We are typically near-future biased, prioritising our present and near-future interests over our own distant-future interests. This bias can be directed at others as well, prioritising their present and near-future interests over their distant-future interests. I here argue that, given these biases, and given a plausible limit on the extent to which we can permissibly prioritise our present interests over the present interests of strangers, we are morally required to prioritise the present interests of strangers over our distant-future interests. I (...) also argue that a similar conclusion holds even if we are near biased only towards ourselves, and regardless of whether this bias is rational. And I show that my conclusions have interesting implications for the ethics of charitable giving, because they generate moral pressure to donate to charity those funds that would otherwise have gone into our long-term savings. (shrink)

Recently, several philosophers have argued that, when faced with moral uncertainty, we ought to choose the option with the maximal expected choiceworthiness (MEC). This view has been challenged on the grounds that it is implausibly demanding. In response, those who endorse MEC have argued that we should take into account the all-things-considered choiceworthiness of our options when determining the maximally choiceworthy option. In this paper, I argue that this gives rise to another problem: for the most part, acts that we (...) consider to be supererogatory are rendered impermissible, and acts that we consider to be suberogatory are rendered obligatory, under MEC. This problem arises because, when we factor in prudential reasons, we often have most reason, or most expected reason, to act in accordance with our interests. I suggest a way to reformulate MEC so that prudential reasons only make acts permissible or non-obligatory, without ever making acts obligatory or wrong under moral uncertainty. (shrink)

Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, two twentieth-century Jewish philosophers and two extremely provocative thinkers whose reputations have grown considerably over the last twenty years, are rarely studied together. This is due to the disparate interests of many of their intellectual heirs. Strauss has influenced political theorists and policy makers on the right while Levinas has been championed in the humanities by different cadres associated with postmodernist thought. In Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation, Leora (...) Batnitzky brings together these two seemingly incongruous contemporaries, demonstrating that they often had the same philosophical sources and their projects had many formal parallels. While such a comparison is valuable in itself for better understanding each figure, it also raises profound questions in the current debate on the definitions of 'religion', suggesting new ways that religion makes claims on both philosophy and politics. (shrink)

Most people have the intuition that, when we can save the lives of either a few people in one group or many people in another group, and all other things are equal, we ought to save the group with the most people. However, several philosophers have argued against this intuition, most famously John Taurek, in his article ‘Should the Numbers Count?’ They argue that there is no moral obligation to save the greater number, and that we are permitted to save (...) either the many or the few. I argue in this article that, even if we are almost completely persuaded by these ‘numbers sceptics’, we ought not to just save the few. If the choice is simply between saving the many or the few, we ought to save the many. (shrink)

We present an axiomatization of a problem in commonsense reasoning, characterizing the proper procedure for cracking an egg and transferring its contents to a bowl. The axiomatization is mid-sized, larger than toy problems such as the Yale Shooting Problem or the Suitcase Problem, but much smaller than the comprehensive axiomatizations associated with CYC and HPKB. This size of axiomatization permits the development of non-trivial, reusable core theories of commonsense reasoning, acts as a testbed for existing theories of commonsense reasoning, and (...) encourages the discovery of new problems in commonsense reasoning.We present portions of core theories of containment, falling, and pouring, integrated into Shanahan's circumscriptive event calculus, and show how these can serve as the basis of an axiomatization that partly characterizes egg cracking. We discuss several commonsense reasoning problems encountered during this research, such as the Initial Specification Problem (a relative of the frame problem that occurs in theories in which fluents can trigger actions), and the Unobtainable State Problem (the problem of determining whether or not a theorem stating that one cannot get from one state to another is meaningful). (shrink)

Although Franz Rosenzweig is arguably the most important Jewish philosopher of the twentieth century, his thought remains little understood. Here, Leora Batnitzky argues that Rosenzweig's redirection of German-Jewish ethical monotheism anticipates and challenges contemporary trends in religious studies, ethics, philosophy, anthropology, theology, and biblical studies.This text, which captures the hermeneutical movement of Rosenzweig's corpus, is the first to consider the full import of the cultural criticism articulated in his writings on the modern meanings of art, language, ethics, and national (...) identity. In the process, the book solves significant conundrums about Rosenzweig's relation to German idealism, to other major Jewish thinkers, to Jewish political life, and to Christianity, and brings Rosenzweig into conversation with key contemporary thinkers.Drawing on Rosenzweig's view that Judaism's ban on idolatry is the crucial intellectual and spiritual resource available to respond to the social implications of human finitude, Batnitzky interrogates idolatry as a modern possibility. Her analysis speaks not only to the question of Judaism's relationship to modernity, but also to the generic question of the present's relationship to the past--a subject of great importance to anyone contemplating the modern statuses of religious tradition, reason, science, and historical inquiry. By way of Rosenzweig, Batnitzky argues that contemporary philosophers and ethicists must relearn their approaches to religious traditions and texts to address today's central ethical problems. (shrink)

