This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

Changing our minds isn't easy. Even when we recognize our views are disputed by intelligent and informed people, we rarely doubt our rightness. Why is this so? How can we become more open-minded, putting ourselves in a better position to tolerate conflict, advance collective inquiry, and learn from differing perspectives in a complex world? -/- Nathan Ballantyne defends the indispensable role of epistemology in tackling these issues. For early modern philosophers, the point of reflecting on inquiry was to understand (...) how our beliefs are often distorted by prejudice and self-interest, and to improve the foundations of human knowledge. Ballantyne seeks to recover and modernize this classical tradition by vigorously defending an interdisciplinary approach to epistemology, blending philosophical theorizing with insights from the social and cognitive sciences. -/- Many of us need tools to help us think more circumspectly about our controversial views. Ballantyne develops a method for distinguishing between our reasonable and unreasonable opinions, in light of evidence about bias, information overload, and rival experts. This method guides us to greater intellectual openness--in the spirit of skeptics from Socrates to Montaigne to Bertrand Russell--making us more inclined to admit that sometimes we don't have the right answers. With vibrant prose and fascinating examples from science and history, Ballantyne shows how epistemology can help us know our limits. (shrink)

This book offers a complete and internally cohesive interpretation of Religion. In contrast to the interpretations that characterize Religion as a litany of “wobbles”, fumbling between traditional Christianity and Enlightenment values, or a text that reduces religion into morality, the interpretation here offered defends the rich philosophical theology contained in each of Religion’s four parts and shows how the doctrines of the “Pure Rational System of Religion” are eminently compatible with the essential principles of Transcendental Idealism.

Kant identifies knowledge [Wissen], belief [Glaube], and opinion [Meinung] as our three primary modes of “holding-to-be-true” [Fürwahrhalten]. He also identifies opinion as making up the greatest part of our cognition. After a preliminary sketch of Kant’s system of propositional attitudes, this paper will explore what he says about the norms governing opinion and empirical hypotheses. The final section will turn to what, in the Critique of Pure Reason and elsewhere, Kant refers to as “General Applied Logic”. It concerns the “contingent (...) conditions of the subject, which can hinder or promote” good inquiry; and, though rarely mentioned in the secondary literature, it offers Kant’s methodological alternative to the traditional epistemological goal of finding “a sufficient and at the same time general criterion of truth”. (shrink)

Twenty-first-century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. Nathan Brown shows that the key to overcoming this antinomy is a re-engagement with the relation between rationalism and empiricism. If Kant’s transcendental philosophy attempted to displace the opposing priorities of those orientations, any speculative critique of Kant will have to re-open and consider anew the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience. Rationalist Empiricism shows that the capacity of reason and experience to extend and yet (...) delimit each other has always been at the core of philosophy and science. Coordinating their discrepant powers, Brown argues, is what enables speculation to move forward in concert with critique. Sweeping across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, as well as political theory, science, and art, Brown engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser, Badiou, and Meillassoux. He also shows how the concepts he develops illuminate recent projects in the science of measurement and experimental digital photography. With conceptual originality and argumentative precision, Rationalist Empiricism reconfigures the history and the future of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics. (shrink)

An expanded and more candid version of the author’s autobiographical “My Philosophical Education”.

This paper obtains the weak completeness and decidability results for standard systems of modal logic using models built from formulas themselves. This line of work began with Fine (Notre Dame J. Form. Log. 16:229-237, 1975). There are two ways in which our work advances on that paper: First, the definition of our models is mainly based on the relation Kozen and Parikh used in their proof of the completeness of PDL, see (Theor. Comp. Sci. 113-118, 1981). The point is to (...) develop a general model-construction method based on this definition. We do this and thereby obtain the completeness of most of the standard modal systems, and in addition apply the method to some other systems of interest. None of the results use filtration, but in our final section we explore the connection. (shrink)

