Picking up before the award-winning documentary The Bad Kids began, Lessons from The Bad Kids will teach us not only to improve our educational system but also how to become better people.

Normativity is what gives reasons their force, makes words meaningful, and makes rules and laws binding. It is present whenever we use such terms as ‘correct,' ‘ought,' ‘must,' and the language of obligation, responsibility, and logical compulsion. Yet normativists, the philosophers committed to this idea, admit that the idea of a non-causal normative realm and a body of normative objects is spooky. Explaining the Normative is the first systematic, historically grounded critique of normativism. It identifies the standard normativist pattern of (...) argument, and shows how this pattern depends on circularities, assumptions about the unique correctness of preferred descriptions, problematic transcendental arguments, and regress arguments that end in mysteries. The book considers in detail a paradigm case: legal normativity as constructed by Hans Kelsen. This case exemplifies the problems with normativist arguments. But it also shows how normativism was constructed as an alternative to ordinary social science explanation. The normativist argument is that social science explanations themselves are forced to rely on normative conceptsÑminimally, on normative rationality and on a normative view of ‘concepts' themselves. Empathic understanding of the reasoning and meanings of others, however, can solve the regress problems about meaning and rationality that are central to the appeal of normativism. This account has no need for a parallel normative world, and has a surprising and revealing lineage in the history of philosophy, as well as a basis in neuroscience. (shrink)

A number of philosophers and theologians have recently challenged the common assumption that it would be impossible for God to cause humans actions which are free in the libertarian or incompatibilist sense. Perhaps the most sophisticated version of this challenge is due to W. Matthews Grant. By offering a detailed account of divine causation, Grant argues that divine universal causation does not preclude humans from being ultimately responsible for their actions, nor free according to typical libertarian accounts. Here, we argue (...) that the kind of divine universal causation that Grant proposes is incompatible with a plausible interpretation of Robert Kane’s influential conception of ultimate responsibility. This conclusion is significant since Grant seeks to harmonize his divine causal account with Kane’s articulation of ultimate responsibility. (shrink)

How does the integration of mixed reality devices into our cognitive practices impact the mind from a metaphysical and epistemological perspective? In his innovative and interdisciplinary article, “Minds in the Metaverse: Extended Cognition Meets Mixed Reality” (2022), Paul Smart addresses this underexplored question, arguing that the use of a hypothetical application of the Microsoft HoloLens called “the HoloFoldit” represents a technologically high-grade form of extended cognizing from the perspective of neo-mechanical philosophy. This short commentary aims to (1) carve up the (...) conceptual landscape of possible objections to Smart’s argument and (2) elaborate on the possibility of hologrammatically extended cognition, which is supposed to be one of the features of the HoloFoldit case that distinguishes it from more primitive forms of cognitive extension. In tackling (1), I do not mean to suggest that Smart does not consider or have sufficient answers to these objections. In addressing (2), the goal is not to argue for or against the possibility of hologrammatically extended cognition but to reveal some issues in the metaphysics of virtual reality upon which this possibility hinges. I construct an argument in favor of hologrammatically extended cognition based on the veracity of virtual realism (Chalmers, 2017) and an argument against it based on the veracity of virtual fctionalism (McDonnell and Wildman, 2019). (shrink)

A global transformation of modes of religious authority has been taking place at an increasing pace in recent years. The social and political implications of the growing dominance of neo-scripturalist discourses on Islam have been particularly noticeable after 11 September 2001. This evolution of religiosity, which is mediated by mass media and new media technology, creates the conditions of existence of a post-Weberian and post-Durkheimian order. In this new social context, legitimacy (and legitimate violence) can be more easily disconnected from (...) the institutionalized framework of religious and political authority. Both in Muslim countries and in Western democracies, the attempt by Islamic activists to make the Shari’a relevant in contemporary settings creates new opportunities and challenges for legal pluralism. At the same time, the multiplication of Muslim voices claiming to be able to interpret the sacred texts, particularly in virtual communities, creates an increasingly inchoate ‘noise’ about Islamic orthodoxy. In the context of an exponential increase in the global possibilities for religious identification and expression, the growth of neo-scripturalist interpretations of Islam reflects a quest for parsimony and stability. (shrink)

