketing, that many argue socializes an unhealthy self-image in young people and distracts attention from important social issues. As well, techno-global-business practices increasingly invade our lives and private spaces with a virtual culture of information and efficiency. We do not know how this retreat from the sensual, concrete present will affect human sensibilities and values in the long run, although there are some disturbing signs. Seen as un-cerebral and allied with pleasure, beauty and its alter ego, appreciation, have acquired a decided regressive air. Having said that, for many people at the level of ordinary life — in human relationships, arts activities, and love of nature, for example — beauty never really went away because beauty is a source of pleasure and well-being that we cannot help wanting. As Plato pointed out, beauty is the only visible quality that inspires love. 1 A life of beauty in a free and ethical environment is an invitation to a life worth living. Though I cannot pursue the matter here, it is noteworthy that we often call a person of courage, goodness, and humility, a beautiful human being. Around the world people find many paths to beauty and of late in the Western artistic and academic worlds, beauty seems to be making a comeback. But beauty is a difficult thing to talk about, partly due to its being an experiential concept, partly because it has a long and complex philosophical history, and also because there is the risk in analysis of reducing it to something small and formulaic. Words in the end cannot replace the experience [End Page 78] of beauty. Despite these concerns, however, I believe that now, more thanever in the arts and education, we need to develop capacities for creating and appreciating beauty, if only to bring us back into contact with what is sensual and intrinsically worthwhile after so much arid theorizing, conflict in the world, and technocratic obsession. Through beauty we might be able to regain a stronger sense of human values and pleasure in living. Therefore, my aim here is to re-examine beauty in order to strengthen its role in aesthetic education. I do not expect to develop any precise definitions but I shall aim for a few signposts. Background to the Concept of Beauty "Beauty," "beautiful," or "the beautiful" refer primarily to a quality found pleasing to the senses. Here I shall restrict discussion to the visual domain, and later principally to art. As noted, beauty has a long philosophical history but the concept remains vague. From classical times on, beauty has been defined or associated with such properties as symmetry, balance, variety, harmony, proportion, order, unity, and perfection. And indeed, these features have long provided normative guidelines for the creation and appreciation of beauty. Over time we have learned the shape and proportions of a beautiful pot or supporting column. The golden section, a ratio of 1:1.6, has been used to good effect in design for millennia, the Parthenon being a prime example, the 35 mm negative another. However, as is well known, differences in beauty in individual cases tend to elude definition on account of this or that property or collection of properties. Exceptions can always be found. A painting may be well balanced but lacking in a certain élan vital, or unbalanced but beautiful. The variability of beautiful things seems to rule out a... (shrink)

“Sentiment” is a term of art, intended to refer to object-directed, irruptive states, that occur in relatively transient bouts involving positive or negative affect, and that typically involve a distinctive motivational profile. Not all the states normally called “emotions” are sentiments in the sense just characterized. And all the terms for sentiments are sometimes used in English to refer to longer lasting attitudes. But this discussion is concerned with boutish affective states, not standing attitudes. That poses some challenges that will (...) be my focus here. Rational sentimentalism is a cousin of fitting attitude theories of value, but other fitting attitude theories appeal to attitudes that are widely assumed to be governable by certain kinds of judgments. The basic challenge is this: are these boutish sentiments the sorts of things that we can and do regulate in the ways that are required for treating ‘shameful’, ‘funny’, ‘disgusting’ and the like as values? In what follows I briefly sketch some necessary conditions on treating something as a value, from which it emerges that treating sentimental values as values requires regulating the sentiments for fittingness. The rest of the paper is devoted to two ways of understanding how such regulation might work. I argue first that sentiments are susceptible to regulation by evaluative judgment, though perhaps not in quite the same way that philosophers have thought “judgment-sensitive attitudes” are regulated by judgment. I then suggest more tentatively that sentiments are also susceptible to regulation for fittingness in a different way: by educating sensibilities. (shrink)

Most agree that when it comes to so-called 'first-order' normative ethics and political philosophy, constructivist views are a powerful family of positions. When it comes to metaethics, however, there is serious disagreement about what, if anything, constructivism has to contribute. In this paper I argue that constructivist views in ethics include not just a family of substantive normative positions, but also a distinct and highly attractive metaethical view. I argue that the widely accepted 'proceduralist characterization' of constructivism in ethics (...) is inadequate, and I propose what I call the 'practical standpoint characterization' in its place. I then offer a general taxonomy of constructivist positions in ethics. Since constructivism's standing as a family of substantive normative positions is relatively uncontested, I devote the remainder of the paper to addressing skeptics' worries about the distinctiveness of constructivism understood as a metaethical view. I compare and contrast constructivism with three other standard metaethical positions with which it is often confused or mistakenly thought to be compatible: realism; naturalist reductions in terms of an ideal response; and expressivism. In discussing the contrast with expressivism, I explain the sense in which, according to the constructivist, the distinction between substantive normative ethics and metaethics breaks down. I conclude by distinguishing between two importantly different debates about the mind-dependence of value. I argue that a failure to make this distinction is part of what explains why the possibility of constructivism as a metaethical view is often overlooked. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 13.2 (2005) 142-145 [Access article in PDF] The Doing of Philosophy in the Music Class: Some Practical Considerations. Response to Bennett Reimer Mary J. Reichling University of Louisiana at Lafayette How I respond to Bennett Reimer's challenge depends in part on how we define philosophy in this context. We might think of philosophy as a subject of study, that is, philosophy in itself such (...) as epistemology, metaphysics, and so on. Or we may conceive it as philosophy of music, better designated as aesthetics. Or we may consider philosophy as a verb in the sense of "doing" philosophy where our goal is to assist students in developing their thinking skills. It seems that Reimer is placing focus on the last, the doing of philosophy, not that these other views of philosophy are mutually exclusive; they are not.Yet even this distinction is not sufficient for discussion. I am reminded of a little book edited by Eunice Boardman, titled Dimensions of Musical Thinking and published by MENC in 1989. It is a real gem with many fine ideas. In particular it stresses the relationship of content-area knowledge to thinking, and that is what I want to do. Developing thinking skills does not take place in a vacuum: "Now I am going to think." It occurs with respect to a subject area. We have philosophy of science, philosophy of history, philosophy of art, and so on, and philosophy of music.Further, our thinking about music occurs in at least two different ways. I suggest that music possesses both instrumental and intrinsic value with respect to philosophical analysis, as well as instances where the two values are combined. In pondering these values we bring together several so-called philosophical 'methodologies': the search for meaning or understanding, analysis, criticism, [End Page 142] and synthesis. In the process we build arguments that are consistent, coherent, and correspond with the musical evidence.1And further, in our field, students, whether it be through course content itself or through performance classes, have the advantage of gaining both propositional knowledge, learning that, for example, the rhythmic value of eighth notes, and procedural knowledge or learning how, for example, performing eighth notes vocally or instrumentally.2Both of which challenge the students' thinking skills.It is also important to articulate several assumptions if we aspire to "doing" philosophy within the teaching of music. These include a belief that it is worthwhile to develop such thinking skills as I have outlined; that we are willing to take the time for dialogue within the music class or rehearsal hour; and that we as teachers are willing to be facilitators of questions rather than experts with answers.I shall attempt with a few examples to show how these thinking processes might be integrated into the music curriculum following Jerome Brunner's view that children can be taught anything if done so at their level of understanding.The first example relates to the instrumental value of music as it supports text or programmatic conceptions. Let us consider the text of a particular song such as "Blowing in the Wind" or the "Kookaburra" song, the subject of an opera such as Berg's Wozzeck, or the topic of war as exemplified in Britten's War Requiem or some of the protest songs. We ask students how the extra musical subjects are established musically, how the music communicates the ideas, why one musical setting is preferred or better than another, and so forth. In dialoging about these examples, students must first of all be perceptive listeners or participants, then analyze at their level of ability. For an elementary child such analysis might be as simple as pointing out the tempo, mood, rhythms, dynamics, or other expressive elements. Advanced students will have a more extensive musical background to draw upon. Through the analysis students come to a synthesis of these factors that leads to greater understanding of the meaning of the music as they approach questions of value and beauty. If the teacher... (shrink)

The concept of quantum information is introduced as both normed superposition of two orthogonal sub-spaces of the separable complex Hilbert space and in-variance of Hamilton and Lagrange representation of any mechanical system. The base is the isomorphism of the standard introduction and the representation of a qubit to a 3D unit ball, in which two points are chosen. The separable complex Hilbert space is considered as the free variable of quantum information and any point in it (a wave function describing (...) a state of a quantum system) as its value as the bound variable. A qubit is equivalent to the generalization of ‘bit’ from the set of two equally probable alternatives to an infinite set of alternatives. Then, that Hilbert space is considered as a generalization of Peano arithmetic where any unit is substituted by a qubit and thus the set of natural number is mappable within any qubit as the complex internal structure of the unit or a different state of it. Thus, any mathematical structure being reducible to set theory is re-presentable as a set of wave functions and a subspace of the separable complex Hilbert space, and it can be identified as the category of all categories for any functor represents an operator transforming a set (or subspace) of the separable complex Hilbert space into another. Thus, category theory is isomorphic to the Hilbert-space representation of set theory & Peano arithmetic as above. Given any value of quantum information, i.e. a point in the separable complex Hilbert space, it always admits two equally acceptable interpretations: the one is physical, the other is mathematical. The former is a wave function as the exhausted description of a certain state of a certain quantum system. The latter chooses a certain mathematical structure among a certain category. Thus there is no way to be distinguished a mathematical structure from a physical state for both are described exhaustedly as a value of quantum information. This statement in turn can be utilized to be defined quantum information by the identity of any mathematical structure to a physical state, and also vice versa. Further, that definition is equivalent to both standard definition as the normed superposition and in-variance of Hamilton and Lagrange interpretation of mechanical motion introduced in the beginning of the paper. Then, the concept of information symmetry can be involved as the symmetry between three elements or two pairs of elements: Lagrange representation and each counterpart of the pair of Hamilton representation. The sense and meaning of information symmetry may be visualized by a single (quantum) bit and its interpretation as both (privileged) reference frame and the symmetries of the Standard model. (shrink)