This paper aims to further examine the relationship between self-awareness and agency by focusing on the role that emotional awareness plays in prominent conceptions of responsibility. One promising way of approaching this task is by focusing on individuals who display impairments in emotional awareness and then examining the effects that these impairments have on their apparent responsibility for the actions that they perform. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder as well as other clinical groups who evince high degrees of the personality (...) construct known as alexithymia, I will argue, do, in fact, display impairments in emotional self-awareness, and, so, may provide some insight into the relationship between this awareness and the capacity for responsible agency. More specifically, individuals with ASD may provide us with evidence that robust emotional self-awareness is not a necessary condition for responsible agency or that lacking such a capacity could undermine some otherwise plausible sufficient conditions for responsibility. The aim of the paper, then, is twofold. First, it will aim to show that ASD ought to be understood, in part, as a disorder of emotional self-awareness. Section 2 presents evidence relating to the emotional profile characteristic of individuals with ASD and argues that the most striking feature of this profile is the way in which the individual seems to be separated from his or her emotions in an important sense. Second, the paper aims to show that this distinctive feature of the emotions in ASD casts serious doubt on some prominent accounts of moral responsibility. To this end, section 3.1 presents a challenge to some widely accepted “subjective conditions” for responsibility, namely those articulated by John Martin Fischer and Ravizza and makes a case, based on the empirical data regarding autism, that these conditions actually are not necessary for one’s being a responsible agent. Section 3.2 then presents a challenge for theories of responsible agency which assign primary importance to the connection between an agent’s actions and her judgment-sensitive attitudes. I argue there that the evidence from autism suggests that these theories fail in their efforts to provide sufficient conditions for responsibility. (shrink)

The ArgumentOver the years national styles have been invoked or denigrated in the writing of the history of science. This paper is an attempt to give the concept of national style a degree of precision and clarity enabling scholars to understand when and how it may be invoked and when and how its use would be dubious or even forbidden. The example of the United States of America is used because the history of the sciences in the United States was (...) often written loosely in terms supposedly conducive to national style analyses. We first discuss the problem of commonalities, factors widely present within all countries in the Western tradition, which, by definition, cannot be exclusive national attributes. Here the problem is to somehow determine whether the supposed national style attribute is a case of a significantly different degree of intensity than some presumed norm in the Western tradition.The principal thesis advanced is that pre-existing historiographic assumptions largely determine whether or not a scholar finds or does not find a national style. This is discussed in terms of some examples for the U.S. case. More particularly, a number of examples are discussed from the three principal genres or schools in current writing in the history of science: the knowledge-centered; the doing-science; and the context-oriented. Based on the analysis of the examples, an attempt is made to sketch an approach to a more rigorous use of the concept of national style. (shrink)

Measurement of scientific productivity is difficult. The measures used (impact factor of the journal, citations to the paper being measured) are crude. But these measures are now so universally adopted that they determine most things that matter: tenure or unemployment, a postdoctoral grant or none, success or failure. As a result, scientists have been forced to downgrade their primary aim from making discoveries to publishing as many papers as possible—and trying to work them into high impact factor journals. Consequently, scientific (...) behaviour has become distorted and the utility, quality and objectivity of articles has deteriorated. Changes to the way scientists are assessed are urgently needed, and I suggest some here. (shrink)

There is perhaps no more famous objection to the Ontological Argument than Kant’s contention that existence is not a predicate. However, this is not his only objection against the Ontological Argument. It is rather part of a more comprehensive attack on the OA, one that contains at least four distinct arguments, only one of which involves. It is the purpose of this paper to explore Kant’s case for, consider three contemporary strategies used to reinforce it, assess their merits, and then (...) finally briefly present Kant’s three further arguments. (shrink)

Summary With the help of psychological and biological concepts it is possible todescribe adequately a fundamental class of inductive inferences that are intuitively correct. Moreover, by relying on evolutionary theories it is possible tojustify them, because they reflect innate, hence useful, capacities. These inferences, however, refer to the past, i.e. the inferred generalization is of the form All Awere B . The reason is that evolutionary theories only claim that innate capacitieshad survival value. With respect to inductive inferences about the (...) future the situation is different. In particular, they are affected by the Goodman paradox. In the article, a method is proposed which enables us to describe adequately a basic class of inductive inferences about the future which are intuitively correct. These inferences can also be justified, but their justification requires a very specific assumption. The conclusions arrived at in the article can be viewed as a satisfactory solution to the Goodman paradox. (shrink)