SummaryChristians often presume that immediate and universally extensive divine governance of human behavior is incompatible with human agency and responsibility. Against this presumption, Kathryn Tanner argues for a distinctive metalinguistic paradigm whereby Christians can coherently speak of God’s transcendence in such a way that divine action could never in principle ‘compete’ with human action. Thus, it is said, God can comprehensively will each human action without thereby compromising significant human freedom and corresponding moral responsibility. In this article, it is argued (...) that Tanner’s non-competitivist paradigm fails to circumvent a theological version of the ‘direct argument’ for the incompatibility between human moral responsibility and causal determinism. (shrink)

Ethics courses are most commonly evaluated using reaction measures. However, little is known about the specific types of reaction data being collected and how these reaction data relate to improvements in trainee performance. Using a sample of 381 ethics training sessions, major reaction data categories were identified. Content and course satisfaction were the most frequently collected types of reaction criteria. Furthermore, content relevance and course satisfaction showed strong, positive relationships with performance criteria, whereas content satisfaction demonstrated a moderate, negative relationship. (...) These results and future directions for ethics training evaluation are discussed. (shrink)

This dissertation argues that recent theoretical attempts to understand fallacious reasoning fail because these theories presuppose problematic accounts of the nature of argument. Current fallacy theories agree that a fallacy is a mistake, but differ wildly about what sort of mistake it is. Chapters one through three explore three very different suggestions. Chapter one is devoted to an examination of the oldest of the modern theoretical accounts of fallacious reasoning, what Hamblin calls the standard treatment. Chapter two begins with a (...) discussion of Finocchiaro's skeptical argument against the very possibility of a fallacy theory. It then turns to a discussion of van Eemeren and Grootendorst's pragma-dialectical treatment of fallacious reasoning as a possible response to Finocchiaro's skeptical challenge. Chapter three examines two epistemic responses to Finocchiaro's analysis: Fogelin and Duggan's frequency treatment and Wreen's mistaken inference treatment. The first three chapters set the stage for an alternative account of fallacies developed in chapter four. This alternative view of fallacious reasoning is consistent with Wright's recent work on the concept of an argument. It suggests that fallacious reasoning results from a kind of incompetency. Such failures of competency, however, are not nearly as common as traditional accounts of fallacious reasoning suggests. Moreover, the very possibility of being tempted by fallacious reasoning depends on our being very competent in normal cases. Chapter four ends with a discussion of some of the implications of this alternative theory of fallacious reasoning for the way we understand and teach argument and reasoning. (shrink)

The phenomenon of sacrifice was a major problem in nineteenth-century social thought about religion for a variety of reasons. These surfaced in a spectacular way in a German trial in which the most prominent Jewish philosopher of the century, the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen, was asked to be an expert witness. The text he produced on the nature of Judaism was widely circulated and influential. It presents what can be taken as the neo-Kantian approach to understanding ritual. But it also reveals (...) the ways in which neo-Kantianism avoided becoming relativistic social science. In this case, it came to the edge and stopped. Cohen's account is compared to the similar, but ‘empirical’, account of the same material in Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, which completed the transition. (shrink)

