The article first discusses the presence among Christians in Roman Africa of "biblical" writings that are not found in the current canon of Scripture. This is followed by a review of what is known of the Manichaean use of extra-canonical material in general, particularly within the Roman Empire, and especially of the pseudepigraphical Acts of the Apostles. Finally, the article focuses on the use among Manichaeans in Roman Africa of this pseudepigraphic literature, especially the Acts of the Apostles. In all (...) cases, the article focuses on cases of a confirmed pseudepigraphic presence, rather than on mere conjectures about it. (shrink)

Discussion of J. Kevin O’Regan’s “Why Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell: Understanding the Feel of Consciousness” Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-20 DOI 10.1007/s13164-012-0090-7 Authors J. Kevin O’Regan, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS - Université Paris Descartes, Centre Biomédical des Saints Pères, 45 rue des Sts Pères, 75270 Paris cedex 06, France Ned Block, Departments of Philosophy, Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University, 5 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, USA Journal Review of (...) Philosophy and Psychology Online ISSN 1878-5166 Print ISSN 1878-5158. (shrink)

According to H.L.A. Hart's analysis, to utter an internal legal statement is partly to express an acceptance of a set of norms. This article attempts to defend Hart's conception of internal legal discourse by responding to the following three lines of criticism that can be found in Joseph Raz's writings: (i) that Hart's analysis fails to account for what Raz calls ‘detached legal statements’; (ii) that Hart's deployment of the notion of acceptance in his analysis vitiates his legal positivist project (...) because such acceptance necessarily amounts to moral endorsement; and (iii) that Hart is wrong to assume that normative practices, including discursive legal practices, can be characterized satisfactorily by deploying only descriptive statements. I argue that Hart's theory, or at least a theory along the lines that Hart developed, has sufficient resources to handle satisfactorily these criticisms. His world is a noonday world in which sharply outlined figures, most of them more than a little singular, act in describable ways against perceptible backgrounds. Clifford Geertz, speaking of Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard. (shrink)

The idea of moral responsibility is central to a wide range of our moral, social, and legal practices, and it underpins our basic notion of culpability. Yet the idea of moral responsibility is increasingly viewed with skepticism by researchers and scholars in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the law. Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility responds to these challenges, offering a new account of the justification of our practices and judgments of moral responsibility. Three distinctive ideas shape the account. (...) The first is the agency cultivation model, which holds that a system of responsibility practices can derive its justification from the way it supports our agency. The second idea, circumstantialism, is a new way of thinking about agential capacities. This is the view that the capacities required for moral responsibility are functions of agents in circumstances, rather than basic features of agents considered in themselves. The third idea is revisionism, or the idea that a satisfactory theory of moral responsibility will conflict with some aspects of ordinary commitments about freedom and moral responsibility. (shrink)

This paper seeks to uncover and rationally reconstruct four theoretical prescriptions that H. L. A. Hart urged philosophers to observe and follow when investigating and theorizing about the nature of law. The four prescriptions may appear meager and insignificant when each is seen in isolation, but together as an inter-connected set they have substantial implications. In effect, they constitute a central part of Hart's campaign to put philosophical investigations about the nature of law onto a path to a genuine research (...) program. The paper takes note of certain prevalent and robust trends in contemporary legal philosophy that detract its practitioners from the four prescriptions, and that have them revert to the some older modes of thinking from which Hart sought a decisive break. A number of contemporary legal philosophers' views and commitments are taken up and assessed, and in particular those of John Gardner and Leslie Green. ‘Yet the answer is a prosaic one: don’t ask what time is but how the word ‘time’ is being used’.Friedrich Waismann.I miss the future.Jaron Lanier. (shrink)

A series of imitation games involving 3-participant (simultaneous comparison of two hidden entities) and 2-participant (direct interrogation of a hidden entity) were conducted at Bletchley Park on the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth: 23 June 2012. From the ongoing analysis of over 150 games involving (expert and non-expert, males and females, adults and child) judges, machines and hidden humans (foils for the machines), we present six particular conversations that took place between human judges and a hidden entity that produced (...) unexpected results. From this sample we focus on features of Turing’s machine intelligence test that the mathematician/code breaker did not consider in his examination for machine thinking: the subjective nature of attributing intelligence to another mind. (shrink)