Human genomic information is invested with enormous power in a scientifically motivated society. Genomic information has the capacity to produce a great deal of good for society. It can help identify and understand the etiology and pathophysiology of disease. In so doing, medicine and science can expand the ability to prevent and ameliorate human malady through genetic testing, treatment, and reproductive counseling.Genomic information can just as powerfully serve less beneficent ends. Information can be used to discover deeply personal attributes of (...) an individual's life. That information can be used to invade a person's private sphere, to alter a person's sense of self- and family identity, and to affect adversely opportunities in education, employment, and insurance. Genomic information can also affect families and ethnic groups that share genetic similarities. (shrink)

Loose, unconnected, free-floating, mobile: this is the modern individual, at least in comparison with the immediate past.

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Charles Carlini interviews Nathan Salmón about the philosophical work of his mentor and friend, the late Saul Kripke, one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th Century.

A substantial body of literature in the management discipline has evolved to make the case for and analyze the impacts of cross‐sector partnerships (CSPs). Yet, not all of these CSPs manifest the requisite collaborative propensities to achieve much more than superficial sustainability. Moreover, other disciplines like economics need to be brought to bear on analyses of such partnerships. In this article, we frame sustainable development challenges as collective action problems. We argue that over‐emphasizing the role of a single actor or (...) institution will not yield genuine sustainability. Instead, we propose that a collaborative orientation is necessary for business managers as they deal with challenges as expansive and complex as those presented by goals of the sustainability of the natural environment. Cross‐sector collaborative partnerships (CSCPs) are needed to achieve collective responsibility, wherein dialogic CSCPs issue in a new paradigm of collaborative markets. Market‐based solutions that ignore or minimize the important contributions that may be made by government, academia, and civil society organizations must give way to new models of collaboration across sectors. We identity specific challenges and opportunities for cross‐sector collaboration and provide case examples. There are important limits to addressing environmental and ethics problems from a single sector focus, and we show how meaningful sustainability can be facilitated within a dialogic cross‐sector collaborative perspective. (shrink)

During the twentieth century a number of competing accounts of Lenin’s theory and practice have sought to reclaim its true meaning from ossification under Stalinism. One account popular today is the Hegelian-Marxist interpretation of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks written in 1914 and 1915. According to thinkers such as Raya Dunayevskaya and Kevin Anderson, Lenin’s notebooks on Hegel’s Science of Logic represent a radical break from classical dialectical materialism. For these Hegelian-Marxists, Lenin’s acerbic remarks on Engels’s and Plekhanov’s dialectics reveal him as (...) the forerunner of Georg Lukács and Herbert Marcuse and represent a thoroughgoing reconceptualization of the dialectics of revolution. In this article I submit these arguments to the test of a fine grained textual analysis. I conclude, opposite to the Hegelian-Marxist narrative, that Lenin neither intended to nor accomplished a refoundation of Marxist dialectics in 1914. The notion of quantity-quality leaps Lenin adds to his works.. (shrink)

State capitalism has recently come to the fore as a transversal research object in the social sciences. Renewed interest in the notion is evident across several disciplines, in scholarship addressing government interventionism in economic life in major developing countries. This emergent field of study on state capitalism, however, consistently bypasses the remarkable conceptual trajectory of the notion from the end of the 19th century to the present. This article proposes an intellectual-historical survey of state capitalism’s many lives across different ensembles (...) of writing: early Marxist pronouncements on state capitalism at the time of the Second International; theories of state capitalism evolved in the first half of the 20th century in response to the European experience of war and fascism; dissident portrayals of the Soviet Union as state-capitalist; post-Second World War theories of state-monopoly capitalism in the Western Bloc; examinations of state capitalism as a development strategy in ‘Third World’ nations in the 1970s and 1980s; and finally, today’s scholarship on new patterns of state capitalism in emerging economies. Having contextualized each of these strands of writing, the article goes on to interrogate definitional and conceptual boundaries of state capitalism. It then maps out essential institutional features of state-capitalist configurations as construed in the literature. In sharp contrast to 20th-century theories of state capitalism, present-day scholarship on the topic tends to retreat from the integrated critique of political economy, shifting its problematics of state-market relations to meso- and micro-levels of analysis. (shrink)

