Philosophy has never delivered on its promise to settle the great moral and religious questions of human existence, and even most philosophers conclude that it does not offer an established body of disciplinary knowledge. Gary Gutting challenges this view by examining detailed case studies of recent achievements by analytic philosophers such as Quine, Kripke, Gettier, Lewis, Chalmers, Plantinga, Kuhn, Rawls, and Rorty. He shows that these philosophers have indeed produced a substantial body of disciplinary knowledge, but he challenges many (...) common views about what philosophers have achieved. Topics discussed include the role of argument in philosophy, naturalist and experimentalist challenges to the status of philosophical intuitions, the importance of pre-philosophical convictions, Rawls' method of reflective equilibrium, and Rorty's challenge to the idea of objective philosophical truth. The book offers a lucid survey of recent analytic work and presents a new understanding of philosophy as an important source of knowledge. (shrink)

This textbook offers a dynamic new approach to logic with emphasis on the development of skills. The reader learns to use practical guidelines and helpful hints in dealing with statements, questions and their presuppositions, single and multiple arguments, and dialogues as they occur in ordinary language.Symbolic logic is presented in a clear and measured fashion with an eye to ordinary language applications. The reader is introduced to natural deduction through the use of proof constructions based on a core set of (...) simple rules.This text also presents a fresh approach to traditional logic though set theory. Carroll diagrams are used in place of Venn diagrams in order to help develop a more intuitive understanding of syllogisms. (shrink)

What is sin? Is it simply wrongdoing? Why do its effects linger over time? In this sensitive, imaginative, and original work, Gary Anderson shows how changing conceptions of sin and forgiveness lay at the very heart of the biblical tradition. Spanning nearly two thousand years, the book brilliantly demonstrates how sin, once conceived of as a physical burden, becomes, over time, eclipsed by economic metaphors. Transformed from a weight that an individual carried, sin becomes a debt that must be (...) repaid in order to be redeemed in God's eyes. Anderson shows how this ancient Jewish revolution in thought shaped the way the Christian church understood the death and resurrection of Jesus and eventually led to the development of various penitential disciplines, deeds of charity, and even papal indulgences. In so doing it reveals how these changing notions of sin provided a spur for the Protestant Reformation. Broad in scope while still exceptionally attentive to detail, this ambitious and profound book unveils one of the most seismic shifts that occurred in religious belief and practice, deepening our understanding of one of the most fundamental aspects of human experience. (shrink)

As the word “optics” was understood from antiquity into and beyond the early modern period, it did not mean simply the physics and geometry of light, but meant the “theory of vision” and included what we should now call physiological and psychological aspects. From antiquity, these aspects were subject to geometrical analysis. Accordingly, the geometry of visual experience has long been an object of investigation. This chapter examines accounts of size and distance perception in antiquity (Euclid and Ptolemy) and the (...) Middle Ages (Ibn al-Haytham), before turning to "natural geometry" in Kepler and Descartes. It finds a purely mechanical realization of natural geometry in Descartes (primarily in his L'Homme, 1664), in which he conceives states of the visual system as varying in accordance with distance, much as his geometrical compasses vary their spatial relations in accordance with geometrical proportions. This reading challenges the notion that a two-dimensional sensation (without three-dimensional phenomenality) was universally accepted prior to the nineteenth century by positing a direct psychophysiological account of the experience of distance in Descartes. It thereby challenges the interpretations of Descartes on natural geometry of George Berkeley, Nancy Maull, Margaret Wilson, Erwin Panofsky, and Jonathan Crary. (shrink)

‘Linguistic meaning must be public’ – for Quine, here is not a statement to rest with, whether it be reckoned true or reckoned false. It calls for explication. When we do, using Quine’s words to piece together what he thought, we find that much too much is concealed by the original statement. Yes, Quine said ‘Language is a social art’; yes, he accepts behaviourism so far as linguistic meaning is concerned; yes, he broadly agrees with Wittgenstein’s anti-privacy stricture. But precisely (...) what is being said by the original statement to be public, and what does calling it ‘public’ amount to? Pressing such questions complicates the picture enormously, partly though by no means entirely aligning Quine with linguistic internalism vis-à-vis Chomsky. (shrink)

In Good and Real, Gary Drescher examines a series of provocative paradoxes about consciousness, choice, ethics, quantum mechanics, and other topics, in an effort to reconcile a purely mechanical view of the universe with key aspects of our ...