Functional analysis rescued religion from the oblivion to which positiviste would have consigned it, by taking 'society' rather than the individual act as the unit of analysis. The history of functionalism has been a record of increasing concern with such holistic units as societies and social systems. One consequence of this shift away from social action (in the Weberian sense) is that the issue of rationality has become largely redundant. Yet the problem remains: How do we account for 'contributions' to (...) the social system in terms that make sense of the perspectives of social actors? An examination of unit actions as they are understood by social actors suggests that functionalism in fact incorporated many of the tenets held by positivists, and that it makes untenable (and implicit) assumptions concerning the 'objectivity' of the scientific observer. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity: The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom: A New Translation, Redaction History, and Interpretation of “Dignitatis humanae.” by David L. Schindler and Jr. Nicholas J. HealyBarrett H. TurnerFreedom, Truth, and Human Dignity: The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom: A New Translation, Redaction History, and Interpretation of “Dignitatis humanae.” By David L. Schindler and Nicholas J. Healy, Jr. Grand Rapids, Mich.: (...) Eerdmans, 2015. Pp. xiv + 477. $45.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8028-7155-8.“I fear that you are going to give the inaccurate impression that this document was exclusively the work of the Americans at the Council, or nearly so,” wrote Ernest Primeau, an American bishop who helped revise Dignitatis humanae (DH) at Vatican II, to a priest-journalist. “The truth is... that many others from other nations played an important role in the writing and passage of the declaration.” Despite Primeau’s warning, popular and scholarly interpretations of DH have often hewed closely to John Courtney Murray’s juridical approach, usually in contrast to the integralism of Cardinal Alfredo [End Page 309] Ottaviani and the Spanish episcopate. Yet “many others” did not fit into those two groups, for a large contingent of bishops favorable to religious liberty nonetheless sought to undergird the juridical reasoning for the right with an ontological foundation.David L. Schindler and Nicholas Healy promote these other voices in Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity. Indeed, they argue that the other voices—the “French” or “ontological” school comprised of bishops such as Alfred Ancel and Karol Wojtyła—provide the true key to DH’s meaning and significance. The book thus responds from the perspective of Communio theology to Murray-ite political theologies that are critical of John Paul II’s emphasis on truth as the basis for freedom. Accompanying Schindler’s and Healy’s essays are conciliar texts charting the origin and influence of this ontological school: the six conciliar drafts, the oral and written interventions of Wojtyła, and an oral intervention of Ancel. These texts, transcribed from the Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II (AS), have been translated by Patrick T. Brannon, S.J., and Michael Camacho. Also included is a side-by-side comparison of the third and sixth drafts that displays the changes made to the juridical position in response to the ontological school.Schindler’s 170-page essay, “Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity: An Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae on the Right to Religious Freedom,” is the heart of the work. Schindler recapitulates in a fresh way themes from his prior analyses of liberalism and Murray. In section 1, he summarizes how Wojtyła’s interventions influenced the evolution of DH such that Murray’s juridical approach became subordinated to an emphasis on truth as the foundation and telos of freedom. He conveys Wojtyła’s concern that DH not divide reason and revelation, but that reason be presented as capable of knowing that religion is “nature’s crown and summit” (50). Section 2 outlines Murray’s postconciliar objections to DH’s final version, namely, that it assumes that the American juridical approach leads to relativism and that its insistence on truth as religious liberty’s foundation undermines the universality of the right by degrading the liberty of those in error. To the first, Schindler replies (in section 3) that Murray’s juridical approach necessarily entails what Servais Pinckaers, O.P., called the “freedom of indifference,” Murray’s denials of relativism notwithstanding. The juridical approach leads to the conception of civil space as something neutral to truth-claims about God, but finally results in a state-enforced indifferentism that limits the religious liberty of those who hold that all of existence, prior to human freedom, is intrinsically ordered to God. “The human act, considered from the perspective of the juridical order, is first empty; and truth thus becomes, from that same juridical perspective, adventitious, something that, as such, cannot but logically burden the free-intelligent human act by arbitrarily limiting and closing what is considered by government, for legal purposes, to be simply open, or abstracted from all (metaphysical-religious) content... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:164 BOOK REVIEWS the " causes and remedies " of homosexuality (this entails a guarded challenge to the notion of " constitutional " homosexuality) and a special outreach to people with AIDS; a long endnote undertakes to defend the thesis that AIDS can sometmies he, at least in a qualified sense, divine punishment for sexual sin (p. 110 n. 4). Ashley's essay concludes with an apology for any unintended (...) offense resulting from imprecise or otherwise infelicitous expressions of his position; and he suggests that such lapses on the part of the CDF letter itself were " inevitable in a document that had to he brief and directly to the point in order to clear up the ambiguities with which this complex question has been obscured" (p. 109). My personal assessment is that Ashley has succeeded much better than CDF in minimizing such problems; he might have been even more successful had he not been so intent on downplaying or excusing the letter's undeniable faults in this regard. Of course, Ashley is here engaging in debate with the Vatican's critics; were he instead directly addressing CDF, his approach might well have been different. Even in the present context, however, as a better gesture toward gay and lesbian people wounded by the letter's simplistic and harsh prescriptions, it would have been well for Ashley to repeat the observation he once addressed to U.S. and Canadian bishops assembled in Dallas for a sexuality workshop (Feb. 2-6, 1981): "Overfacile solutions to the tragic dilemmas of life which people are experiencing make the Church appear smug and silly." The debate over this issue will continue, as indeed it must. The participants in this hook, notwithstanding problems on either side, have contributed significantly to the ongoing conversation and have set a high standard which we must hope will he emulated by all who carry the conversation forward. Pontifical, University of St. Thomas Rome, Italy BRUCE WILLIAMS, O.P. Perplexity in the Moral Life: Philosophical and Theological Considerations. By EDMUND N. SANTURRI. Charlottesville, Va.: The University Press of Virginia, 1988. Pp. 256. $35.00. Edmund Santurri has written an important book about a central issue in moral theory and a fundamental problem in the moral life. On occasion, one feels on the horns of a dilemma. Whatever course of action might he taken, it appears as if wrong will he done in the process of doing right. Thus, we want to keep promises, but if we keep BOOK REVIEWS 165 this promise, we will cause or allow some great harm to come to an· other person. How ought this sort of dilemma to he understood? Santurri argues that there are within the traditions of moral philosophy and theology two ways of construing the problem. One can say either that moral dilemmas of the sort Santurri discusses are the re· sult of deficient knowledge and so in principle resolvable, or that they stem from the structure of the moral universe itself and are in consequence not resolvable. It is Santurri's contention that Christian ethics must hold to the former position and defend the view that in all dilemmatic contexts there is a way to dispel moral perplexity through more adequate moral knowledge. In order to establish this thesis he undertakes a review of typical philosophical and theological literature that addresses the problem he has identified. Santurri's review of the philosophical literature, though on occasion unnecessarily dense, is always competent and generally thorough. Among others, he reviews the work of David Lyons, Bernard Williams, and Thomas Nagel. His conclusion is that philosophical argument can establish neither of the two possible views of moral dilemma as superior to the other. Arguments designed to establish both points of view prove inconclusive in the end because they beg more fundamental ques· tions concerning the content, nature, and function of morality itself. Thus, Santurri argues that moral perplexity cannot he interpreted adequately apart from a discussion of " certain fundamental questions of moral ontology " (p. 4), and he quite successfully shows that these questions are passed over or inadequately treated in the philosophical literature. The fundamental questions he lists are these: Are moral codes simply systems of convention or do these... (shrink)

