How should we understand the arrogance of groups that do not seem to exhibit group agency? Specifically, how should we understand the putative epistemic arrogance ascribed to men and privileged or powerful groups in cases raised in the extant philosophical literature? Groups like these differ from others that are usually the subject of work on collective vice and virtue insofar as they seem to lack essential features of group agency; they are sub-agential groups. In this article, I ask whether extant (...) summative or anti-summative accounts of collective epistemic vice offer a basis for understanding the structure of the epistemic arrogance of men and the privileged. I argue that a summative formulation and two prominent anti-summative positions fail to adequately account for the structure of group arrogance in such cases. This leaves us lacking an understanding of how sub-agential group arrogance works. To address this, I defend a collectivist account of group arrogance that takes social norms as the determinative basis of group arrogance. (shrink)

This thesis provides a novel account of arrogance and applies it to both individuals and collectives. In Chapter 1, I introduce and summarise the main aims and contributions of the thesis and note its omissions. In Chapter 2, I introduce a variety of plausible examples of individual arrogance and survey extant philosophical accounts of the trait. I argue, contra two contemporary accounts, that arrogance is an essentially interpersonal vice. I also argue for the novel view that arrogance can not only (...) involve feelings of superiority to or uniqueness from others but also feelings of similarity. In Chapter 3, I elaborate a novel approach to arrogance, understood as principally involving making undue assumptions of license. I explain how this account can disaggregate moral and epistemic forms of arrogance and argue that even highly domain-specific manifestations of arrogance can be conceived of as character traits. In Chapter 4, I use the analysis developed in earlier chapters to assess how we should understand the arrogance of groups. I argue that claims of group arrogance found in the extant philosophical literature involve sub-agential groups that are not paradigmatic group agents. An account of collective arrogance that caters to such groups is therefore required. The chapter proceeds to argue that prominent approaches to collective epistemic vice do not adequately account for these cases. In Chapter 5, I aim to fill this gap in our understanding by offering a novel account of collective arrogance. I argue that the dispositions of sub-agential groups can be understood in terms of the social norms that operate within them; that social norms underlie the arrogant dispositions of putatively arrogant groups. I conclude, in Chapter 6, by summarising the thesis’ key contributions and considering some of the questions that they raise for future research. (shrink)

AESTHETIC RELATIVITY Among the philosophical disciplines logic has the reputation of rigid and complete finality. It has been pronounced by no lesser..

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It is sometimes thought that the renowned essayist Isaiah Berlin was incapable of writing a big book. But in fact he developed some of his most important essays--including "Two Concepts of Liberty" and "Historical Inevitability"--from a book-length manuscript that he intended to publish but later set aside. Published here for the first time, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age is the only book in which Berlin lays out in one continuous account most of his key insights about the history of (...) ideas in the period that he made his own--the Romantic age. Distilling his formative early work in the history of ideas, the book also contains much that is not found elsewhere in his writings. The last of Berlin's posthumous books, it is of great interest both for his treatment of the subject and for what it reveals about his intellectual development. Written for a series of lectures at Bryn Mawr College in 1952, and heavily revised and expanded by Berlin afterward, the book argues that the political ideas of the Romantic age are still largely our own--down to the language and metaphors they are expressed in. Vividly expounding the central political ideas of leading European thinkers in the period 1760-1830, including Helvetius, Condorcet, Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte, the book is written in Berlin's characteristically accessible style. The book has been carefully prepared by Berlin's longtime editor Henry Hardy, and Joshua L. Cherniss provides an illuminating introduction that sets it in the context of Berlin's life and work. (shrink)

And at the other extreme and in a somewhat different sense, a realistic metaphysician in, say, the Aristotelian tradition would be equally insistent that he must be able to consider and talk about beings or things or entities just as such, about being qua being, in other words. And he too would mean to employ such terms in a way that would be all-inclusive and all-embracing. For he would say that there is literally nothing--unless it be just nothing--which could not (...) be said to be in some sense or other, or to be something or other. That is to say, outside being there is nothing. And this, as everyone knows, is simply the basis for Aristotle's celebrated denial that being can be a genus. (shrink)

This paper attempts to nudge the reader in the direction of an enlightened account of democratic choice, a sense of reflective choice which undermines our present support of discriminatory sectarian doctrine. I use Gutmann’s and Altman’s views as prologues to my own, though they might well reject my conclusions about discriminatory religion. I contrast my view with Macedo’s, Gray’s, Larmore’s, Rosenblum’s, and Galston’s.My argument utilizes common sense and relatively uncontroversial metaphysical principles to make it more difficult to dismiss as being (...) on an ontic par with the discriminatory doctrines which it challenges. I argue that discriminatory religion might be allowed to continue to be practiced and expressed by those who would pay their own way, much as with hate groups generally, but I view our continued public subsidization of it as a failure to recognize it for what it is. (shrink)

Novello, Henry The New Testament is undoubtedly a book of joy. The verb chairein, which means to rejoice, occurs seventy-two times in the New Testament and the noun chara, which means joy, occurs sixty times. The word chairein is found both at the beginning of the gospel story and at the end: at the annunciation the angel greets Mary by saying, 'Joy be with you', and on the resurrection morning the risen Jesus greets the women who had come to (...) mourn him by saying, 'Joy be with you'. The triumphant message of joy forms the framework of the gospel story and rings resoundingly throughout the pages of the New Testament. Paul makes it very clear in his letters to the Corinthians that he is committed to helping them in their progress and joy in the faith and almost the last thing that he writes to the Corinthians is: 'Joy be with you!'. When Paul writes to his Philippian friends, again joy is a constant theme: 'Rejoice in the Lord'. This command is repeated in Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians. In a key text in his letter to the Colossians, Paul prays that they may increase in their knowledge of God and live a virtuous life worthy of the Lord, and his prayer ends with the words 'with joy'. The hallmark of the Christian life for Paul is that every virtue and every tribulation and all knowledge should be irradiated with joy. (shrink)

In the Middle Ages, as today, the concept of magic meant different things to different people. Broadly speaking, it is possible to distinguish between two categories of definitions. To the first category, which may be called external, belong the definitions of magic provided by modern anthropologists, who seek, probably in vain, to find common denominators of “magic” in all human societies. The second category, which may be called internal, is composed of the definitions provided by individual societies or by groups (...) within those societies. In this article I shall be dealing with internal definitions, viewing the subject from the perspectives of the authorities of the early Middle Ages, who understood magic to consist in unsanctioned dealings with supernatural forces that stood outside of the official practices of church and state. Such marginal activities were referred to by a number of words, such as magia and superstitio in Latin or μαγεία and γοητεία in Greek. The written sources do not enable us to define each of these terms with much precision, except to say that in the early Middle Ages they all usually implied an unsanctioned or illicit engagement with the immaterial world, frequently involving the participation of demons. (shrink)

This author confronts Christianity's basis and its hypocrites, in view of its involvment in the Great War.

The article revisits the "Essay on Self-Criticism", written by Nietzsche as a late preface toThe Birth of Tragedy, in the 1886 edition. The intention is to show how his interpretation of the Dionysian concept reaches his mature works, among themEcce Homo,Beyond Good and EvilandThus Spoke Zarathustra, and how his self-criticism shows that the presence of Dionysus would never cease to occupy a decisive place in his thought.