I am concerned with values in the descriptive rather than in the normative sense. I am interested in theories that seek to explain one or another aspect of people's moral psychology. Why do people value what they value? Why do they have other moral reactions? What accounts for their feelings, their motivations to act morally, and their opinions about obligation, duty, rights, justice, and what people ought to do? A moral theory like utilitarianism may be put forward (...) as offering the correct normative account of justice, or of the good, or of what people ought morally to do. The answers such a theory offers may be surprising in suggesting that what people ought to do is quite different from what they think they ought to do. I am not concerned with normative moral theories of this revisionary sort. Indeed, I am interested in less revisionary normative theories only to the extent that they can be reinterpreted as offering potential explanations of people's actual moral reactions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Learning from Examples of Civic Responsibility:What Community-Based Art Centers Teach Us about Arts EducationJessica Hoffmann Davis (bio)Introduction/QuestionThroughout the United States, beyond school walls, there struggles and soars a sprawling field of community art centers dedicated to education.1 Most frequently clustered on either coast in bustling urban communities, these centers provide arts training that enriches or exceeds what is offered in schools. They serve artists who need space (...) for work or performance, students who crave instruction and direction, and the broader community that enjoys attendant cultural enrichment. At the core, they create safe havens for arts learning that has been marginalized elsewhere.Unfettered by the demands and constraints of school administrations, these self-designed centers have been of considerable interest to arts education researchers over the last twenty years.2 Largely conceived and staffed by artists, they demonstrate artful alternatives to mainstream education: creative visions of teaching, learning, and assessment. Moreover, the positive impact these centers have had on students considered at risk across a number of variables has caught the attention of researchers looking for better ways to serve our youth.3The location of these centers beyond school walls, like their operation beyond the hours of the school day, would naturally seem to cast them as positive opportunities for extending arts learning that goes on in school. But with school art curricula scarce or in danger of elimination, supplementary options can seem threatening to school arts specialists. Administrators have regarded the opportunities that outside artists and centers provide as sufficient substitutes for a school-based course of sequential instruction in the arts. While vital funding sources encourage and sustain collaboration, a tension persists between the autonomy of outsider arts centers and the integrity [End Page 82] of insider school arts programs. For students disenfranchised from schools, the "otherness" of centers has a certain cachet. For centers unable to afford their own space, school classrooms in after-school hours offer a home base for their offerings and easy access for students. The back and forth across school walls raises opportunities and concerns that have resulted in a range of creative solutions.4 But my interest here is not in the cross-wall meeting of services, but rather in the differences in arts learning on either side of school walls. In the pages that follow, I pose the question, What can schools learn from the arts education provided in the community?In addressing this question, I first mark the differences between arts learning in schools and in the community as a need for justification versus an opportunity for demonstration. I then describe the research from which my thinking and discussion draw and offer a brief overview of the history of community art centers as inspired by and illustrative of civic responsibility. With an eye to what educators and advocates can learn from these community-based efforts, I focus next on three common objections to prioritizing the arts in our schools: value, measurement, and autonomy. Each objection is introduced from a school-based perspective and then reconsidered in light of community-based attitudes and activities.5 In conclusion, I delineate the insights derived from a consideration of community arts education as stimulus for the redirection of educational objectives and advocacy rationales for arts learning in schools.Justification vs. DemonstrationIn its struggle for recognition and place in school settings, arts education has sought justification in terms of its potential to serve the broader educational scene. We ask of classes that provide mounting skills in visual arts, music, or theater, "Yes, but what else does arts learning do? Can it improve student skills in reading, mathematics, or any other subjects that are more traditionally valued?" Such demands may seem unfair. When has math ever been defended for its ability to improve arts performance? Beyond a sense of injustice, claims for arts learning's causal impact on measurable extraneous outcomes (such as improvements in test scores in nonarts academic subjects) are at best most difficult to prove.6In community centers where art is the chosen heart of the matter, students come specifically to study the arts and to benefit from their enhancement of more generalized experience... (shrink)

Early modern medicine was much more dependent on the senses than its contemporary counterpart. Although a comprehensive medical theory existed that assigned great value to taste and odor of medicaments, historical descriptions of taste and odor appears imprecise and inconsistent to modern eyes. How did historical actors move from subjective experience of taste and odor to culturally stable agreements that facilitated communication about the sensory properties of medicaments? This paper addresses this question, not by investigating texts, but by going (...) straight to the sensory impression, which certain substances convey. The aim is not to overwrite or rectify historical descriptions but to investigate whether modern methodologies for sensory assessment can be enlisted to understand the past. We draw on history of science for framing and research questions, pharmaceutical science for knowledge of pharmaceuticals and preparations, and food and meal science for assaying procedures and protocols. We show that sensory evaluation can yield precise descriptions that would not have been alien to early modern medicine makers. However, there are problems with translating descriptions of taste between different historical contexts. By comparing contemporary descriptions of sensations with eighteenth‐century ones, the article discusses how sensory descriptions are highly dependent on context, and subject to historical change. (shrink)