According to the standard formulation, natural selection requires variation, differential fitness, and heritability. I argue that this formulation is inadequate because it fails to distinguish natural selection from artificial selection, intelligent design, forward-looking orthogenetic selection, and adaptation via the selection of nonrandom variation. I suggest adding a _no teleology_ condition. The no teleology condition says that the evolutionary process is not guided toward an endpoint represented in the mind of an agent, variation is produced randomly with respect to adaptation, and (...) selection pressures are not forward looking. (shrink)

In an epoch marked by the threat of global warming, the conflicts between science and religion are no longer simply matters that concern only intellectual elites and armchair philosophers; they are in many ways matters that will determine the degree to which we can meet the challenges of our times. John H. Evans's Morals Not Knowledge represents an important provocation for those committed not only to using scientific method as a resource for making moral judgments but also to creating political (...) alliances with religious constituencies. In this important work, Evans argues that most conflicts between science and religion do not concern a clash between two contradictory ways of knowing, but rather a clash over our moral responsibilities and ultimate values. In my response to his work, I suggest that integrating both John Dewey's pragmatic understanding of the moral situation and Kenneth Burke's rhetorical interpretation of motives helps bolster Evans's cause and provides support for a political movement that aims to bridge the divide between science and religion in the epoch of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Many ‘deep self’ theories of moral responsibility characterize the deep self as necessarily requiring that an agent be able to reflect on her own cognitive states in various ways. In this paper, I argue that these metacognitive abilities are not actually a necessary feature of the deep self. In order to show this, I appeal to empirical evidence from research on autism spectrum disorders that suggests that individuals with ASD have striking impairments in metacognitive abilities. I then argue that metacognitive (...) conceptions of the deep self are implausible insofar as they fail to give a satisfactory account of the responsibility of persons with autism. (shrink)

Although Mr. Schrader states that "it is beyond the scope of [his] paper to examine Kant's argument in the Analytic that our empirical knowledge rests upon a priori knowledge of space and time," he does offer a hint as to how he would go about this: "[Kant] seeks to show that the categories are necessary in order to cognize events in one space and one time, and that all empirical judgments rest upon the assumption that space and time are unitary." (...) This is undeniably the foundation of Kant's theory of time. It shows, however, a bias for the special manner of the objective deduction, where emphasis falls on the unity of consciousness as the basic premiss, instead of on the conditions of representations in general, which is how the basic premiss is stated in the subjective deduction in the first edition. The two are equivalent, as Kant insists, but the formulation in the subjective deduction wears a bolder, more radical countenance, since it stresses what is less explicit in the objective deduction, that all the Analytic is derived from nothing more than the nature of a representation. For most purposes the two transcendental deductions are interchangeable, but for the theory of time we turn most profitably to that deduction which dwells more meticulously on the earliest stages, and elaborates the most primitive steps of the deduction of the categories. Accordingly we will now examine the subjective deduction in the first edition. (shrink)

This is a new release of the original 1960 edition.

_The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals^ is one of the most important works of moral philosophy ever written, and Kant's most widely read work. It attempts to demonstrate that morality has its foundation in reason and that our wills are free from both natural necessity and the power of desire. It is here that Kant sets out his famous and controversial 'categorical imperative', which forms the basis of his moral theory. This book is an essential guide to the groundwork_ (...) and the many important and profound claims that Kant raises. The book combines an invaluable introduction to the work offering an exploration of these arguments and setting them in the context of Kant's thinking, along with the complete H.J Paton translation of the work, and a selection of six of the best contemporary commentaries. It is the ideal companion for all students of Kantian ethics and anyone interested in moral philosophy. _ _ _. (shrink)