The study of landscape and place has become an increasingly fertile realm of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. In this new book of essays, selected from presentations at the first annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Geography, scholars investigate the experiences and meanings that inscribe urban and suburban landscapes. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi bring philosophy and geography into a dialogue with a host of other disciplines to explore a fundamental dialectic: while our collective and (...) personal activity modifies the landscape, in turn, the landscape modifies human identities, and social and environmental relations. Whether proposing a peripatetic politics, conducting a sociological analysis of building security systems, or critically examining the formation of New York City's municipal parks, each essay sheds distinctive light on this fascinating and engaging aspect of contemporary environmental studies. (shrink)

This book explores the relationship between romantic love and personal identity by examining work in both areas by philosophers in the continental and analytic traditions. Foster finds a promising connection between love and identity in the Sartrean influenced notion of embodied love.

Brad Mellon argues that persistent-vegetative-state cases, including the recent Terri Schiavo case, are ambiguous. By this he seems to mean that decisions about such cases are fraught with doubt and uncertainty and perhaps even that rational resolution of many such cases is impossible. Faced with such cases the most we can do is to live and cope with the ambiguity. I am more optimistic. With good will, and much clarification and discussion, rational agreement is possible in these cases, including the (...) Schiavo case. (shrink)

The argument for vegetarianism from overlapping species goes like this. Every individual who is the subject of a life has a right to life. Some humans—e.g., the severely congenitally cognitively limited—lack language, rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness, and yet they are subjects of a life. Severely congenitally cognitively limited humans have a right to life. Some animals—e.g., all mammals—lack language, rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness, and yet they are subjects of a life. We ought to treat like cases alike. The cases of (...) some humans are like the cases of some animals. Therefore, some animals have a right to life. -/- The argument seems not to have moved many people to change their diets. The reason, I suggest, is not because the argument is unsound but because our ability to change our dietary practices is difficult and we lack the imaginative resources to see the world from a nonhuman perspective. -/- I suggest that creative artists are of great value here, and I provide an example by referring to the work of the American novelist, Cormac McCarthy. (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce sketches "a nest of three arguments for the Reality of God" in his article "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God." I provide careful analysis and explication of Peirce's argument, along with consideration of some objections. I argue that there are significant differences between Peirce's neglected argument and the traditional arguments for God's existence; Peirce's analysis of the neglected argument into three arguments is misleading; there are two distinct levels of argument that Peirce does not recognize; (...) and it is doubtful whether the argument meets all the criteria set by Peirce himself. (shrink)