En décembre 2000, le comité de rédaction de CLIO, Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés m'a donné la responsabilité fort agréable d'animer une table ronde des répresentant/e/s de six revues européennes de l'histoire des femmes. Chaque revue, Arenal (Espagne), Cender & History (Royaume Uni), L'Homme. Z.F.G. (Autriche), Sextant (Belgique), Memoria (Italie), Genesis (Italie) – et CLIO HFS elle-même – a, naturellement, une histoire bien particulière. Elles ont été créées entre 1981 et 1995, et l'une d'ent...

This chapter discusses anti-individualism—which often depicts the individual as a physical creature bounded by its skin—and how it runs contrary to the Cartesian view of the mind—which states that it is coherent to doubt whether any of one’s thoughts correspond to external objects. Anti-individualism contends that this is a conceptual truth; without objects external to an individual, that individual’s purported thoughts would have no content at all. A well-known argument presented by McKinsey holds out the possibility of proving to skeptics (...) that there are physical things. Two things have been missing from this argument, however, and they shall be outlined here. First is a thorough assessment of the extent to which the anti-individualism it relies on can be made compelling for the skeptic. Second is the application of a lesson that can be drawn from Wittgenstein to the Cartesian self-knowledge which is the other main component of the argument. (shrink)

It is easy to think of Frege as having offered two unintentionally discordant criteria for the identity of senses—one tied to the truth conditions of sentences, and one meant to capture relations of cognitive discriminability. This reading, however, is doubly mistaken; the discord between these two ways of thinking of senses has a Fregean resolution, but neither the resolution nor either of the original two pictures affords a genuine criterion for the identity of senses.

La recherche sur le genre de la nation faite aux États-Unis, même si elle ressemble beaucoup à la recherche faite en Europe, est aussi originale par des particularités liées soit à l’histoire du pays, soit aux structures de recherche. La première spécificité se voit surtout par l’intérêt porté aux questions de race ; la seconde se voit surtout par l’importance de l’interdisciplinarité, de la recherche sur la masculinité, et de l’ interaction des recherches féministe et gay. Ces trois effets...

There is a common refrain in the literature on punishment that presumes the mutual exclusivity of defending retribution and adopting a humanistic or welfare-oriented outlook. The refrain, that if we want to be humane, or care about human welfare, we must abandon retributive punishment, anger, and resentment is readily repeated, endorsed, and relied upon. This article suggests that this opposition is false: retribution and welfare-orientation can not only be endorsed concomitantly, but are complimentary projects, and may even be grounded in (...) the same normative basis, such that if we endorse one we are already committed to ideas that ground reason to care about the other.My primary target will be claims that aim to undermine retributivism by demonstrating the desirability of welfare-orientation. If both can live together, demonstrating the attractiveness of one goes nowhere toward displacing the other. Further, establishing this claim invites further inquiry into classic questions about the “barbaric,” or “morally repugnant” credentials of retributivism. Confronting these claims will elucidate the consistency of adopting both retributive and welfare-oriented views, which, I suggest, can be jointly adopted and pursued. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Levinas's positive relation to the Western philosophical tradition is far more complex than his interpreters have allowed. At the same time, Levinas's relation to Judaism is far more complex than Levinas and his interpreters suggest. Analyzing Levinas's messianic claims for philosophy in the context of the historically religious roots and aspirations of modern German philosophy, the chapter considers some broad affinities between Levinas's philosophy and Christian theology, in terms of both form and content. Drawing on the (...) recent work of intellectual historians Ian Hunter and Walter Sparn, it argues that the development of modern metaphysics historically transformed what had been the social function of Christian theology. In this sense, Levinas's positive use of the term metaphysics is akin to the historical function of Christian theology, as well as to the historical function of what became post-Christian metaphysics. To make this argument, the chapter reconsiders Levinas's interpretation of Rosenzweig to shed light on Levinas's conceptions of “philosophy” generally, and his conception of “incarnation” in particular. (shrink)

Recently some arguments against Cartesian-style skepticism have been based on causal theories of content. I hope to show that the relevance of causal theories of content to what we can know is conditional in a more complex way than has been recognized so far.