A closely argued book about what the negative tradition in Western theology involves.

This paper contributes to the growing literature in social epistemology of diagnosing the epistemically problematic features of fake news. I identify two novel problems: the problem of relevant alternatives; and the problem of the degradation of the epistemic environment. The former arises among individual epistemic transactions. By making salient, and thereby relevant, alternatives to knowledge claims, fake news stories threaten knowledge. The problem of the degradation of the epistemic environment arises at the level of entire epistemic communities. I introduce the (...) notion of an epistemic environment, roughly the totality of resources and circumstances relevant to assessing the epistemically interesting statuses, such as knowledge. Fake news degrades our epistemic environment by undermining confidence in epistemic institutions and altering epistemic habits, thereby making the environment less conducive to achieving positive epistemic statuses. This is problematic even if the decrease in confidence and the altering of habits are rational. I end by considering solutions to these problems, stressing the importance of reproaching each other for proliferating fake news. I argue that we should reproach even faultless purveyors of fake news. This is because fake news typically arises in abnormal epistemic contexts, where there is widespread ignorance of, and noncompliance with, correct epistemic norms. (shrink)

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one logic. Logical normativism is the view that logic is normative. These positions have often been assumed to go hand-in-hand, but we show that one can be a logical pluralist without being a logical normativist. We begin by arguing directly against logical normativism. Then we reformulate one popular version of pluralism—due to Beall and Restall—to avoid a normativist commitment. We give three non-normativist pluralist views, the most promising of which depends (...) not on logic’s normativity but on epistemic goals. (shrink)

