Whitehead's magnum opus is as important as it is difficult. It is the only work in which his metaphysical ideas are stated systematically and completely, and his metaphysics are the heart of his philosophical system as a whole.

There is almost no theoretical discussion of non‐human animal well‐being in the philosophical literature on well‐being. To begin to rectify this, I develop a desire satisfaction theory of well‐being for animals. I contrast this theory with my desire theory of well‐being for humans, according to which a human benefits from satisfying desires for which she can offer reasons. I consider objections. The most important are (1) Eden Lin's claim that the correct theory of well‐being cannot vary across different welfare subjects (...) and (2) his objection against theories of human well‐being that require exercising a sophisticated capacity such as reason giving. (shrink)

Although human well-being is a topic of much contemporary philosophical discussion, there has been comparatively little theoretical discussion in philosophy of (nonhuman) animal well-being. Animal welfare science is a well-established scientific discipline that studies animal well-being from an empirical standpoint. This article examines parts of this literature that may be relevant to philosophical treatments of animal well-being and to other philosophical issues. First, I explain the dominant conceptions of well-being in animal welfare science and survey some debates in that literature (...) surrounding these competing conceptions. Second, I explain the empirical methods used to measure animal well-being. Third, I argue for the philosophical relevance of the research in animal welfare science and outline some philosophical issues concerning animal welfare and its science that I claim are worthy of attention by philosophers. (shrink)

Donald Shriver argues that recognition of morally negative events in American history is essential to the health of our society. The failure to acknowledge and repent of these events skews the relations of many Americans to one another and breeds ongoing hostility. Focusing on the wrongs suffered by African Americans and Native Americans, Shriver examines the challenges associated with the call for collective repentance: What can it mean to morally master a past whose victims are dead and whose sufferings (...) cannot be alleviated? What are the measures that lend substance to language and action expressing repentance? In answering these questions Shriver creates a compelling vision of the collective repentance and apology that must precede real progress in relations between the races in this country. (shrink)

This book provides a practitioner's foundation for the process of explanatory model building, breaking down that process into five stages. Donald W. Katzner presents a concrete example with unquantified variable values to show how the five-stage procedure works. He describes what is involved in explanatory model building for those interested in this practice, while simultaneously providing a guide for those actually engaged in it. The combination of Katzner's focus on modeling and on mathematics, along with his focus on the (...) explanatory performance of modeling, promises to become an important contribution to the field. (shrink)

Applying the rules and systems of mathematics and logic to instance ontology, this work argues for the validity and problem-solving capacities of instance ontology, and associates it with a version of the realist position which is named by the author as moderate realism.

An adaptive preference is a preference that is regimented in response to an agent’s set of feasible options. The fabled fox in the sour grapes story undergoes an adaptive preference change. I consider adaptive preferences more broadly, to include adaptive preference formation as well. I argue that many adaptive preferences that other philosophers have cast out as irrational sour-grapes-like preferences are actually fully rational preferences worthy of pursuit. I offer a means of distinguishing rational and worthy adaptive preferences from irrational (...) and unworthy ones. The distinction is based on the agent’s own appraisal of the adaptive preference. (shrink)

Here Donald Livingston traces this distinction through all of Hume's writings and reveals its relevance for contemporary discussion.

Cognitive neuroscientists have anticipated the union of neural and behavioral science with ethics (Gazzaniga 2005). The identification of an ethical rule—the dictum that we should treat others in the manner in which we would like to be treated—apparently widespread among human societies suggests a dependence on fundamental human brain mechanisms. Now, studies of neural and molecular mechanisms that underlie the feeling of fear suggest how this form of ethical behavior is produced. Counterintuitively, a new theory presented here states that it (...) is actually a loss of social information that leads to sharing others' fears with our own, thus allowing us to treat others as we would like to be treated. Adding to that hypothetical mechanism is the well-studied predilection toward affiliative behaviors. Thus, even as Chomsky hypothesizes that humans are predisposed to utter grammatical sentences, we propose that humans are 'wired for reciprocity'. However, these two neural forces supporting ethical behavior do not explain individual or collective violence. At any given moment, the ability to produce behavior that obeys this ethical rule is proposed to depend on a balance between mechanisms for prosocial and antisocial behaviors. That balance results not only from genetic influences on temperament but also from environmental effects particularly during critical neonatal and pubertal periods. (shrink)