The chapter examines some common assumptions regarding the shape of the history of theories of mind. It questions the conception that the Scientific Revolution resulted in placing the mind “outside of nature.” During the seventeenth century, the followers of Descartes routinely placed study of the mind, or, at least, mind–body interaction, within “physics” considered as a science of nature in general (and so including physics in the narrow sense, biology, and psychology). By the end of the eighteenth century, many authors (...) treated the psychological and the physical as distinct areas of investigation (with points of contact, to be sure), both amenable to natural scientific study. Another assumption is that, prior to behaviorism, the notion of “the psychological” was equivalent to “the mental.” And yet, during the seventeenth century psychological phenomena were assigned to both sides of the mind–body divide: the Cartesians and their allies offered (nonmentalistic) mechanistic explanations for the sensory and behavioral capacities that human beings share with animals, while also holding that some aspects of mental life (including consciousness, free will, conceptual language, and general intelligence) require an immaterial mind. Finally, from the late eighteenth century onward, some have maintained that if mental states are reached only by introspection then they cannot be studied objectively. The chapter argues that the standard version of this objection misunderstands the nature of introspection, and it mounts a reply founded on Wundt’s methodological discussions and making reference to the perceptual investigations of the Gestalt psychologists. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are two camps in narrative theology, "pure" (e.g., Hans Frei) and "impure" (e.g., Paul Ricoeur) narrative theologians. Narrative theology, reflection on religious claims embedded in stories, is one of the most significant currents of late twentieth century thought. H. Richard Niebuhr initiated the conversation when he wrote in 1941 of "The Story of Our Lives." If his theme lay undeveloped for several decades, it burst onto the theological scene in the early 1970s. Demurrers followed, and (...) we now recognize the limits of the metaphor" narrative." Still, scholarly interest has not waned. Books and articles keep coming: on narrative in the Bible, narrative and theology, narrative and morality, narrative tradition, narrative practice, even narrative truth. The conversation, it appears, is as lively as ever. And if it has produced lasting contributions, it is because of the quality of the minds it has managed to attract: Paul Ricoeur, Hans Frei, David Tracy, George Lindbeck, Stanley Hauerwas, Julian Hartt, Sallie McFague, Johann Baptist Metz. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rethinking Cooperation with Evil: A Virtue-Based Approach by Ryan ConnorsGary AtkinsonCONNORS, Ryan. Rethinking Cooperation with Evil: A Virtue-Based Approach. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2023. xiii + 313 pp. Paper, $34.95The author adheres closely to the recommendation to tell his reader what he intends to do, tell him what he is doing while doing it, and having finished, tell him what he’s done, a recommendation (...) worth following for a work as tightly structured and complex as this one. It is clear, irenic, and shows extensive research: nearly 1,000 footnotes in its 275 pages of text offering many avenues for further exploration including numerous references to “alternative” accounts. It is far more than an analysis of cooperation, for it exposes the reader to a universe of concepts, many of which are seldom introduced in studies on the topic. It is also bracing, an elixir likely to incite (and likely intended to incite) the reader to a deeper commitment to careful moral thought and conscientious moral action. Few readers will close this book with a feeling of time unprofitably spent.The introduction makes clear the book’s two central claims: (i) that an adequate analysis of the topic of cooperation with evil has yet to be provided and (ii) that a virtue-based approach stemming from St. Thomas Aquinas contains the elements for its provision. In support of these claims the book is organized into five chapters, the first three foundational and the last two matters of application.Chapter 1, “The Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas: Received and Jettisoned,” begins with a presentation of St. Thomas’s treatment of five topics—borrowing money from known usurers, scandal, restitution for [End Page 709] crimes committed by agents working together, exacting oaths from known perjurers, production of objects used for sinful purposes. This first section is followed by an examination of three theologians in the tradition of Thomistic analysis, Jean Capreolus (d. 1444), Giacomo de Vio Cajetan (d. 1534), and John of St. Thomas (d. 1644). Following this section is a third containing an account of the departure from the Thomistic mode of analysis represented by Thomas Sanchez (d. 1610) and St. Alphonsus Liguori (d. 1787). The first chapter provides a nice introduction and solid grounding for what is to come.Chapter 2, “A Broad Sampling of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Casuist Authors,” explores in its first section the manuals of nine figures: Aloysius Sabetti, Thomas Slater, Dominicus Prümmer, Benoit-Henri Merkelbach, Noldin-Schmitt, Jone-Adelman, McHugh-Callan, Henri Davis, and Bernhard Häring. The second and third sections highlight the lack of consensus among the authors and the consequent perplexity encountered by a conscientious moral agent regarding what counts as a “sufficient, proportionate, serious, or grave” reason for cooperation with evil. At several points throughout this book the author acknowledges the good sense of the casuists and the careful articulation of their judgments, but he finds their general approach to be wanting for several reasons, including their tendency to neglect consideration of the moral virtues and the nature of the act of cooperation itself.The extensive historical grounding provided by chapters 1 and 2 prepares the reader for chapter 3, “The Renewal of Theology: A Return to Virtue,” the focal chapter of the book. The first section concerns the thought of Servais Pinckaers, who “initiated a revival of St. Thomas’s moral theory that continues to the present day.” This is followed by a section treating of magisterial documents adopting St. Thomas’s and Pinckaers’s approach: Veritatis splendor, Evangelium vitae, Declaration on Euthanasia (1980), Vademecum for Confessors Concerning Some Aspects of Conjugal Life (1997), Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (2009). The third section considers the work of three twenty-first-century moralists who apply Thomistic methods to the topic of cooperation with evil: Steven Long, Archbishop Anthony Fisher, and Andrew McLean Cummings.Chapter 4, “A New Way Forward: the Virtuous Person Faces a Moral Dilemma,” is the first of two chapters showing St. Thomas’s approach at work. The author calls this approach both “object based” and “virtue based,” marking the two features receiving... (shrink)