Does the idea of human enhancement presuppose a goal or an ideal to direct technological modifications? In the absence of such an agreed ideal in today’s culture, can Christian theology help clarify the goal or the meaning of “perfection” when applied to human beings? A theological perspective rooted in scripture and in the writings of theologians such as Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Gregory of Nyssa suggests that theology instead of offering its own definition of the human ideal, theology rejects the possibility (...) of any defined human goal. An analysis of the biblical word teleios (“mature” or “perfect”), along with Gregory’s view of infinite ascent, leads to the conclusion that the human goal is found in relationship to the triune God and not in any anthropologically-definable status. (shrink)

Most contemporary interpreters of Aquinas think that he rejects the possibility of intermittent or “gappy” existence. Thus they think that the soul’s natural survival after death is a necessary part of Aquinas’s defense of the possibility of the resurrection. Yet this contemporary consensus rests on shaky foundations. For on the basis of a widely neglected quodlibet question, earlier interpreters of Aquinas as eminent as John Capreolus and Francis Sylvester Ferrara recognized that Aquinas reserves to God the power to annihilate material (...) substances, including human beings, and then re-create them numerically the same. If these earlier interpreters are right, then the contemporary consensus is wrong. But Adam Wood argues that they are not right. He attempts to vindicate the contemporary consensus by offering an alternative reading of Aquinas’s quodlibet on annihilation and re-creation, providing textual evidence of Aquinas’s rejection of the possibility of “gappy” existence, criticizing the reading given to this evidence by Aquinas’s earlier interpreters, and mounting a philosophical case against the possibility of “gappy” existence based on his preferred interpretation of Aquinas’s theory of the principle of individuation. In this paper I come to the defense of Aquinas’s earlier interpreters. Wood’s alternative reading of Aquinas’s quodlibet is impossible to square with the text itself. Close inspection of Wood’s textual evidence shows that some of the readings of Aquinas’s earlier interpreters are much more plausible than Wood allows, making his textual case much weaker than he admits. And his philosophical case against the possibility of “gappy” existence begs the question. (shrink)

Contemporary interpreters have entered a new debate over Aquinas’s view on the status of human beings or persons between death and resurrection. Everyone agrees that, for Aquinas, separated souls exist in the interim. The disagreement concerns what happens to human beings—Peter, Paul, and so on. According to corruptionists, Aquinas thought human beings cease to exist at death and only begin to exist again at the resurrection. According to survivalists, however, Aquinas thought human beings continue to exist in the interim, constituted (...) by their separated souls alone. In this paper I offer a new argument in favor of corruptionism based upon Aquinas’s repeated discussions of a central though so far neglected topic: the death of Christ. To the question, “Was Christ a human being during the three days of his death?” Aquinas always answered, “No.” Examining his reasons proves that corruptionism, and not survivalism, is the right interpretation of Aquinas. (shrink)

Logical consequence is typically construed as a metalinguistic relation between sentences. Deflationism is an account of logic that challenges this orthodoxy. In Williamson’s recent presentation of deflationism, logic’s primary concern is with universal generalizations over absolutely everything. As well as an interesting account of logic in its own right, deflationism has also been recruited to decide between competing logics in resolving semantic paradoxes. This paper defends deflationism from its most important challenge to date, due to Ole Hjortland. It then presents (...) two new problems for the view. Hjortland’s objection is that deflationism cannot discriminate between distinct logics. I show that his example of classical logic and supervaluationism depends on equivocating about whether the language includes a “definitely” operator. Moreover, I prove a result that blocks this line of objection no matter the choice of logics. I end by criticizing deflationism on two fronts. First, it cannot do the work it has been recruited to perform. That is, it cannot help adjudicate between competing logics. This is because a theory of logic cannot be as easily separated from a theory of truth as its proponents claim. Second, deflationism currently has no adequate answer to the following challenge: what does a sentence’s universal generalization have to do with its logical truth? I argue that the most promising, stipulative response on behalf of the deflationist amounts to an unwarranted change of subject. (shrink)