...If, in some places, backward science determines the remaining period by the lack of optimism only by the number 123456789, then our progressive science expands it to 987654321, which is eight times more advanced than theirs. However, due to the inherent caution of scientists, both sides do not specify the measuring unit of reference — year, day, hour or minute are meant. Leonid Leonov. Collected Op. in ten volumes. Volume ten. M.: IHL, 1984, p.583. -/- The modern men being as (...) a rule is proceeding in three relatively autonomous, but immanently coexisting, and each penetrating dialectically through other, and each contesting even cruelly with other, and each more or less dominating on other, differently in various societies, worlds: the first one of the barbarity, the second one the culture, the third one the civilization... Barbarity is the mode of coexistence of autonomous human societies based on the unlimited will to act so as subject wants to do without any limitations of his activities... Culture is the mode of coexistence of autonomous human societies based on the most ancient testaments, customs, traditions etc of the highestly sacrified appearence... Civilisation is the mode of coexistence of autonomous human societies based on the reasoned or legitimated by social contracts, by profits, by expediency and so more constitutions, institutions etc... -/- Andrei Melnikov-Pechersky in his epic "In the Woods" says that there was a movement among the Old Believers in Russia, or a current that proclaimed Kostroma the new and, it seems, the only true Jerusalem, in an apocalyptic sense, of course, which in its spiritual scale was probably not inferior to the Bogomils, shakers, Mormons, or else and the whole Reformation in potential. In Western Europe, every more or less convex nuance of the history of a state or region (even if it is a small San Marino) is overgrown with almost a dozen institutions, not always state ones, by the way, in which almost every sneeze and step of very ambivalent historical subjects in a broad sense is studied. Especially in the young, but very pretentious America of the United States, which embodies all world justice. In our country, for example, even many leading humanitarian specialists do not realize the spiritual value of the Ipatievsky MONASTERY. The Russian writer Boris Shiryaev, who died quite a long time ago and in a very far abroad, devoted a special part of his documentary and artistic epic of wanderings "The Inextinguishable Lampada" to an entertaining and instructive, tragic fate of a kind of village monarchy in some Villages of the Kostroma province (I could not identify the area, and, frankly, I did not really try) in the early years The Soviet government. At the same time, all Russians learn about the French emperor Napoleon almost with their mother's milk how many percent of cyanide potassium was found in his hair, they reflect on Lermontov's "Airship" (probably, just not to "memorize" the imposed "Borodino" by heart). The events, of course, are incomparable, but the fact is significant. The outstanding national artist (if not to say a thinker of the Chesnyakov level) Grigory Pavlovich Kusochkin was glorified wherever, in whatever catalogues he was not included. Paris, London, New York, St. Petersburg, Moscow... To look at some smear of luminaries like Picasso or Modigliani, international tourist routes are organized in the restaurant toilet using the finest marketing technologies, and we did not even know Grigory Pavlovich by sight until, thank God, a series of TV shows on all Russian channels was dedicated to him in one gulp. Why is this happening? Is it a consequence of poverty or the result of the conscious policy of the ruling elite of the country and the world? The regions of the Kostroma Region are Austria, Switzerland, Bavaria, Armenia, Moldova, and Georgia... Georgia! I served in the army there. In this small but very great country, judging even by the appearance of its President Shevardnadze, although it is smaller than the Kostroma region, there are so many different, but Georgian-speaking peoples! Kakhetians, Meskhetians, Imereti, Iveretians, Mingrelians, Khevsurs... Adjarians (mostly Georgian-speaking Muslims) even have their own autonomy. And some peoples are not Georgian—speaking at all — South Ossetians, Abkhazians, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, even Assyrians. In the Kostroma Region, and in any Russian "province" — not much less: there are plenty of the same Georgians or Armenians everywhere, quite moderate, loyal, and so on. Having, as a rule, their own officially registered associations within the framework of cultural autonomy. Well done! And Israel! He is the only one with all his "illegal" (and I am for the fact that every nation knows better where its ancestral lands are) territories half the size of the Kostroma region. The total number of Jews worldwide, according to the "Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary" in 1987, is about 14 million. Meanwhile, the fate of Israel is being preoccupied (it is very instructive how he achieved this!) all the united nations of the world. In the Kostroma Region and its diaspora, it seems to everyone, and especially to its semi-migrant, Varangian leadership. I don't care if they build a public atomic bomb here in the form of a nuclear power plant or not. Because they do not know the value of this land, the greatness of its spirit. Kostroma is a holy land. I will immediately make a reservation that by Kostroma I mean not only the modern region, but the entire area that has ever historically been associated with Kostroma. The USSR is also a part of the great historical Russia. In this sense, even the entire era of the Russian Romanov Empire is the Kostroma region. Or: many toponymic objects of our native land are called mysteriously beautiful: Sharya, Shunga, Shekshema, Sholezhka, - we need to find out what kind of peoples — and where are they now? — we left such euphonious archetypal combinations, because these are our Kostromsky peoples, these are our Kostroma people. Or, say, the classic of American and world sociology Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin writes in his autobiographical scientific novel "The Long Way" that he studied at the Khrenovskaya (what a strong word!) teachers' seminary of Kostroma province, but in an administrative row for propaganda activities, gendarmes were taken by sledge to the prison of the city of Kineshma - is this not a fact for Kostroma, and primarily for him, local history, although Kineshma has long been attributed to the Ivanovo region, and Pitirim Alexandrovich is buried on the other side of the planet?! I have not the slightest doubt that Kostroma provided spiritual food, gave birth to and nurtured a huge intellectual diaspora with extremely valuable material on a national, global scale. And this is both in direct and indirect order, in the form of a chain reaction. Apparently, it is easy for an intelligent person to grow up in Kostroma, but it is impossible to live, and somewhere on the contrary. Therefore, it is not surprising that the geneticist academician D. K. Belyaev, who was born in the village of Protasov near Nerekhta, very close to Kostroma, glorified Moscow and Siberia with his discoveries and practical results, which immeasurably enriched the Soviet state treasury with foreign exchange income from the sale of the most valuable fur grown according to the biotechnology developed by him in a much shorter time than it usually turns out in nature. And in Kostroma, most likely, few people know who he is and what he is famous for. I will focus in more detail on one of the aspects of his great life. This happened back in the so-called pre-Perestroika times. In a series of his speeches, Dmitry Konstantinovich, based on the results of his and colleagues' research, emphasized, in his opinion, the determining role of the biological factor in shaping the content of human essence, of course, only in a philosophical, conceptual aspect. For some reason, this was opposed by a geneticist, as they say, persecuted at one time by the "senile" in selectionism (including human nature) by the Michurino-Lysenkoists, academician N. P. Dubinin, which personally remains incomprehensible to me until now. With a grateful curtsey to Academician Dubinin and his point of view, the famous French humanist, member of the Politburo of the French Communist Party Lucien Sav appeared on the pages of the Communist magazine. The material was clearly titled: "Problems are not only scientific, but also political." He very indecently attributed the views of academician Belyaev to "a reactionary ideology that tries to put genetics at its service, and more broadly, biology, in order to present all kinds of social inequalities of all kinds as inherent in nature itself"(1). I would like to see any ideology that does not try to "put this or that at its service," much less something worthwhile... A little later, the editorial of the Communist hit the "biologizers", and soon Dmitry Konstantinovich was gone. In short, it is only on the example of our fellow countrymen that you can write interesting, world-class essays on science and its history, but instead our scientists should fit their global potencies into a page and a half (good yet. if not entirely at their own expense), and then for at least three years to guess whether they will be published or not. Now it no longer surprises me how at one time, when, after reading the listener card I filled out, the sweetest girl from the IPKPON office at USU congratulated me for something. It turned out that the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy of USU, doctor, professor, Honored Scientist, and now academician Konstantin Niko-laevich Lyubutin is a countryman, Kostromsky, or rather Manturovsky by origin, as I write below in the notes — we are Kostromendors. To him, my fellow citizen in the most subtle micropatriotic dimensions, I owe a lot in my professional and social development, even in survival. Because that's how it often turns out: you can be born here, sometimes you can live here... It's very hard. Maybe the Kostroma origin of an outstanding Russian historian of philosophy, organizer of science and education, educator and friend of a galaxy of people devoted to the Motherland and the cause is not a great milestone in the history of the region, but name me at least a dozen Russian cities on the scale of Kostroma, from where such intellectual ones would come out into the world and light luminaries like ours. No matter who you take from the world significance of the pillars of national (and world, and foreign, - even the great Rabbi of Lubavitcher spent three years in exile in a Campfire, — I learned from some foreign voices) history, literature, culture in general, technology, science and so on - you will always find someone, which is very directly related to Kostroma. Pushkin, Lermontov, Gorky. Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky, Pisarev, Uspensky, Katenin, Florensky, Savrasov, Kustodiev, Dyagilev, Mikhalkov, Alexander Alexandrovich Zinoviev; writers, artists, entrepreneurs, revolutionaries, inventors, politicians... In some world-famous for its classic Russian provincialism, Kologriv has been storing, figuratively speaking, unique sketches, if not of Leo-Nardo da Vinci himself, then certainly of his school, almost since the seventeenth century. And not only that. Nevertheless, the well-known Chukhloma to the Fatherland, in addition to thinkers of the rank of Rozanov and Zinoviev (where should domestic philosophers mature and not be born, if not in Chukhloma, Manturov or Khrenknowswhere?), gave an actor of amazing, national, originality — Mikhail Pugovkin, who can not be confused with anyone, a role that no one will repeat. (shrink)

Despite the long history of scientific, philosophical, and political debate around heritability studies, certain fundamental conceptual issues have not been recognized or well appreciated. The starting point is that heritability does not measure the degree of influence that genes have on a trait or provide a reliable basis for choosing which traits to investigate further with molecular genetic research. The short argument on this point revolves around two issues: the disconnect between analyzing measurements of a trait and exposing the measurable (...) genetic and environmental factors underlying the trait’s development; and the possibility of heterogeneity in these underlying factors, that is, different factors may lead to the same trait value. The idea of underlying heterogeneity is elaborated through schematic diagrams and distinguished from other senses of heterogeneity. Five conceptually distinct approaches for addressing underlying heterogeneity are identified, corresponding to distinct ways of managing the reciprocal relationship between the degree of knowledge of the dynamics through which the trait develops and the actions that can be reliably be based on what is known . This framework, which extends the interventionist notion of causality, allows the scope and limitations of heritability studies to be clarified in greater detail. It can also inform critical appreciation of newer methods of analysis of genetic and environmental factors. The issues discussed in this article do not centre on empirical data or technical detail and should be accessible to non-specialists as well as challenging active researchers. (shrink)

In this Chapter (ch 5 of Strong Evaluation without Moral Sources), as well the following chapters, I defend a hermeneutical but nevertheless non-relativistic moral theory, taking Charles Taylor’s writings on this topic as my guide. Taylor is a realist concerning natural sciences, the ontology of persons and the ontology of goods (or meanings, significances or values). Yet, his realisms in these three areas differ significantly from one another, and therefore one has to be careful not to presuppose too rigid views (...) of what “realism” must be like. Taylor’s moral realism can be called engaged, cultural, phenomenological, hermeneutical or even “expressivist” in a sense to be clarified. According to such value realism, cognitivism is the correct view of our ordinary moral and evaluative reactions and responses to situations. In the realm of evaluative judgements, genuinely correct and incorrect (and better and worse) judgements are possible. These judgements can be implicit in our moral emotions and tacit agent’s knowledge, or more explicit in different articulations. What makes evaluative judgements correct are evaluative properties or “imports” of the situation, and both the evaluative features of situations and our correct responses to them can be further understood in terms of a plurality of (conflicting and incommensurable) goods, ideals or values (section 5.1). In 5.2 I discuss some motivations for non-cognitivism, and try to show that cognitivism can preserve these motivations. I then ask whether value-properties are metaphysically “queer” and what the perspective from which goods are accessible is. I argue for a lifeworldly, engaged access. The evaluative realm is not accessible from a disengaged perspective, but only from within an engaged, lifeworldly perspective. Evaluative properties are not merely a matter of subjective projection nor merely a matter of objective properties independent of valuers. Evaluative properties are relational, and neither the objective nor the subjective pole has priority (5.3). Then I clarify the meaning of “good” and “value”, especially in relation to the central idea that each qualitative distinction of worth expressible in thick, strongly evaluative terms specifies a “value” or a “good” or a “good-making property”. I contrast this with other meanings of “good”. (5.4) After that, I defend the irreducible plurality of such goods against more uniform principles and value monism on the one hand, and I defend their generality against more radical particularisms on the other. Further, I discuss the “lumpy” character of the evaluative realm in relation to incompatibility, incommensurability and conflicts of goods. (5.5). These theses are reconstructed from Charles Taylor’s writings, but authors like John McDowell and Joseph Raz hold similar views. Not unimportantly, Charles Taylor would add a further thesis claiming that there are “constitutive goods” which constitute the goodness of “life goods”, or which in other words bring about the fact that evaluative properties have value. I try to defend the coherence and appeal of engaged, lifeworldly moral realism without taking at first any stand on this further claim about constitutive goods. J. Schneewind (1991, 422) writes in his perceptive review of Sources of the Self that Taylor does not really pay attention to the metaethical debates of 20th century value-theorists. While Taylor’s contribution could have benefited from the work already done in the field, and while Taylor’s philosophizing often leaves it open how his views relate to the views of others, his approach manages to be remarkably original. One might add that due to the theoretically “rhapsodic” nature of Taylor’s work, his theory has received criticism from opposing directions. He tries to defend several theses, which many critics seem to think cannot be held together. Taylor seems to be both communitarian and expressive individualist stressing authenticity; both historicist and universalist; both anthropocentricist and deep ecologist; a realist and a cultural relativist. In this work, some of these seemingly contradictory combinations are defended, while some of them are criticized. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 181-196 [Access article in PDF] Bookmarks What is Genius? Denis Dutton There's a school of thought which holds that there's nothing much of interest that can be said about genius. The root idea is older than Kant, but it was well summarized by him: genius is a natural endowment, deep, strange, and mysterious, at least with respect to putative explanations. Schubert can get (...) up in the morning and before lunch knock off five songs that captivate us hundreds of years later. There's no way for us to account for this, and we ought not to expect, Kant claims, that genius can explain itself either: Schubert doesn't have a clue how he does it.Yet trying to figure out how creative geniuses do it remains a permanent source of fascination, most of it fairly naïve. When the ingénue reporter is sent out by the City Editor to interview the famous, crusty old novelist, the first question is normally, "Where do you get your ideas?" Of course, if the novelist knew that, he'd not be likely to blab it in the press. Kant's point is that he cannot really know; no one can. Monroe Beardsley relays a story about Picasso, who claimed to suffer from "an indigestion of greenness" from walking in the woods on a summer's day: "I must empty this sensation into a picture," Picasso said. "Green dominates it. The painter paints as if in urgent need to discharge himself of his sensations and his visions." Beardsley observes that green indigestion could have been even more plausibly used to "explain" a red painting ("I needed an antidote to all that green"), or a pen-and-ink drawing ("I needed to get away from color"), or anything else. There is in this a general point about why we are so often disappointed by interviews with artists. The artist can do; the artist can't explain how. [End Page 181]It does not follow, however, that nothing of interest can be learned, at least at a descriptive level, about genius. Dean Keith Simonton has spent most of a career looking at the subject as a psychologist, and his Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity (Oxford University Press, $27.50) ties together much of his research and that of others in a way that extends thinking on genius far beyond armchair meditations or mere platitudes. At the heart of Simonton's project are two very different ideas: first, he argues that evolution and processes of natural selection provide illuminating models to explain the existence and operation of creative genius in the sciences and the arts. Second, he propounds a rather more dubious thesis, that the process of natural selection itself is an adequate model for understanding genius at work, that the history of human ideas demonstrates a kind of secondary evolution. To these hypotheses, Simonton adds a further Darwinian overlay: he returns repeatedly to the personality and biography of Charles Darwin himself as the paradigm of a life of creative genius. While this has the advantage of anchoring the discussion, giving it a kind of ostinato ground, it diverts Simonton from the manifestations of genius, especially artistic genius, which do not resemble Darwin's personal example.Creative genius is defined by Simonton as the capacity to originate scientific discoveries, artistic works, technical inventions, or engage in political leadership, in a manner that achieves what is conventionally termed eminence. The eminent person creates, discovers, or invents something that passes the test of time and, like the similar test devised by Hume to mark out artistic greatness, appeals to cultures beyond that of the original act of creation. It is not hard for the philosophically trained reader to devise counter-examples to Simonton's general theses, but the value of his book does not require a rigorous definition at the outset. Whatever genius is, and however we might dispute it, there is no doubting that Leonardo Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Newton, and Einstein count as creative geniuses in Simonton's sense. High raw IQ is frequently associated with genius... (shrink)