In The Untamed God (2003), Jay Wesley Richards defends what he calls “theological essentialism,” which affirms God’s essential perfections but also recognizes contingent properties in God. This idea places Richards’s view in the vicinity of Charles Hartshorne’s dipolar theism. However, Richards argues that Hartshorne’s modal theory suffers from the defects that it abandons the principle ab esse ad posse, makes nonsense of our counter-factual discourse, and can only be expressed by C. I. Lewis’s S4, although for certain purposes Hartshorne needs (...) the stronger S5. Richards, however, fails to realize that Hartshorne’s theory involves two concepts of necessity—necessity as what is common to every possible world-state and necessity as it pertains to the unalterability of the past. While questions remain about Hartshorne’s theory, Richards’s arguments against it are unsuccessful. Most importantly, Richards uncritically accepts the concept of possible worlds as a basis for his critique, but Hartshorne’s arguments cast doubt on the coherence of this idea. Possible worlds provide anything but a firm foundation on which to make sense of either theological essentialism or Hartshorne’s panentheistic dipolar theism. (shrink)

A previously unpublished manuscript found among Hartshorne's papers, the book was completed by Hartshorne in the mid-1980s and constitutes a vigorous and wide-ranging defense of his “neoclassical metaphysics” of creative freedom. Eight of the chapters are revisions of articles Hartshorne published between 1953 and 1986; the remaining five chapters and the preface were not published prior to the appearance of this book.

Positions in the ongoing debate about free will are characterized and compared, that is, determinism, indeterminism, chaoticism, stronger and weaker versions of indeterminism and chaoticism, and hard and soft determinism, and libertarianism. Libertarianism is claimed to be the most adequate of these alternatives and is defended from the process perspectives of A. N. Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and the psychologist-philosopher William James. The defence is developed by responding to three objections to libertarianism: (1) that scientific explanations in psychology and other disciplines (...) require belief in causal determinism; (2) that indeterminism, assumed by libertarianism, makes impossible moral or other kinds of responsibility for human acts; and (3) that libertarianism must assume an untenable mind-body dualism. The article concludes that liber4tarianism is a more subtle and cogent position than most of its opponents have recognized, that determinism has glaring deficiencies of its own, and that libertarianism is an appropriate position for psychology—even for a scientific psychology. (shrink)

Hugh LaFollette, Jeff McMahan, and David DeGrazia endorse the most popular and convincing argument for the strict regulation of firearms in the U.S. The argument is based on the extensive, preventable harm caused by firearms. DeGrazia offers another compelling argument based on the rights of those threatened by firearms. My thesis is a conditional: if these usual arguments for gun control succeed, then alcoholic beverages should be controlled much more strictly than they are, possibly to the point of prohibition. The (...) argument for this thesis involves developing a careful analogy between firearms and alcohol and defending the analogy against objections. (shrink)