This article addresses the long-standing problem of how to understand Mill’s famous harm principle in light of his failure to specify what counts as “harm” in On Liberty. I argue that standard accounts restricting “harm” to only certain negative consequences fail to do justice to the text, and that this fact forces us to rethink Mill’s defense of individual liberty. I then offer a new account of that defense in which “harm” is understood in an expansive sense, despite apparent problems (...) for such a view. (shrink)

Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. We then present the results of our studies, which (...) put significant pressure on the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive. Finally, we consider and respond to several potential objections to our approach. (shrink)

An influential way of distinguishing inferential from non-inferential processes appeals to representational states: an agent infers a conclusion from some premises only if she represents those premises as supporting that conclusion. By contrast, when some premises merely cause an agent to believe the conclusion, there is no relevant representational state. While promising, the appeal to representational states invites a regress problem, first famously articulated by Lewis Carroll. This paper develops a novel account of inference that invokes representational states without succumbing (...) to regress. The key move is to reject the tempting idea that the relevant representational states are causally prior to inferences. I argue, instead, that an inference constitutes the relevant representational state. To infer is thus—in the very drawing of the conclusion—to represent the premises as supporting the conclusion, and thereby to commit to that support relation. (shrink)

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one correct logic. A key objection to logical pluralism is that it collapses into monism. The core of the Collapse Objection is that only the pluralist’s strongest logic does any genuine normative work; since a logic must do genuine normative work, this means that the pluralist is really a monist, who is committed to her strongest logic being the one true logic. This paper considers a neglected question in the collapse (...) debate: what is it for a logic to do genuine normative work? As well as having wider upshot for the connection between logic and normativity, grappling with this question provides a new response to the Collapse Objection on behalf of the pluralist. I suggest that we should allow logics to generate pro tanto reasons in a way that bears not just on combinations of attitudes but on how an agent’s attitudes are based on one another. This motivates adopting normative principles that allow the pluralist’s weaker logics to earn their normative keep. Rather than being ad hoc, these principles capture a sense in which good reasoning goes beyond the consistency of an agent’s attitudes. Good reasoning is also concerned with how an agent’s attitudes are based on one another. (shrink)

The concept of "practices"--whether of representation, of political or scientific traditions, or of organizational culture--is central to social theory. In this book, Stephen Turner presents the first analysis and critique of the idea of practice as it has developed in the various theoretical traditions of the social sciences and the humanities. Understood broadly as a tacit understanding "shared" by a group, the concept of a practice has a fatal difficulty, Turner argues: there is no plausible mechanism by which (...) a "practice" is transmitted or reproduced. The historical uses of the concept, from Durkheim to Kripke's version of Wittgenstein, provide examples of the contortions that thinkers have been forced into by this problem, and show the ultimate implausibility of the idea. Turner's conclusion sketches a picture of what happens when we do without the notion of a shared practice, and how this bears on social theory and philosophy. It explains why social theory cannot get beyond the stage of constructing fuzzy analogies, and why the standard constructions of the contemporary philosophical problem of relativism depend upon this defective notion. This first book-length critique of practice theory is sure to stir discussion and controversy in a wide range of fields, from philosophy and science studies to sociology, anthropology, literary studies, and political and legal theory. (shrink)

How did Casanova learn the theory of sex? Why did male pornographers write in the characters of women? What happens when philosophers take sexuality seriously and the sex-writers present their outrageous fantasies as an educational, philosophical quest? Schooling Sex is the first full history of early modern libertine literature and its reception, from Aretino and Tullia d'Aragona in 16th century Italy to Pepys, Rochester, and Behn in late 17th century England. James Turner explores the idea of sexual education, from (...) the simple instructional dialogue to the advanced experiments of the philosophical libertine, analysing the hard-core curiculum that defined sexuality centuries before the Marquis de Sade. He shows how close, nuanced readings of neglected but compelling texts - like the searingly explicit Alcibiade fanciullo, L'escole des filles, and Aloisia Sigea - link them to larger issues of gender politics, aesthetics, literary criticism, sexual history, medical science, mind-body philosophy, and the educational revolution. (shrink)