Concomitant to the renaissance of the concept of virtue in contemporary moral philosophy was the return to the traditional theories of virtue. The author offers a comparison of the theories of virtue with Aristotle, Spinoza and Hume, focusing on two questions: First, what do such diverse conceptions as Aristotle's eudaimonism, Spinoza's ethical rationalism and Hume's theory of moral sense have in common? Her argument is, that in spite of different principles and different conceptual means these conceptions could (...) be covered by the same moral - philosophical tradition in which that, what ought to be is not strictly separated from that, what is . Thus the good and the virtue are not seen as divergent objectives or two mutually alienated worlds - as the Kantian tradition later tried to suggest. The second question conerns some of the specific incentives of the contemporary theories of virtue, especially the concept of character and its philosophical interpretation. (shrink)

It is largely agreed that if constructivism contributes anything to meta-ethics it is by proposing that we understand ethical objectivity “in terms of a suitably constructed point of view that all can accept” (Rawls 1980/1999: 307). Constructivists defend this “practical” conception of objectivity in contrast to the realist or “ontological” conception of objectivity, understood as an accurate representation of an independent metaphysical order. Because of their objectivist but not realist commitments, Kantian constructivists place their theory “somewhere in the space between (...) realist and relativist accounts of ethics” (O’Neill 1988: 1). Furthermore, they argue that their practical conception of objectivity succeeds in making sense of certain features of morality, such as its categorical authority and its relation to rational agency, which escape rival theories (Korsgaard 1996b, Korsgaard 2003b). To this extent, constructivism claims a privileged place in meta-ethics. The legitimacy of this claim is widely challenged. Precisely because of its practical conception of objectivity, many – including some constructivists — regard constructivism as a first-order normative theory, rather than as a meta-ethical position, hence not on a par with realism. Some critics object that constructivism fails to offer a distinct meta-ethics because it is structurally incomplete and thus must be combined with a fully-fledged meta-ethics (Hussain and Shah 2006); others argue that it tacitly relies on realism (Timmons 2003; Shafer-Landau 2003; Larmore 2008). Thus far, the debate about the prospects of constructivism as a meta-ethical theory has been driven by the conviction that the case for or against constructivism depends on its ontological commitments. In this chapter, I propose a change in perspective. My aim is to defend constructivism as an objectivist account of practical knowledge. Its defining feature is the claim that practical knowledge is knowledge by principles. Its task is to establish a constitutive relation between knowledge of oneself as a practical subject and knowledge about what one ought to do. By focusing on the issue of practical knowledge I hope to show that the difficulty in situating Kantian constructivism firmly on the meta-ethical map, along with other meta-ethical theories, reflects ambiguities and oscillations about the practical significance of ethics. Even though the term is ambiguous, I retain the qualification “Kantian” for the constructivist theory I outline, and for two reasons. First, while the theory I outline differs from current agnostic or anti-realist variants, it is closer to its origins, since Kant treats practical reason as a cognitive capacity and takes moral judgments to be objective moral cognitions, which importantly differ from other sorts of rational cognitions because they bind us in the first person. Practical cognitions are common knowledge because they are such that all subjects endowed with rationality can arrive at them by reasoning and find them authoritative. Thus understood, Kantian constructivism carves a distinct logical space in the meta-ethical debate that other sorts of constructivism fail to identify. This is the second reason for keeping the qualification “Kantian”. On this formulation, constructivism is antagonistic to non-cognitivist theories denying that moral judgments have cognitive contents, because they deny that there is something to be known; but it is also a rival to cognitivist theories denying that knowledge can be practical in itself. How constructivism differs over the realist theories of practical reason is the least understood aspect of this debate. This essay aims to make the case that practical reason is both discursive and emotional. In contrast to foundational and anti-realist accounts of practical reasoning, it attempts to show that the moral feeling of respect plays a cognitive but non-evidential role in the account of the cognitive and practical powers of reason. The argument proceeds as follows. In section 1, I consider some prominent constructivist arguments against the model of applied knowledge and show that they are driven by non-cognitivist assumptions about the practicality of ethics and the legitimacy of epistemological claims. In section 2, I argue that these arguments do not succeed in disposing of the idea of practical knowledge as incoherent, because they trade on an ambiguity regarding the proper object of practical knowledge. To solve this ambiguity, I turn to Anscombe’s contrast between “practical” and “speculative” knowledge as models for understanding action. I thus suggest that Anscombe’s account of practical knowledge as knowledge of oneself as an agent is an important resource for Kantian constructivism. This finding prompts us to reset the current dispute about the ontological and epistemological commitments of Kantian constructivism, as illustrated in section 3. While constructivism does not postulate any moral ontology prior to reasoning, it attributes to reasoning the cognitive powers to establish a distinctive relation between the agent and her action. The task of sections 4-7 is to account for the distinctive features of Kantian constructivism understood as an objectivist account of practical knowledge. In section 4, I argue that in order for reasoning to accomplish its normative tasks, it should be conceived as a self-legislating activity. I respond to some objections to the idea of self-legislation as the form of rational willing by offering a dialogical view of practical reason. In section 5, I propose a non-standard interpretation of Kant’s argument of “the fact of reason” to show that the constructivist account of self-legislation does not build on realism about value, as its detractors claim. The “basis of construction” is the subjective experience of respect for the self-legislative capacity itself. This moral feeling conveys our awareness of rational agency and shows our responsiveness to the demands of practical reason. It is an emotional mode of practical knowledge of oneself as an agent (in the sense specified in section 2), but not as a mode of moral discernment. In section 6, I show how practical knowledge of oneself as an agent relates to practical knowledge about what one ought to do. I thus account for the relation between respect as emotional moral consciousness and respect as a deliberative constraint. Finally, in section 7, I reply to the objection of subjectivism. I explain how the complex sort of objectivity that Kantian constructivism affords is at the same time more ambitious and more modest than is generally assumed. (shrink)

From the Middle Ages onto the 19th century, following the trend set in leper hospitals, madness was to be hidden, secluded in dark places, far away from the mainstream of society. The emergence of the mad person, perceived as inevitably different, allows to make the boundaries between reason and folly, between human and inhuman, irrelevant. If leper hospitals have almost emptied out, if there are much fewer confinement facilities, the values and images related to the leper or the mad (...) person, as well as the sense of exclusion, continue to persist. The purpose of this paper is to show clearly that this matter of exclusion is a serious legacy that could very well apply nowadays to other figures that, each in their own way, symbolize menace or mockery. It applies notably to the aged and the dying who both appear as the opposite of modern society and its values of efficiency, productivity and profitability. The multiplication of places where old people are left to die, and the elderly who are crowded in old folks homes, stand as proof of their exclusion from society. Nevertheless, youth and old age coexist, as well as life and death. If care of others is the trait of a humane civilization, must it be understood that barbarism consists in ignoring its own humanity as well as that of others? In view of such practices of exclusion, policy statements based on recognition of human dignity, where ethical obligation rests on recognition of others and humanism, are rather paradoxical. Is this a paradox or a deadlock; a condition of exclusion or of reconnaissance? (shrink)