George Klosko rejects the standard assumption that political obligations, at least insofar as they are conceived as moral requirements to obey the law, must be content-independent. He thereby neglects the familiar distinction between obedience to and mere compliance with legal norms. The present article insists on this distinction by identifying a plausible alternative to the understanding of content-independence that Klosko correctly, even if not for the most obvious reason, dismisses and mistakenly, though not unreasonably, attributes to several philosophers with whose (...) work it is actually incompatible. Given Klosko’s failure to examine this further option, which is consistent with nearly all, including skeptical, theories of political obligation, his case against the necessity of content-independence must be deemed unsuccessful. (shrink)

This paper seeks to uncover and rationally reconstruct four theoretical prescriptions that H. L. A. Hart urged philosophers to observe and follow when investigating and theorizing about the nature of law. The four prescriptions may appear meager and insignificant when each is seen in isolation, but together as an inter-connected set they have substantial implications. In effect, they constitute a central part of Hart’s campaign to put philosophical investigations about the nature of law onto a path to a genuine research (...) program. The paper takes note of certain prevalent and robust trends in contemporary legal philosophy that detract its practitioners from the four prescriptions, and that have them revert to the some older modes of thinking from which Hart sought a decisive break. A number of contemporary legal philosophers’ views and commitments are taken up and assessed, and in particular those of John Gardner and Leslie Green. (shrink)

What did Jesus mean by the expression, the Kingdom of God? As an answer, Kevin Hart sketches a "phenomenology of the Christ" that explores the unique way Jesus performs phenomenology. According to Hart, philosophers and theologians continually reinterpret Jesus’s teaching of the Kingdom so that there are effectively many Kingdoms of God. Working in, while also displacing, a tradition inaugurated by Husserl and continued by philosophers such as Heidegger, Marion, and Lacoste, Hart puts forward a new phenomenology of religion (...) that claims that ethics and religion are not always unified or continuous. (shrink)

We prove that the classes of UHF algebras and AF algebras, while not axiomatizable, can be characterized as those C*-algebras that omit certain types in the logic of metric structures.

Environmental ethicists have devoted considerable attention to discussing whether anthropocentric or nonanthropocentric arguments provide more appropriate means for defending environmental protection. This paper argues that philosophers, scientists, and policy makers should pay more attention to a particular type of anthropocentric argument. These anthropocentric indirect arguments defend actions or policies that benefit the environment, but they justify the policies based on beneficial effects on humans that are not caused by their environmental benefits. AIAs appear to have numerous appealing characteristics, and their (...) weaknesses do not provide compelling reasons to avoid them. Elucidating these arguments should inspire social scientists and philosophers to study the range of situations in which AIAs can be ethically and effectively employed and the extent to which they increase or diminish public support for environmentalism. (shrink)

This volume presents 15 studies occasioned by the 500th anniversary of the European discovery of America. It covers both the initial encounters between the Europeans and native Americans and the golden age of Hispanic philosophy that followed the discovery - specifically between 1500 and 1650.

In this essay, I claim that certain passages in Book IV of Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics suggest a novel version of what is known as metaethical constructivism. The constructivist interpretation emerges in the course of attempting to resolve a tension between Spinoza’s apparent ethical egoism and some remarks he makes about the efficacy of collaborating with the right partners when attempting to promote our individual self-interest. Though Spinoza maintains that individuals necessarily aim to promote their self-interest, I argue that Spinoza (...) has an atypical conception of self that allows the interests of other people to be partially constitutive of one's own self-interest. In this way, Spinoza can account for the rationality of concern for the interests of others. This interpretation attributes to Spinoza a form of constructivism that differs in important ways from contemporary Humean and Kantian constructivisms and which can in principle be detached from Spinoza’s particular metaphysical commitments in order to yield a third general category of constructivist view. Though my treatment is necessarily brief, it is my hope that it can serve both to motivate a constructivist reading of Spinoza and, perhaps even more crucially, to suggest a Spinozistic variety of constructivism as a live theoretical option in metaethics. (shrink)

According to a widely held view, people's commitments to laws are dependent on the existence in their community of a conventional practice of complying with certain fundamental laws. This conventionalism has significantly hampered our attempts to explain the normative practice of law. Ronald Dworkin has argued against conventionalism by bringing up the phenomenon of persistent fundamental legal controversies, but neither Dworkin nor his legal positivist respondents have correctly understood the real significance of such controversies. This article argues that such controversies (...) pose a deep challenge to any conception of our legal practice as a genuinely normative, rule-mediated, practice. The article also argues that what is needed to deflect this challenge is a new understanding – different from the widely held conventionalist understanding – of how people's commitments to laws are predicated on their fellows’ like commitments. (shrink)