Our century has witnessed violence on an unprecedented scale, in wars that have torn deep into the fabric of national and international life. And as we can see in the recent strife in Bosnia, genocide in Rwanda, and the ongoing struggle to control nuclear weaponry, ancient enmities continue to threaten the lives of masses of human beings. As never before, the question is urgent and practical: How can nations--or ethnic groups, or races--after long, bitter struggles, learn to live side by (...) side in peace? In An Ethic for Enemies, Donald W. Shriver, Jr., President Emeritus of Union Theological Seminary, argues that the solution lies in our capacity to forgive. Taking forgiveness out of its traditional exclusive association with personal religion and morality, Shriver urges us to recognize its importance in the secular political arena. The heart of the book examines three powerful and moving cases from recent American history--our postwar dealings with Germany, with Japan, and our continuing domestic problem with race relations--cases in which acts of forgiveness have had important political consequences. Shriver traces how postwar Germany, in its struggle to break with its political past, progressed from denial of a Nazi past, to a formal acknowledgement of the crimes of Nazi Germany, to providing material compensation for survivors of the Holocaust. He also examines the efforts of Japan and the United States, over time and across boundaries of race and culture, to forgive the wrongs committed by both peoples during the Pacific War. And finally he offers a fascinating discussion of the role of forgiveness in the American civil rights movement. He shows, for instance, that even Malcolm X recognized the need to move from contempt for the integrationist ideal to a more conciliatory, repentant stance toward Civil Rights leaders. Malcolm came to see that only through forgiveness could the separate voices of the African-American movement work together to achieve their goals. If mutual forgiveness was a radical thought in 1964, Shriver reminds us that it has yet to be realized in 1994. "We are a long way from ceasing to hold the sins of the ancestors against their living children," he writes. Yet in this poignant volume, we discover how, by forgiving, enemies can progress and have progressed toward peace. A timely antidote to today's political conflicts, An Ethic for Enemies challenges to us to confront the hatreds that cripple society and threaten to destroy the global village. (shrink)

A common and convincing argument for the moral requirement of veganism is based on the widespread, severe, and unnecessary harm done to animals, the environment, and humans by the practices of animal agriculture. If this harm footprint argument succeeds in showing that producing and consuming animal products is morally impermissible, then parallel harm footprint arguments show that a vast array of modern practices are impermissible. On this first horn of the dilemma, by engaging in these practices, vegans are living immorally (...) by their own lights. This first horn can be avoided by assuming that morality requires not minimizing harm, but only keeping the harm of our actions within some budget. On the second horn, however, we recognize that there are many ways of keeping our harm footprints within budget other than through our dietary choices. On the second horn of the vegan's dilemma, therefore, veganism is not a moral requirement. (shrink)

It was a genuine pleasure to read Frederick Ferré’s presidential address. He has done an elegant job of humanizing Whitehead’s account of the nature of speculative philosophy. Not only has he provided a most useful expansion of Whitehead’s rather austerely presented criteria for judging the success of a metaphysical system—coherence, logicality, applicability, and adequacy—he has wrapped the whole in his version of the axiological viewpoint in such a way that we see how norms and value judgments anchor metaphysics in an (...) unshakable practicality that goads us evermore toward living not just well, but beautifully. I find this vision not only satisfactory, but genuinely uplifting. Therefore, in what follows I will simply put forward some random thoughts concerning the practicality of metaphysics generated by Ferré’s very succinct, yet rich, presentation. (shrink)

In a well-known paper, Bernard Williams argues that an immortal life would not be worth living, for it would necessarily become boring. I examine the implications for the boredom thesis of three human traits that have received insufficient attention in the literature on Williams’ paper. First, human memory decays, so humans would be entertained and driven by things that they experienced long before but had forgotten. Second, even if memory does not decay to the extent necessary to ward off boredom, (...) once-satisfied desires often return after a sufficient period of time. Eternity would always contain sufficient time for our desires to rejuvenate. Third, even if too many of our desires were satisfied but not yet rejuvenated, we can expect that human ingenuity would continue to invent new pursuits, pastimes, careers, and ways of life that would prevent us from becoming bored as we moved from one to another. Finally, I consider and respond to several objections, including the claims that as much variety as I propose to be put into an eternal life is inconsistent with having one character throughout one’s life and that the sort of character change and memory decay I postulate is inconsistent with personal identity. (shrink)

In , Ben Colburn claims that preferences formed through covert influences are defective. I show that Colburn's argument fails to establish that anything is wrong with preferences formed in this manner.