: Many bioethicists assume that morality is in a state of wide reflective equilibrium. According to this model of moral deliberation, public policymaking can build upon a core common morality that is pretheoretical and provides a basis for practical reasoning. Proponents of the common morality approach to moral deliberation make three assumptions that deserve to be viewed with skepticism. First, they commonly assume that there is a universal, transhistorical common morality that can serve as a normative baseline for judging various (...) actions and practices. Second, advocates of the common morality approach assume that the common morality is in a state of relatively stable, ordered, wide reflective equilibrium. Third, casuists, principlists, and other proponents of common morality approaches assume that the common morality can serve as a basis for the specification of particular policies and practical recommendations. These three claims fail to recognize the plural moral traditions that are found in multicultural, multiethnic, multifaith societies such as the United States and Canada. A more realistic recognition of multiple moral traditions in pluralist societies would be considerably more skeptical about the contributions that common morality approaches in bioethics can make to resolving contentious moral issues. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas was one of the most significant Christian thinkers of the middle ages and ranks among the greatest philosophers and theologians of all time. In the mid-thirteenth century, as a teacher at the University of Paris, Aquinas presided over public university-wide debates on questions that could be put forward by anyone about anything. The Quodlibetal Questions are Aquinas's edited records of these debates. Unlike his other disputed questions, which are limited to a few specific topics such as evil or (...) divine power, Aquinas's Quodlibetal Questions contain his treatment of hundreds of questions on a wide range of topics—from ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion to dogmatic theology, sacramental theology, moral theology, eschatology, and much more. And, unlike his other disputed questions, none of the questions treated in his Quodlibetal Questions were of Aquinas's own choosing—they were all posed for him to answer by those who attended the public debates. As such, this volume provides a window onto the concerns of students, teachers, and other interested parties in and around the university at that time. For the same reason it contains some of Aquinas's fullest, and in certain cases his only, treatments of philosophical and theological questions that have maintained their interest throughout the centuries. (shrink)

Experimental examination of how the folk conceptualize certain philosophically loaded notions can provide information useful for philosophical theorizing. In this paper, we explore issues raised in Shaun Nichols' (2004) studies involving people's conception of free will, focusing on his claim that this conception fits best with the philosophical theory of agent-causation. We argue that his data do not support this conclusion, highlighting along the way certain considerations that ought to be taken into account when probing the folk conception of free (...) will. (shrink)

We usually consider literary thinking to be peripheral and dispensable, an activity for specialists: poets, prophets, lunatics, and babysitters. Certainly we do not think it is the basis of the mind. We think of stories and parables from Aesop's Fables or The Thousand and One Nights, for example, as exotic tales set in strange lands, with spectacular images, talking animals, and fantastic plots--wonderful entertainments, often insightful, but well removed from logic and science, and entirely foreign to the world of everyday (...) thought. But Mark Turner argues that this common wisdom is wrong. The literary mind--the mind of stories and parables--is not peripheral but basic to thought. Story is the central principle of our experience and knowledge. Parable--the projection of story to give meaning to new encounters--is the indispensable tool of everyday reason. Literary thought makes everyday thought possible. This book makes the revolutionary claim that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking. In The Literary Mind, Turner ranges from the tools of modern linguistics, to the recent work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman, to literary masterpieces by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust, as he explains how story and projection--and their powerful combination in parable--are fundamental to everyday thought. In simple and traditional English, he reveals how we use parable to understand space and time, to grasp what it means to be located in space and time, and to conceive of ourselves, other selves, other lives, and other viewpoints. He explains the role of parable in reasoning, in categorizing, and in solving problems. He develops a powerful model of conceptual construction and, in a far-reaching final chapter, extends it to a new conception of the origin of language that contradicts proposals by such thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. Turner argues that story, projection, and parable precede grammar, that language follows from these mental capacities as a consequence. Language, he concludes, is the child of the literary mind. Offering major revisions to our understanding of thought, conceptual activity, and the origin and nature of language, The Literary Mind presents a unified theory of central problems in cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. It gives new and unexpected answers to classic questions about knowledge, creativity, understanding, reason, and invention. (shrink)