Researchers have long debated the extent to which an individual’s skin tone influences their perceived race. Brooks and Gwinn demonstrated that the race of surrounding faces can affect the perceived skin tone of a central target face without changing perceived racial typicality, suggesting that skin lightness makes a small contribution to judgments of race compared to morphological cues. However, the lack of a consistent light source may have undermined the reliability of skin tone cues, encouraging observers to rely disproportionately on (...) morphological cues instead. The current study addresses this concern by using 3D models of male faces with typically Black African or White European appearances that are illuminated by the same light source. Observers perceived target faces surrounded by White faces to have darker skin than those surrounded by Black faces, particularly for faces of intermediate lightness. However, when asked to judge racial typicality, a small assimilation effect was evident, with target faces perceived as more stereotypically White when surrounded by White than when surrounded by Black faces at intermediate levels of typicality. This evidence of assimilation effects for perceived racial typicality despite concurrent contrast effects on perceived skin lightness supports the previous conclusion that perceived skin lightness has little influence on judgments of racial typicality for racially ambiguous faces, even when lighting is consistent. (shrink)

According to reductionists about agency, an agent’s bringing something about is reducible to states and events involving the agent bringing something about. Many have worried that reductionism cannot accommodate robust forms of agency, such as self-determination. One common reductionist answer to this worry contends that self-determining agents are identified with certain states and events, and so these states and events causing a decision counts as the agent’s self-determining the decision. In this paper I discuss J. David Velleman’s identification reductionist theory, (...) according to which an agent is identified with his desire to make most sense of himself. I develop two constraints that an adequate identification reductionist theory must satisfy and show that Velleman’s theory cannot satisfy both. In particular, I argue that Velleman’s account founders on cases of self-determined self-transformation. (shrink)

Wittgenstein was centrally concerned with the puzzling nature of the mind, mathematics, morality and modality. He also developed innovative views about the status and methodology of philosophy and was explicitly opposed to crudely "scientistic" worldviews. His later thought has thus often been understood as elaborating a nuanced form of naturalism appealing to such notions as "form of life", "primitive reactions", "natural history", "general facts of nature" and "common behaviour of mankind". And yet, Wittgenstein is strangely absent from much of the (...) contemporary literature on naturalism and naturalising projects. This is the first collection of essays to focus explicitly on the relationship between Wittgenstein and naturalism. The volume is divided into four sections, each of which addresses a different aspect of naturalism and its relation to Wittgenstein's thought. The first section considers how naturalism could or should be understood. The second section deals with some of the main problematic domains—consciousness, meaning, mathematics—that philosophers have typically sought to naturalise. The third section explores ways in which the conceptual nature of human life might be continuous in important respects with animals. The final section is concerned with the naturalistic status and methodology of philosophy itself. This book thus casts a fresh light on many classical philosophical issues and brings Wittgensteinian ideas to bear on a number of current debates-for example experimental philosophy, neo-pragmatism and animal cognition/ethics-in which naturalism is playing a central role. (shrink)

My point of departure is the idea that Wittgenstein's work, especially his later work with its explicit emphasis on practices, seeks to engage a reader who is likely to come to philosophy with a certain cast of mind that includes unexamined commitments from a particular cultural context. I show how a substantial number of remarks by Wittgenstein in which he addresses cultural topics bring out the importance of the quite specific connections he saw between the philosophical problems with which he (...) grappled and the historical cultural context in which those problems have arisen. Not only is a grasp of this aspect of his writing integral to a proper understanding of Wittgenstein as a thinker, bringing out these connections serves to put these remarks into a coherent conceptual framework. In assessing the relation of Wittgenstein's cultural concerns to his engagement with metaphysics, I show how his development of Spengler's thought is an important connecting link. Particularly important for this analysis will be my discussion of Wittgenstein's understanding and employment of the concept of a Betrachtungsform , as well as a few closely related concepts. I then offer an interpretation of what I believe to be the significance of the connection in his later thought between his philosophical activity and his views about the modern West. (shrink)

The selection from Capreolus's work represented in this translation shows him defending Aquinas's conclusions on faith, hope, charity, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the virtues against such adversaries.

The paper assumes for its starting point the basic correctness of the so-called “resolute” reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, a reading first developed by Cora Diamond and James Conant. The main part of the paper concerns the consequences this interpretation will have for our understanding of Wittgenstein's well-known remark in a letter to a prospective publisher that the point or aim of his book was an ethical one. I first give a sketch of what, given the committments of the resolute reading, (...) the ethical point of the book will be, and then argue that given these committments and Wittgenstein's own philosophical biases at the time he wrote the Tractatus, the book cannot serve the ethical purpose for which it was written. (shrink)