The most popular and convincing arguments for the claim that vegetarianism is morally obligatory focus on the extensive, unnecessary harm done to animals and to the environment by raising animals industrially in confinement conditions (factory farming). I outline the strongest versions of these arguments. I grant that it follows from their central premises that purchasing and consuming factoryfarmed meat is immoral. The arguments fail, however, to establish that strict vegetarianism is obligatory because they falsely assume that eating vegetables is the (...) only alternative to eating factory-farmed meat that avoids the harms of factory farming. I show that these arguments not only fail to establish that strict vegetarianism is morally obligatory, but that the very premises of the arguments imply that eating some (non-factory-farmed) meat rather than only vegetables is morally obligatory. Therefore, if the central premises of these usual arguments are true, then strict vegetarianism is immoral. (shrink)

Using a critical framework developed by W. H. Walsh, this essay assesses Polanyi's theory of historical passage. It then compares Polanyi's views about history with those of Paul Tillich. The comparison reveals similar approaches to understanding ontology and epistemology.

It is commonly recognized that not all actions are candidates for moral evaluation. For instance, morality is silent on the issue whether to tie one's right shoe before one's left shoe or the other way around. This shoe-tying action is not a candidate for moral appraisal. The matter is amoral, for neither alternative is morally required nor forbidden, and both are permissible. It is not commonly recognized that not all actions are candidates for prudential evaluation. I shall argue, however, that (...) there are cases of individual action over time, as well, that are aprudent in the sense that none of the alternatives under consideration are required or forbidden by prudence, but all of them are permissible. These are cases in which there is no fact of the matter as to what is the best choice for one. There are at least two such cases: first, cases in which the alternative courses of action open to one are incommensurable; and second, cases in which one's values are not yet determined and one is deciding what values to adopt, what sort of person to become, or what ideals to pursue. In these cases, prudence is silent on the question of what one ought to do. Indeed, I go on to argue prudence can even be silent on the question whether to act according to the values one currently holds or to pursue an entirely different course that will result in changes to one's values, which is the third case of aprudent choice. (shrink)

Structure or system is a ubiquitous and indispensable feature of all our experience and theory, and requires an ontological analysis. The essays collected in this volume provide an account of structure founded upon the proper analysis of polyadic relations as the irreducible and defining elements of structure. Following from an analysis of ontic predication there is given a number of principles delineating realist instance ontology, together with a critique of both nominalistic trope theory and modern revivals of Aristotle's instance ontology (...) of the Categories. It is shown how the resulting theory of facts can, via "horizontal" and "vertical" composition, account for all the hierarchical structuring of our experience and theory, and, importantly, how this can rest upon an atomic ontic level composed of only dependent ontic predicates. The latter is a desideratum for the proposed "Structural Realism" ontology for micro-physics where at its lowest level the physical is said to be totally relational/structural. Nullified is the classic and insidious assumption that dependent entities presuppose a class of independent substrata or "substances," and with this any pressure to admit "bare particulars" and intensionless relations or "ties." The logic inherent in realist instance ontology--termed "PPL"--is formalized in detail and given a consistency proof. Demonstrated is the logic's power to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate impredicative definitions, and in this how it provides a general solution to the classic self-referential paradoxes. PPL corresponds to Gdel's programmatic "Theory of Concepts." The last essay, not previously published, provides a detailed differentiation of identity from indiscernibility, preliminary to which is given an explanation of in what sense a predicate logic presupposes an ontology of predication. The principles needed for the differentiation have the significant implication (e.g., for the foundations of mathematics) of implying an infinity of logical entities, viz., instances of the identity relation. Donald Mertz is currently the director of the Center for Academic Development at the University of Missouri - St. Louis. He has taught both university philosophy and mathematics, and has published a number of articles in analytic philosophy. He is the author of Moderate Realism and Its Logic, and is an associate editor of The Modern Schoolman. (shrink)