For a half - century, I have been developing a view of free will that is incompatible with determinism and, in the process, attempting to answer the Intelligibility Question about such a free will: Can one make sense of an incompatibilist or libertarian free will without reducing it to mere chance, or mystery, and can such a free will be reconciled with modern views of the cosmos and human beings? In this paper, I discuss recent refinements to my earlier writings (...) on such a view, refinements developed in recent years in response to the large critical literature on my views in the past several decades. My view has usually been designated an event-causal view of libertarian free will and distinguished from non-causal and agent-causal libertarian views. But I was never happy with this designation of my view as “event-causal” and did not use it myself in earlier writings. In this paper, I explain why I now reject it altogether. I have come to believe that to avoid numerous misunderstandings in current debates about free will, we must distinguish four different kinds of libertarian theories, not merely three: in addition to non-causal, agent-causal, and event-causal theories, we need to add a fourth kind, which might be called an agent-causal/event-causal theory. My view has always been of this fourth kind. It represents what I call in the title of this paper the “fourth way forward” for making sense of an incompatibilist free will. (shrink)

A socio-cognitive approach to trust can help us envisage a notion of networked trust for multi-agent systems (MAS) based on different interacting agents. In this framework, the issue is to evaluate whether or not a socio-cognitive analysis of trust can apply to the interactions between human and autonomous agents. Two main arguments support two alternative hypothesis; one suggests that only reliance applies to artificial agents, because predictability of agents’ digital interaction is viewed as an absolute value and human relation (...) is judged to be a necessary requirement for trust. The other suggests that trust may apply to autonomous agents because predictability of agents’ interaction is viewed only as a relative value since the digital normativity that grows out of the communication process between interacting agents in MAS has always deal with some unpredictable outcomes (_reduction of uncertainty_). Furthermore, human touch is not judged to be a necessary requirement for trust. In this perspective, a diverse notion of trust is elaborated, as trust is no longer conceived only as a relation between interacting agents but, rather, as a relation between cognitive states of control and lack of control (_double bind_). (shrink)

Frege's puzzle for demonstratives is accounting for the cognitive significance of identity statements containing demonstratives, such as "That [demonstration-1] is identical to that [demonstration-2]". Since the demonstrative 'that' makes the same semantic contribution (has the same 'character') on both occurrences, the difference must be due to the cognitive significance or 'senses' of the associated demonstrations. But what is the sense of a demonstration? Kaplan's suggested solutions in terms of gestures and appearances are not compatible with his general theory, (...) and do not work - a different solution must be found. (shrink)

The titile essay of this collection suggests that Bertrand Russell's lifelong preoccupation: the disentanglement, with ever-increasing precision, of what is subjective or intellectualy cloudy from what is objective or capable of logical demonstration. The first five essays he calls 'entirely popular': they include two on the revolutionary changes in mathematics in the last hundred years, and one on the value of science in human culture. The last five, 'somewhat more technical', are concerned with particular problems of philosophy: the (...) ultimate nature of matter, the connection between the sense-data and physics, the problem of casuality and different ways of knowing. In these one can see the Russell method in operation, intellectual analysis dissecting the problem to its bare bones. (shrink)

I take issue with Glezakos’s explanation of why Frege’s puzzle is un-puzzling. On her view, Frege’s statement – how can sentences of the form a=a and a=b, if true, differ in cognitive value if they express the same semantic content/are made true by the same object’s self-identity? – should not be considered any puzzling either because it is on the whole circular, or because, neutrally stated, it cannot even be set up. I argue against this that if, as she takes (...) it, Frege’s statement is “problematic” it is not for the reasons she gives, but because it rests upon a couple of questionable assumptions: i) there is no ambiguity as to which aspect of the sign (in its relation to the referent) is relevant to a neutral statement of the puzzle ii) it is of the (sentence) forms themselves one may sensibly say they differ in cognitive value. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.3 (2003) 265-266 [Access article in PDF] Definition Is Limited and Values Inescapable Richard Mullen THIS IS A welcome paper that lays bare some of the presumptions of those who seek to determine the status of psychiatric disorder. At different times debate on the subject reflects stigma, prejudice, needs for coherent categorization, and occasionally just antipsychiatric resentment. As Pickering hints, much philosophical argument may (...) be selected to support a position already chosen.The article illustrates that the likeness argument is insufficient to demonstrate that mental disorders are or are not disorders in any other more profound sense. Similarly perhaps, if a debate were conducted about whether or not a bony fracture, hypertension, obesity, or bacterial infection were real illnesses, the likeness argument might be unfruitful. This is perhaps unsurprising; notions of health and illness, mental or physical, are largely abstractions. In psychiatry, so-called symptoms are themselves abstract classifications of incompletely articulated mental phenomena far more diverse than the definitions and criteria to be found in a diagnostic manual.Argument by analogy is always limited. If my car has a flat tire, the car will be dysfunctional or disordered. Its loss of performance will be the symptoms of the flat tire, which is the lesion. It is a problem quickly diagnosed and treated. If convenient, I suppose my car could have been said to be ill, but this would not lead to any particular insights into the nature of cars, mechanics, health, or anything else.A variety of concepts can be contained within terms such as illness,disease, and disorder. They include the clinicopathological approach (the disease is the organic lesion), the disease is deviance approach, disease as distress, and approaches that consider disease—particularly mental disorder—as largely socially constructed. None may resolve the questions that Pickering raises, but recognizing that our terms are not always precise or used consistently is part of formulating the problem more clearly. For the most part clinical psychiatry (and the rest of medicine) has no difficulty in properly identifying most of our patients as disordered or ill. The fact that there are some borderline instances, difficult to classify either way, does not invalidate the classification.Consideration of whether or not the features of a disorder can in themselves determine whether or not a person is disordered is timely for two reasons. As stigma about (some) psychiatric disorder lessens, and opportunities for complaint and compensation expand, an era of self-definition as mentally disordered has arrived. How are mental health practitioners to respond to someone whose mental distress appears not to be clinically significant, but who demands access to the sick role? Also of current concern for clinical psychiatry is widespread pressure to define as disordered those persons whose antisocial behavior brings them into conflict with society. Professional recognition that definitions of mental disorder are inadequate, or rather incomplete, [End Page 265] may be valid. Worryingly, there are others who are willing to define it for us.Both major international systems of classification of mental disorder offer definitions of mental disorder that turn on what is to be meant by clinical significance or clinically recognizable. In the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, mental disorder implies "clinically significant impairment or distress," and criteria for specific disorders mostly including a comment about "clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning" (APA 2000, 8). In the International Classification of Disease, disorder is used to imply "existence of a clinically recognizable set of symptoms or behavior associated in most cases with distress and with interference with personal function" (WHO 1992, 5). It seems that no definition of mental disorder is adequate for all purposes. Seeking to improve existing definitions by further defining the terms used quickly becomes an exercise in pedantry, far removed from practical utility.Pickering mentions as an example the "symptom" of delusions. Available definitions are widely recognized as incomplete or otherwise unsatisfactory (David 1999). This leads to debate about what the individual elements within the definition precisely mean. However in practice delusions are identified with remarkably high reliability (WHO 1973... (shrink)

The above arguments have not conclusively demonstrated the existence of value; nor have they sought to. Rather, they have focused primarily on value-language itself: what it is, what it means, and how men use it. In value-judgements, men intend to speak about reality, and not merely to manifest their feelings to influence others. The conceptual character of value-words gives them a formal objectivity lacking in mere manifestations of feeling; the meaning of value-words contains a “claim to objectivity” arising (...) from the “ontological claim to objectivity” of value itself.These facts demonstrate conclusively that value-language differs essentially from emotive manifestations of feeling. Therefore, and in contradiction to both Ayer and Stevenson, even the most abstract of value-words can be used to form legitimate, conceptually meaningful value-judgements. As judgements, value-judgements can be true or false, not because of any “factual” content, but specifically as conceptually meaningful, pure value-judgements.I have deliberately restricted these investigations to consideration of language, without seriously arguing the ontology of value itself. Thereby, I have met the emotivists on their own ground. Even without demonstrating the existence of value, I have shown their analysis of value-language to be flawed. Further, I have identified a unique “claim to objectivity” in value-language which argues strongly in favor of the real existence of value as its ultimate foundation.For the simplest, most obvious explanation of this “claim to objectivity” is that it refers to value, which actually exists. That proof is logically the next step in my argument. A good place to begin would be a more careful, detailed analysis of the structure of human responses such as admiration, love, enthusiasm, etc., seeking to determine what they ontologically presuppose. Von Hildebrand proceeds in this way in his Ethics. See note 17, above.Proof of the real existence of value would demonstrate the ontological grounds for the “claim to objectivity” of value-language. It would show that value-language is rooted in the real world, speaking of reality as it is. This would be the last, and most important sense in which value-language is meaningful and objective. (shrink)