Recently, several philosophers have argued that, when faced with moral uncertainty, we ought to choose the option with the maximal expected choiceworthiness (MEC). This view has been challenged on the grounds that it is implausibly demanding. In response, those who endorse MEC have argued that we should take into account the all-things-considered choiceworthiness of our options. I argue that this gives rise to another problem: acts that we consider to be supererogatory are rendered impermissible, and acts that we consider to (...) be suberogatory are rendered obligatory, under MEC. I suggest a way to reformulate MEC to solve this problem. (shrink)

One of the main characteristics of this phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the resort by Palestinian groups to suicidal terror. This paper focuses on the unique nature of suicidal terror, since, I believe, it is this kind of terror that presents the most immanent threat to the foundations of politics and law in the free world. The article begins with a phenomenological exploration of the effect of suicidal terror on politics in Israel, inspired by the work of Hannah Arendt. (...) It presents the various manifestations of the suicidal terror as a new Paradigm of Violence. This new paradigm poses a great threat on politics: as the terrorists waive their effort to stay alive, deterrence becomes useless; the Israeli politics, in response, redraws the boundaries of the collective according to demographic lines; the feelings of helplessness reduces politics to personal tragedies giving up on normative arguments and long term policies. Compassion replaces persuasion. The attempt of an organized army to respond effectively to suicidal terror is ridden by the dilemma of effectiveness-legitimacy, that is, the more the response is effective, the more difficult it becomes to retain the distinction between the actions of the army and the actions of the terrorist. Moreover, during the attempt to bring the actions of the army to the review of the court, the legal system itself is infected by the same dilemma. The article examines the response of the Israeli Supreme Court to several petitions that questioned the legality of the means employed by the IDF in its fight against terror. These cases provide a unique opportunity to examine the way in which terror infiltrates into the very legal system that is called upon to respond to it, mainly by changing the legal language. The question that guides my discussion is what effect terror exerts on politics and law, and can law provide a way to resist the destructive influence of terror on the political system. (shrink)

Among anti-skeptical arguments based on premises about meaning, Davidson’s is distinctive because of the holistic element in both his semantic starting point and his epistemological conclusion. Davidson takes the primary bearers of meaning to be belief systems, and it is actually-held belief systems whose overall correctness he concludes to be knowable. Critical attention has gravitated toward a part of the argument that claims that any meaningful discourse must be radically interpretable by one who is omniscient except for the meanings of (...) the speaker’s words and thoughts. I argue that there is a reading of this claim on which skeptics have good reason to accept it. But on this reading the argument goes through only if another crucial premise---the necessity for radical interpretation to be done charitably---is construed in a way that leaves skeptics free to reject it. (shrink)

Logical structure may explain the necessity and a priori knowability of such truths as that if A is red then A is either red or green. But this explanation cannot be extended to sentences that, while necessary and knowable a priori, do not wear the appropriate logical structure on their sleeves – sentences like ''''if A is a point and A is red, then A is not green,'''' or ''''if A is a sphere, then A is not a cube.'''' The (...) real origin of these sentences'' necessity and a priori knowability is a relationship between the meanings of their component atomic sentences – a relationship which cannot be systematically reduced to logical structure by translating those atomic sentences into any kind of ''''ideal'''' language. Moreover, this kind of relationship is one to which any atomic sentences are susceptible if they have a classifying, or comparison-implying, content. Arguably, then, all atomic sentences are capable of being related to others in ways that are necessary and knowable a priori. (shrink)

Qu’est-ce que les objets ont à apprendre aux historiennes et historiens qui cherchent à mieux comprendre les dynamiques du genre? Ce numéro de Clio. Femmes, genre, histoire « Objets et fabrication du genre » tente de répondre à cette interrogation ; d’où le choix, atypique pour Clio, de centrer un numéro autour d’un problème de méthode plutôt que sur un thème. Habituellement nous cherchons à éclaircir comment une étape de vie, un moment historique, un métier, profession ou activité, ou encor...

La Belle Juive est un livre ambitieux, motivé par trois objectifs. Le premier est de décrire la construction de l’image de la « belle Juive » ainsi que la circulation et la réception de cette image en France à travers un siècle et demi d’histoire. Le deuxième est d’établir le rapport entre cette représentation et la réalité vécue des Juives françaises, et le troisième, de déterminer si l’image a nourri ou, au contraire, servi à combattre l’antisémitisme. É. Fournier date l’apparition (...) de la f... (shrink)