It has been fifty years since a report by an ad hoc committee of Harvard Medical School ushered in the widespread adoption of brain death as a definition of death. Yet brain death remains disputed as an acceptable definition within bioethics. The continuous debate among bioethicists has had three key recurring features: first and foremost, argument over alleged flaws in the conceptual logic and consistency of the “whole‐brain” approach as a description of the meaning of death; second, efforts to fix (...) perceived limitations of brain death‐based practices to optimize transplantation, especially given that transplantation was the presumed original intended purpose of the definition; and third, a basic unease provoked by the experience of using the criteria and managing a body in this state of “irreversible coma.”The third feature is the one I find the most compelling, though it is less explored, and it persists because of the failures of the prior two. Brain death remains strange—to medical personnel, families, philosophers. That is not because it hasn’t yet been logically argued well enough or conceptually framed adequately, but because those things don’t matter as much to resolving this strangeness as the bioethical approach to brain death over the last fifty years has assumed it does. It is necessary to look to other things that can anchor the aims of medicine in the midst of this strangeness. (shrink)

L’Homme presents what has been termed Descartes’ “physiological psychology”. It envisions and seeks to explain how the brain and nerves might yield situationally appropriate behavior through mechanical means. On occasion in the past 150 years, this aim has been recognized, described, and praised. Still, acknowledgement of this aspect of Descartes’ writing has been spotty in histories of neuroscience and histories of psychology. In recent years, there has been something of a resurgence. This chapter argues that, in seeking to explain psychological (...) functions such as sense perception, attention, memory, and emotional response, Descartes ascribed a range of active functions to the brain acting on its own (independently of mind). (shrink)

When I wrote “The Case Against bGH” in the late 1980s, I enjoyed eating meat, enjoyed serving it to my family, and believed one could simultaneously defend traditional family farms and the welfare of animals. Shortly after finishing that article, I read again, and more carefully, Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights. 2 Regan’s arguments challenged my presuppositions.

City 2000 is a chronicle of Chicago in the first year of the 21st century. More than 200 photographers spent the year documenting the city. This book features 199 photographs drawn from more than half a million images within the Comer Archive of Chicago In The Year 2000. The archive was donated to the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago where it will be preserved for the next millennium.

A copy of the book is available from my website.

The aim of this essay is to demonstrate three main points: that many of the widespread appeals made to conscience in the time of COVID display little understanding of conscience’s fundamental nature; that they assume for conscience a sacrosanct status it does not possess; and that because of the first two points, conversation regarding conscience and COVID has generated considerable confusion. In support of these points, this paper shows what conscience is, employs St. John of the Cross’s examination of attachments (...) to suggest that possession of a well-formed conscience is frequently a most difficult achievement, and examines various expressions associated with the COVID debate to illustrate how much of the conversation has stemmed from or resulted in little real understanding. (shrink)

This paper argues (a) that the concept of “potential being” is central to the theory and practice of contemporary cosmology and evolutionary science, and (b) that the reality of potential being points to the existence of an intelligent and purposive cause of the intelligible order among potential beings that existed from the first moments of the Big Bang. The paper introduces and explains the concept of “potential being” and then traces the existence of potential beings back to the beginnings of (...) the cosmos at the instant of the Big Bang. This primeval existence of potential beings is shown to possess a character and order that points to a cause external to that order. The paper concludes with a consideration of the features that must be possessed by that external cause in order to make sense of what we know. (shrink)