IntroductionIn May 2006, the small group of doctoral students working on ecophilosophy at the Higher Institute of Philosophy at K.U.Leuven invited the Dutch environmental philosopher Martin Drenthen to a workshop to discuss his writings on the concept of wilderness, its metaphysical and moral meaning, and the challenge social constructivism poses for ecophilosophy and environmental protection. Drenthen’s publications on these topics had already been the subject of intense discussions in the months preceding the workshop. His presentation on the workshop and the (...) three critical responses by Wim Bollen, Glenn Deliège, and Richard Kover are published here in a thoroughly revised form on the basis of further and ongoing discussions about the issues involved. Three further contributions to the discussion are added: one by Nathan Edward Kowalski, a young Canadian philosopher who studied in Leuven and wrote his as yet unpublished dissertation on “Evil in Nature,” a second one by Kingsley Goodwin who is currently writing a dissertation on deep ecology at University College in Dublin and, finally, my own unsystematic thoughts inspired by Martin Drenthen’s provocative and stimulating hermeneutics of our postmodern understanding of nature and wilderness, as well as the diverse critical responses to Drenthen’s views by the other contributors. I owe gratitude to all of them for enriching my own ecophilosophical thought and enlarging its horizon although as my fragmentary reflections show at the cost of yet greater uncertainty and more questions about the possibilities of arguing for a radical environmentalist position. Such a position would somehow connect or ground our moral obligation to preserve genuine non-human otherness, wild and free nature, in the non-human meaning of such nature and in our essential need to be in direct and concrete contact with that field of wild non-human meaning because we ourselves belong to nature, because we are not only and purely civilized but are also and most fundamentally wild and free. Three fundamental questions need to be distinguished: the question about our moral obligations regarding nature and its preservation, the metaphysical question about the nature of nature or the meaning of nature, and the question of the metaphysical grounding of our morals in general, and of our moral obligation regarding nature in particular, in the nature or meaning of nature. The complex intertwinement between these three questions is at the heart of Martin Drenthen’s reflections.The authors contributing to the present discussion approach the various issues from markedly different philosophical backgrounds and concerns: critical theory, anthropology, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deep ecology are all to some degree or other brought to bear on the question of what wilderness means for us, why we are fascinated by it and what it actually and in the first place is.Another interesting difference between the five respondents to Martin Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy relates to the place from which they write: while the Canadians Richard Kover and Nathan Edward Kowalski have wilderness of some sort still close at hand, the Belgians Wim Bollen and Glenn Deliège write from a place which has been thoroughly domesticated, cultivated, and industrialised for a long time. Martin Drenthen himself, of course, writes from the same kind of place as these last two, which explains why he only refers to the wilderness that he has read about in novels, seen in movies, or experienced as recreated in the reserves of the Netherlands. The Irish Kingsley Goodwin writes perhaps from a third, intermediate place that is not wild anymore but still much more natural than Belgium or the Netherlands are.The differences in philosophical approach and concern combined with the difference of place generate a rich tapestry of perspectives and voices wrestling with the fundamental questions of our perceived homelessness and alienation from nature, our cultural discontent, our longing for and need for radical alterity, of immanence and transcendence, of who we are and where we belong, and more concretely of whether there is more to ground our efforts to preserve nature than enlightened self-interest and subjective preference. Martin Drenthen deserves praise for inaugurating this fruitful discussion with his intriguing and highly paradoxical effort to hybridize a postmodern deconstruction of the idea and ideal of wilderness as unspoilt and true nature on the one hand with a new metaphysics of wilderness on the other. Arne Naess, who is generally regarded as the founding father of deep ecology, pointed out the positive and stimulating role that vagueness in the expression of ideas can play in political and philosophical debate. Such general and vague but highly suggestive expressions as ‘all life is one’ are not empty at all, as is often claimed; they are rather full of possibilities of ‘precisation’ and differentiation. Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy is certainly not vague to the degree of ‘all life is one,’ but his expositions are similarly pregnant with a wealth of further questions, precisations, distinctions, and conceptual clarifications. Good examples of different kinds are to be found in the contributions of Nathan Edward Kowalski and Richard Kover. Kowalski points out that Drenthen’s notions of culture and wilderness need to be made more precise by distinguishing them from the notions of civilization and wildness such that wild cultures become a conceptual possibility. Richard Kover takes the lead from Drenthen’s question about the reason for our postmodern fascination for wilderness to confront it with our primordial fascination in terms of the dependence in the evolution of our subjectivity and our consciousness on the focused perceptual attention on wild forms.Glenn Deliège situates Martin Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy in its original context of the Dutch debate on the preservation of nature, in particular on the new wilderness paradigm. According to this paradigm, the nature to be preserved should be true and pure, truly natural and wild nature, that is nature outside of and free from the cultivating and domesticating influence of humans. In the Netherlands, however, such nature no longer exists; it can only be preserved after it has first been artificially recreated. Deliège gives an informative summary account of the highly charged three-cornered debate between the adepts of this wilderness-paradigm, the proponents of the more traditional form of conservation of remnants of the typical European landscapes created by pre-industrial farming practices and the modern technocratic functionalists. This debate makes obvious that there are quite different views of the nature of nature and its value. Enter social constructivism: the contested nature of nature is nothing more than a social construct, an idea in a collective mind. The contestation itself is a struggle for authority and power between different such social constructs, any claim to scientific objectivity and objective truth for one’s image of nature is an arrogation of a truth which doesn’t exist and is potentially oppressive by silencing other views. Nature then is up for the grabs of politics, political negotiation, and compromise between various interest groups who all want to get some benefit from nature, some use-value.The problem with Drenthen’s effort to articulate a normative concept of nature which cannot be deconstructed in this way is the extreme formality and emptiness of his metaphysical concept of wilderness as that which is always ‘beyond’, always ‘more’ and which can never be exhausted by any image and construction of nature. Any more concrete determination is mere appearance; the thing in itself is a border concept of that which in fact cannot be grasped conceptually. Glenn Deliège is critical of this formality and emptiness from which it will be impossible to derive any concrete guidance for our conservation practices. He then goes on to defend the Arcadian tradition of our appreciation of nature as giving us a historically well-grounded orientation for those practices. Of course that Arcadian tradition is obviously a cultural construction but that doesn’t make it completely arbitrary and contingent since it is itself ultimately grounded in and open to modification by our concrete sensuous experiences of nature.Deliège here raises the very important issue of the relation between our concrete perceptual and bodily experiences in and with nature and our concepts and metaphysical images of nature. Drenthen himself approaches this issue from the hermeneutical perspective of our need to make sense of our experiences and to articulate their meaning. His confrontation with social constructivism and his effort to salvage something from its relativizing acid lead him, however, into the direction of a highly abstract and empty concept of wilderness.Richard Kover shows that perception is, indeed, the key to a radical critique of social constructivism. He does this with the help of the ecological anthropology of Paul Shepard, the structuralist anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It needs to be said here that Kover takes his leave from an unpublished paper by Martin Drenthen with the title “How to appropriate wilderness appropriately?” – the paper is accessible though on Drenthen’s web-site - in which Drenthen comments and reflects upon three contemporary wilderness-tales, one of them being Werner Herzog’s much-discussed documentary on Timothy Treadwell, an American environmentalist drop-out who lived thirteen summers among wild grizzlies in the Alaskan wilderness before being killed together with his girlfriend by a grizzly bear.Kover tries to show that we are not imprisoned in the mirror-cabinet of our mind or of our human sociality. To make his case, he starts from Paul Shepard’s thoughtful observation that the evolutionary emergence of the mind did not remove us from the natural world but actually connected us deeper with it. Through our mind we evolved more fully into it because our mind is primordially in our senses and in the ability to articulate a perceptual world. The natural world in the form of the system of natural species and their relations is the primary model for perceptual discriminations, for the fundamental discovery of order with its twin-aspects of distinction and discontinuity on the one side and relations and continuity on the other side. Our cognition is essentially perceptually based, our subjectivity is primordially informed by our inherence in the sensible world. Perceptual cognition is inherently intentional and relational, it is not an autonomous mental construction, it is rather in the world and informed by that which is perceived. The other is always intertwined with the subject. We are always already hooked up with the world, with the others, before we start reflecting, thinking, and conceptualizing. This is one of the major themes in Shepard’s work: what this insight means with regard to our relations to non-human otherness, in particular to our perceptual encounter with wild animals. In our encounter with non-human otherness, we are confronted with an essentially ambiguous sense of both affinity and disjuncture. Wild animals demonstrate to us that we are not homeless or alien to this world, that we fundamentally belong to it and are part of it. Their difference, however, shows us that there are different perspectives and ways of being in the world. “Thus the encounter with non-human others inform humans that we are both of the world and simultaneously not the world and there are horizons of significance beyond our own perspective.”Nathan Edward Kowalski comes to a similar conclusion when he situates our morality in the larger moral order of wild nature. According to Kowalski it is indeed a moral order though not our own, an Other to our morality but not simply a negative one. It is, as Drenthen says, a highly paradoxical amoral morality. But what can it mean to speak of morality here? For Kowalski it means that the issue is not merely the theoretical recognition and acknowledgment of axiological transcendence, of non-human values out there, but whether we will appropriately conform to and comport ourselves towards that axiological transcendence so that we can find a human homeland in wild nature instead of turning it into a wasteland. The question then is, how to fit our own human morality into this larger order and greater reality, to subordinate it to that greater reality as a part of it and encompassed but not denied by it so that we can be moral and natural at the same time, tender carnivores hunting the sacred game. Indigenous people follow a moral protocol in their relationship with non-human others which acknowledge and respects their autonomy, their alterity, and the sacred mystery of their different ways of being. They are not befriended but some of them are hunted and eaten – as an exchange in the gift-economy of nature.The problem of the homelessness and alienation from nature is discussed by Wim Bollen from the radically different vantage point of critical theory. In Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment the human story unfolds as a tragic effort to liberate ourselves from nature and to become fully human through rational control when in the end this effort turns against ourselves and instead of liberation and human flourishing we get social domination and repression of our natural needs. The frustrations and mutilations imposed upon us by a repressive civilization give rise to the regressive desire for a return to a natural existence. Referring to the myth of Odysseus and Circe as interpreted by Adorno and Horkheimer, Wim Bollen equates such a natural existence with animal life. In the light of contemporary knowledge about primitive existence, however, this equation is highly problematic. Palaeolithic foragers were already fully human in all respects. A life without civilization need not be an animal-existence.According to Adorno/Horkheimer, our subjectivity and autonomy have to be wrested from animal-nature through an exertive struggle that cannot but proceed by a threefold strategy of domination: the domination of non-human otherness, of human others, and of our own inner nature. The siren song of nature consists in the temptation to give up that struggle for the promise of an unreflective, non-alienated natural existence without toil.When Odysseus’ men give in to Circe’s seduction they are, however, not transformed into wild animals but into swine. According to Bollen this signifies that we cannot re-wild ourselves, that we remain imprisoned in civilization, either as master-subjects or as domesticated animals. Bollen, by the way, like Drenthen, does not distinguish conceptually between civilization and culture. Since re-wilding for Bollen means the impossibility of returning to animal-existence, which is actually the impossibility of becoming another species since biologically we are animals already, to be imprisoned in civilisation means nothing else than to be imprisoned in our humanity. The fact that we cannot become wild animals again – according to Paul Shepard, however, we are still wild animals – is indeed, as Bollen stresses, a trivial form of alienation. A more meaningful concept of alienation which can be put to critical use must refer to a culturally and historically determined frustration and deficit inside the cultural order that is to be overcome not by an impossible regression but by progressive politics leading beyond the three intertwined forms of domination. Not back to nature but forward towards a reconciliation of culture with nature! Such a reconciliation would neither collapse culture into the immanence of nature nor submerge nature into the transcendence of culture. According with the three forms of domination it would be a three-dimensional form of reconciliation.Odysseus’ men did not got what they thought were promised them: the complete liberation from the burden of being autonomous subjects, of being civilized, but they got something worthwhile, namely a certain from of pleasure, a limited and provisional relief and escape. Bollen sees a critical potential in these piggish pleasures after all and consequently even in the siren song of nature since these pleasures were only experienced because Odysseus’ men gave in to it. But one has to give in to this siren song critically if it is to unfold its liberating potential. The problem with pleasure though in bourgeois society is that it is necessarily betrayed, instrumentalized and sold.Kingsley Goodwin’s paper starts by defending deep ecology against the charge of asserting a naïve and dogmatic metaphysics of nature. For convenience sake, but not quite unproblematically, he identifies deep ecology with the environmental thought of Arne Naess. A metaphysics of nature for Naess is always part of a personal worldview. Worldviews which are partly inspired by ecology Naess calls ecosophies. Naess always stresses the personal character of such a worldview and the irreducible plurality of them. It used to be a common misunderstanding of the platform of deep ecology which Naess conceived together with George Sessions that it expressed in a condensed form the metaphysical beliefs of deep ecology. Naess’ intention, however, was to try to articulate in a general fashion the basic viewpoints on which the supporters of the deep ecology movement agreed. It would be possible then to derive these viewpoints from quite different worldviews. In light of this, I think, that Goodwin’s characterisation of the platform as “pragmatic and activist” is not quite appropriate.Goodwin goes on to compare Drenthen’s conception of wilderness and wildness with the similar position developed by Neil Evernden in his book The Social Creation of Nature. He like Naess in his personal ecosophy stresses the crucial role of perceptual experience of wild otherness to find an antidote to the relativity and contingency of our interpretations of nature. Evernden refers to studies on child development to argue for a non-dualistic and relational conception of the self, similar to Naess’ relational ontology. According to Goodwin, Drenthen, in spite of his hermeneutical approach remains too much indebted to the Western subject/object-dualism. The object, in this case wild nature, is pure otherness.With regard to a compost heap, Goodwin shows that we are not separated from nature by an inseparable gulf, that nature is close at hand, and that we can experience and explore it, appreciate the complex play of identity and difference it consists of, the exchanges and transformations and that we can identify with the organisms involved in these exchanges.*The proceeding remarks only highlight some of the prominent themes and considerations in the various contributions to this topical issue of Ethical Perspectives. Hopefully the reader will feel invited and enticed to read the articles themselves, starting, preferably of course, with the essay by Martin Drenthen, who sparked off this lively discussion on the moral meaning of wild nature. I am honoured and pleased to be able to introduce these rich explorations by such talented young environmental philosophers who are eager to develop environmental philosophy further and lead it into new directions. They all have to wrestle with and find answers to the challenge postmodern deconstruction and social constructivism pose for environmental philosophy. In the face of that challenge, it is even more difficult than it already was to provide solid and convincing arguments for the defence of wild and free nature beyond merely pragmatic arguments in terms of its utilitarian value for us. The reason for that defence is not clear-cut and proves to be just as evasive as the moral meaning of nature itself. But neither that reason nor that meaning are mere phantoms and mirages that vanish when we approach them and try to grasp them. They are more substantial, even if they will never have the solidity of a mathematical proof or a scientific measurement. Their locale is the lifeworld which from the point of view of scientific and logical precision and clarity is a messy place where subject and object, reason and heart, fact and value, experience and thought and, yes, nature and culture cannot be clearly separated. This has important consequences for environmental philosophy and its methodology. Conceptual analysis and logical argumentation have to become sensitive to the richness of experience in the lifeworld and to the diverse efforts of its articulation: i.e., they have to open themselves up and maybe even to subordinate themselves to phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches. For me personally this is one of the most important conclusions I draw from the discussion presented here. (shrink)