_Interpreting Music_ is a comprehensive essay on understanding musical meaning and performing music meaningfully—“interpreting music” in both senses of the term. Synthesizing and advancing two decades of highly influential work, Lawrence Kramer fundamentally rethinks the concepts of work, score, performance, performativity, interpretation, and meaning—even the very concept of music—while breaking down conventional wisdom and received ideas. Kramer argues that music, far from being closed to interpretation, is ideally open to it, and that musical interpretation is the paradigm of interpretation (...) in general. The book illustrates the many dimensions of interpreting music through a series of case studies drawn from the classical repertoire, but its methods and principles carry over to other repertoires just as they carry beyond music by working _through_ music to wider philosophical and cultural questions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 37.1 (2004) 21-41 [Access article in PDF] Conquering Our Imagination: Thought Experiments and Enthymemes in Scientific Argument Nathan Crick Department of Communication University of Pittsburgh The dividing line between rhetoric and science has traditionally been drawn at the split between persuasion and logic. On the one side, rhetoric seeks to influence human beliefs and behavior through use of stylistic language that resonates with the experiences (...) of an audience; on the other, science endeavors to describe empirical phenomena through the use of logical propositions that can be understood wholly on their own terms. However, recent scholarship has blurred this border. For instance, in his research on Charles Darwin's rhetorical accomplishments, John Angus Campbell has sought to break down "the neopositivist Berlin Wall separating the context of discovery from the context of justification" that represents this traditional division (1990, 23). Claiming that scientific discovery and rhetorical invention are each "an aspect of a flexible logic of inquiry and presentation" (23), Campbell argues that "the social and theological ring of Darwin's language is not merely decorative or ameliorative, but is constitutive of the fabric of his thought" (5). In other words, Campbell insists there is something intrinsically valuable about Darwin's frequent use of colloquial language beyond its immediate rhetorical appeal—it also contributes something fundamental to scientific knowledge itself.This "something," according to Campbell, is the necessary connection between argument and audience that inspires scientific theorizing and culminates in the establishment of new scientific paradigms. Within the context of discovery, the potential rhetorical audience works as a motivating force in the invention of persuasive arguments. That is why, when Darwin's notebooks are closely examined, it can "be said that virtually every note Darwin penned... was written with an eye to a public, often in response to a nameable individual" (1990, 23). Then, within the context of justification, the actual rhetorical audience works to literally fill in the necessary gaps in any rhetorical argument. That is why Darwin, in order to [End Page 21] tap into this resource, "embedded his central insight in a preexisting common world of thought and feeling" (4). Finally, it is for both of these reasons that one cannot fully reconstruct Darwin's "core concept of his argument as a logical proposition shorn of its colloquial language and associations" (4). For Campbell, "the danger in setting aside Darwin's language is that we effectively remove half of the problem he addressed and disregard the intelligence required to address it—how to present a radical idea to a particular scientific and popular audience in a way that retains the persuasive force of the very tradition it destroys" (5).Campbell's claim that rhetoric is constitutive and cannot be boiled away through logical or reductive analysis asserts the centrality of both stylistic language and audience within the process of scientific argumentation. However, although it is clear that rhetoric has a role to play during revolutionary moments in the history of science, it is not as clear that contemporary audiences cannot go directly to the logical reconstructions of past theories without any significant loss of cognitive value. Thus, we must ask whether a scientific argument, when removed from its immediate persuasive context, can nonetheless be "shorn of its colloquial language and associations" in order to reveal its logical core. What, in other words, is the relationship between the logic of scientific argumentation, the rhetorical appeal of language, and the participation of an audience?This essay suggests that a tentative answer can be found by approaching the question through the concept of the "thoughtexperiment." Thought experiments are distinguished from traditional experiments by their explicitly hypothetical quality. Instead of seeking immediately verifiable empirical results, they are designed to invite an audience to visualize a set of initial conditions and then imagine what might happen in response to those conditions. Galileo, for instance, authored one of the most famous thought experiments when he speculated what would happen if two objects of different weights were tied together and dropped. Einstein tried to envision what we might see from a clear box... (shrink)