This article argues that Nietzsche’s transvaluation project refers not to a mere inversion or negation of a set of nihilism-prone, Judeo-Christian values but, instead, to a different conception of what a value is and how it functions. Traditional values function within a standard logical framework and claim legitimacy and “bindingness” based on exogenous authority with absolute extension. Nietzsche regards this framework as unnecessarily reductive in its attempted exclusion of contradiction and real opposition among competing values. I propose a (...) nonstandard, dialetheic model of valuation that requires a value to be both true and false as well as neither true nor false.In our Europe, life is no longer quite so uncertain, contingent, nonsensical. [...] The power man has achieved now allows a reduction of those means of discipline of which the moral interpretation was the strongest.— KSA 12:5[71]The logic of our conscious thinking is only a crude and facilitated form of the thinking needed by our organism [...] A simultaneity-thinking [ein Zugleichdenken], for example, is needed of which we have hardly an inkling. [...] We are still growing continually, our sense of time and place, etc., is still developing.— KSA 11:34[124]. (shrink)

This chapter advances a contextual view of evidence, through a reconsideration of Hempel's paradox of confirmation. The initial view regarding Hempel's paradox is that a non-black non-raven does confirm ‘All ravens are black’, but only in certain contexts. The chapter begins by reformulating the paradox as a puzzle about how the same entity can have variable evidential values for a given proposition. It then offers a three-stage solution to the reformulated paradox. The situation makes better sense when we reach a (...) deeper propositional understanding of evidence, recognising that each entity can be represented in multiple observational propositions. Some anti-contextualist intuitions can be defused by distinguishing two different senses of the word ‘evidence’, one applying to objects or events and the other applying to propositions; only the latter is relevant to inference. A fuller understanding comes from analysing the constitution and use of evidence in terms of epistemic action. These reflections on the ravens paradox suggest a general philosophical framework more suitable for understanding the function of evidence in scientific and everyday practices. (shrink)

We can often achieve together what we could not have achieved on our own. Many times these outcomes and actions will be morally valuable; sometimes they may be of substantial moral value. However, when can we be under an obligation to perform some morally valuable action together with others, or to jointly produce a morally significant outcome? Can there be collective moral obligations, and if so, under what circumstances do we acquire them? These are questions to which philosophers (...) are increasingly turning their attention. It is fair to say that traditional ethical theories cannot give a satisfying answer to the questions, focusing as they do on the actions and attitudes of discreet individual agents. It should also be noted that the debate surrounding collective moral obligations is ongoing and by no means settled. This chapter discusses and compares the different attempts to date to answer the above questions. It proposes a set of meta-criteria—or desiderata— for arbitrating between the various proposals. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay seeks to defend the claim that political philosophy ought to be appropriately guided by the phenomenon of politics that it seeks to both offer a theory of and, especially in its normative guise, offer a theory for. It does this primarily through the question of political values. It begins by arguing that for any value to qualify as a value for the political domain, it must be intelligible in relation to the constitutive features of politics as a human (...) activity. It then examines the extent to which the preconditions for the realization of values in practice ought to figure in our considerations as to whether they are values that fit or belong to our social world. We can understand these parts of the essay as responding to two related questions, respectively: (i) Is this a political value at all? — which is to ask, is it a value that is appropriate for the political realm?; and then (ii) Is this a political value for us? The final section responds to the often-made complaint that political philosophy ought not to make any concessions to the actual world of politics as it really is, arguing that attending to the realities of politics, and in particular the constitutive conditions of political activity, gives meaning to the enterprise as the theorization of politics (and not something else). Furthermore those same conditions provide the limits of intelligibility beyond which ideals and values can no longer be, in any meaningful sense, ideals and values for the political sphere. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. SandelYoko NagaseMichael J. Sandel. The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? New York: Penguin Books, 2021. 272 pp. Hardcover, £9.99. ISBN 978-0-141-99117-7.Is a meritocratic capitalist society a utopia? The answer depends on who you are. A libertarian is likely to embrace the meritocratic credo that talent and effort deserve rewards, (...) regarding their success in a competitive market system as their own doing and even looking down on those who are not successful (25). A liberal may emphasize the need for a redistributive safety net and yet still promote meritocratic capitalism as utopian as we may ever achieve.1 Michael Young, who coined the term meritocracy in 1958, depicted an imaginary meritocratic society as a dystopia (116). In The Tyranny of Merit, Michael J. Sandel spends six out of seven chapters exemplifying the misery of not-being-a-winner in a meritocratic society.The Tyranny of Merit does a brilliant job at providing an “A-ha!” moment to anyone who has been compelled to accept, and to live with, the seemingly fair meritocratic rule of evaluating individuals, despite the frustrating awareness that something is not quite right. The author articulates exactly what’s wrong with meritocratic capitalism.The problem of meritocratic capitalism is, succinctly put, “merit drives out grace” (58). Meritocratic capitalism denigrates those who lack abilities or, worse, it humiliates those who hold jobs that are needed by the society but do not pay a lot (203). Meritocracy provides a justification for inequality that markets deliver by making people believe that their success is their own doing, not something they inherit (120, 125). However, distribution of income and wealth based on the natural distribution of talent and abilities on which the success depends is just as arbitrary as the distribution based on the [End Page 154] historical and social fortune such as class.2 This lack of gratitude and humility among those who are rewarded richly by the markets, Sandel points out, discourages the successful people from caring for the common good or those who are less fortunate than themselves (14, 59).Any mainstream introductory economics textbook would say that prices provide market participants with information about the scarcity of productive inputs and incentive to pursue their self-interests (utility and profits), resulting in markets’ delivering goods and services that best serve consumers’ needs and wants. These textbooks would also clarify that efficiency that markets deliver in allocating productive resources and goods does not imply that the outcomes are necessarily fair or equitable. What is not necessarily made explicitly clear, however, is that market prices do not represent moral values. Rawls, Hayek, and Friedman agreed with Knights in that a market price depends on supply and demand that depend on institutional settings such as property rights, taxation, and support for higher education; therefore, distributing according to the market outcome has “little or no ethical significance.”3 Sandel laments that, in reality, those who are marked by markets as lacking merits (via low pay) live with a sense of demoralizing, humiliating failure (185). The outcome is a lack of contributive justice; those who lack merits struggle to achieve the recognition and honor that they deserve for what they offer through their works (203).What is likely to be completely missing in introductory economics classes at universities is the emphasis on contributive justice. Contributive justice, in my view, is the most important concept introduced by The Tyranny of Merit. The author emphasizes that individuals should be given a chance “to win the social recognition and esteem that go with producing what others need and value” (206). The author challenges us to think again how we should value different types of occupations (191). Aren’t plumbers, social workers, and teachers just as important for society as bankers? Why should there be any prejudice against those who choose not to go to universities? (73). Economics should emphasize that we are not just consumers; we are (proudly?) producers as well. Chapter 3 of The Tyranny of Merit provides many examples of politicians embracing meritocratic policies based on... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The “Wider View”: André Hellegers’s Passionate, Integrating Intellect and the Creation of BioethicsWarren Thomas Reich* (bio)AbstractThis article provides an account of how André Hellegers, founder and first Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, laid medicine open to bioethics. Hellegers’s approach to bioethics, as to morality generally and also to medicine and biomedical science, involved taking the “wider view”—a value-filled vision that integrated and gave meaning (...) to what otherwise was disparate, precarious, and conflicting. This article shows how Hellegers’s wider view of bioethics was shaped by events in his own life, his resultant sense of the precariousness of life and health, his commitment to religious inclusiveness, his research in fetal medicine, his clinical experience in obstetrics, his role in the struggle to change the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church on fertility control, and his developing concepts of health and disease. Hellegers was committed to and worked toward bioethics as a self-consciously interdisciplinary field in which the contributing disciplines adapt to each other—rather than sustain themselves as autonomous disciplines—to create a dynamic and complex intellectual, clinical, and social activity.André Hellegers’s personality and life were like that of a meteor: brief appearance on the scene; high-speed, flaming trajectory; quick burn-out; its smallest residue worth examining for ages to come. You had to watch carefully, for otherwise you might miss what he was about—what he was really about. He had an unusually probing and unflagging mind, coupled with the ability to make people think; and in a very real sense, that is what he was always about. André was an extremely effective communicator. He was like Fred Astaire: he had flair and charm, and no matter how crowded the room, you instantly knew when he entered it. Like Astaire, he had a deep intensity and striving for perfection while making his art always look like great fun. He was an engaging [End Page 25] story-teller who also knew how to stun intelligent people with his insightful, often ironic and humorous thinking that got to the bottom of things very quickly, leaving his interlocutors with a huge agenda for further reflection. Yet in spite of all this alluring talent, André never attracted attention to himself in a vain way. Even as raconteur, he was always working, getting people to think and talk.There were three great passions in Hellegers’s life that enabled him to inspire and shape bioethics as he did. He had a passionate intellect that was constantly probing for new clarity at new levels of understanding and values, and he had the ability to infect other people with his intellectual passion. André Hellegers was deeply rooted in a Catholicism scarcely imaginable in the United States—an open, historically-conscious, northern European faith that kept him free of ideology while providing him a foundation on which he built a rich ecumenicity of theological and philosophical bioethics. Finally, and perhaps most decisively for his founding work in bioethics, Hellegers pushed and probed to get a world that was almost totally unaccustomed to communicating over disciplinary lines (incredibly, virtually no interdisciplinary conferences had taken place before his day) to dialogue and collaborate across the barriers of medicine, politics, and religion.IntroductionThe customary way of writing a history of someone’s involvement in the origins of something—say, the origins of a nation or, I suppose, the origins of bioethics—certainly would not customarily start with the foregoing type of vignette. It would have as its purpose to discuss such things as issues, events that raised issues, methods pursued and applied, and outcomes achieved. However, in this modest account of some of the major contributions of the late André E. Hellegers, M.D., to the development of the field of bioethics, I intend to focus on a different level of historical inquiry, one that portrays and explains the person, his world-view, and his motivation, as well as the cultural forces and events that conspired to make Hellegers and the people with whom he came into contact vibrant with a sense of innovative and creative—not to mention urgent—inquiry. I believe that... (shrink)

Are there distinctly European values in bioethics, and if there are, what are they? Some Continental philosophers have argued that the principles of dignity, precaution, and solidarity reflect the European ethos better than the liberal concepts of autonomy, harm, and justice. These principles, so the argument goes, elevate prudence over hedonism, communality over individualism, and moral sense over pragmatism. Contrary to what their proponents often believe, however, dignity, precaution, and solidarity can be interpreted in many ways, and it (...) is not clear which reading would, or should, be favored by popular opinion. It is therefore dangerous to think that any one understanding of ``European'', or any other, values could be legitimately imposed on those who have different ideas about morality in health care and related fields. Bioethical principles should be employed to promote discussion, not to suppress it. (shrink)

Toleration is typically defined as follows: an agent (A), for some reason, objects to certain actions or practices of someone else (B), but has outweighing other reasons to accept these actions or practices nonetheless and, thus, refrains from interfering with or preventing B from acting accordingly, although A has the power to interfere. So understood, (mutual) toleration is taken to allow for peaceful coexistence and ideally even cooperation amongst people who disagree with each other on crucial questions on how to (...) live and what to value, which is why it has traditionally been regarded as an important part of political liberalism. An explicitly value-neutral liberal state then avoids taking sides when it comes to different and competing ways of life. However, following this idea of liberal neutrality, it has been questioned whether a value-neutral liberal state still needs toleration or is even compatible with it, for apparently neutrality leaves no more room for the objection component of toleration to take hold. In this paper, I take up this question and argue that there is, indeed, conceptual and practical room left for a value-neutral liberal state to be tolerant. Drawing on the interplay between four kinds of reasons (pragmatic, ethical, moral, and political), pragmatic and political reasons may still provide the needed evaluative and normative ground upon which the combination of objection and outweighing acceptance can be made sense of. However, the possible scope of toleration for a value-neutral liberal state is considerably limited. (shrink)

Can one conceive something to say about Allan Bloom’s view of America and the American university that he hasn’t already heard? Setting aside the perhaps undiscussable differences in what we each saw in our students of the 1960s, I find two regions in which Bloom’s experience and mine differ systematically that are specific and clear enough to be stated briefly, perhaps usefully: first, our experience of the position of philosophy in the intellectual economy we were presented with in the (...) two decades prior to the 1960s; second, our experience of the modern and the popular in the arts. My citing of these differences can only prove worthwhile, however, against a background of agreement I find with his work over the centrality of a cluster of issues, of which I specify five: a first agreement concerns the illustriousness of the university in the life of a democracy; a second concerns the irreplaceability of Great Books—what Thoreau calls scriptures—in a humanistic education; a third concerns the unaware imbibing of European thought by a chronically unprepared American constitution—a condition that is as live for us, or should be, as when Emerson was founding American thinking by demonstrating his knack of inheriting, by transfiguring, European philosophy; a fourth moment of agreement concerns the goal of a democratic university education as keeping open the idea of philosophy as a way of life, call it the life of the mind, a name for which might be Moral Perfectionism ; a fifth sense of my agreement with Bloom concerns the threat that a discourse about such issues, such as the prose fashioned in Bloom’s book , is becoming unintelligible to the culture that has produced it, and not alone to the young . Stanley Cavell is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. His most recent works include In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism and This New Yet Unapproachable America: Essays after Emerson after Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Classically, vagueness has been considered something bad. It leads to the Sorites paradox, borderline cases, and the (apparent) violation of the logical principle of bivalence. Nevertheless, there have always been scholars claiming that vagueness is also valuable. Many have pointed out that we could not communicate as successfully or efficiently as we do if we would not use vague language. Indeed, we often use vague terms when we could have used more precise ones instead. Many scholars (implicitly or explicitly) assume (...) that we do so because their vagueness has a positive function. But how and in what sense can vagueness be said to have a function or value? This paper is an attempt to give an answer to this question. After clarifying the concepts of vagueness and value, it examines nine arguments for the value of vagueness, which have been discussed in the literature. The (negative) result of this examination is, however, that there is not much reason to believe that vagueness has a value or positive function at all because none of the arguments is conclusive. A tenth argument that has not been discussed so far seems most promising but rests on a solely strategic notion of function. (shrink)