'Propositionalism' is the widely held view that all intentional mental relations-all intentional attitudes-are relations to propositions or something proposition-like. Paradigmatically, to think about the mountain is ipso facto to think that it is F, for some predicate 'F'. It seems, however, many intentional attitudes are not relations to propositions at all: Mary contemplates Jonah, adores New York, misses Athens, mourns her brother. I argue, following Brentano, Husserl, Church and Montague among others, that the way things seem is the way (...) they are, and that propositionalism must be abandoned. (shrink)

The author argues that the proper use of analogy opens up reason to revelation. Drawing on ancient and medieval sources (Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas), he discusses the transcendental properties of being (unity, truth, goodness, and beauty) and their analogous application.

A study of reason, as an invitation to explore and discover a new life of meaning, The Romance of Reason is an attempt to put the philosophical basis of Aquinas' thinking into nontechnical language and make it accessible to the general reader.

Some philosophers, for example Quine, doubt the possibility of jointly using modalities and quantification. Simple model-theoretic considerations, however, lead to a reconciliation of quantifiers with such modal concepts as logical, physical, and ethical necessity, and suggest a general class of modalities of which these are instances. A simple axiom system, analogous to the Lewis systems S1 —S5, is considered in connection with this class of modalities. The system proves to be complete, and its class of theorems decidable.

Freedom, Philosophy, and Faith: The Transformational Role of Freedom in the Thought of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas highlights the essential role freedom plays in the Catholic intellectual tradition. Montague Brown argues that that freedom, taken in its most essential form as understood by the Judeo-Christian tradition, has been transformative in all aspects of human thought, from metaphysics to politics.

Discussions of the ethics of war commonly – and reasonably – assume that defensive wars are morally justified if any wars are. They also assume that explanations of why defensive warfare is morally justified must be based on principles that also explain the moral justifiability of individual self-defense. David Rodin has recently argued that the second of these assumptions is mistaken, and he has developed an alternative account of the morality of defensive warfare. The purpose of this paper is to (...) show that Rodin’s argument fails, and to explain how defensive warfare can indeed be justified in terms of principles that also apply to individual self-defense. (shrink)

In this paper I consider Franz Brentano’s theory of emotion. I focus on three of its central claims: (i) emotions are sui generis intentional phenomena; (ii) emotions are essentially evaluative phenomena; (iii) emotions provide the basis of an epistemology of objective value. I argue that all three claims are correct, and I weave together Brentano’s arguments with some of my own to support them. In the course of defending these claims, Brentano argues that ‘feeling and will’ are united into the (...) same fundamental class. I summarize two of his arguments for this claim, what I call ‘the nature of desire’ argument and ‘the transition’ argument. I show how a central plank of these arguments relies crucially on Brentano’s epistemology of value. (shrink)

Presents a broad collection of essays on love and friendship. It draws on the rich tradition handed down from Greek philosophers and the Holy Scriptures, illuminated by the wisdom of the medieval theologians, and reflected upon by Jacques Maritain, his students, and other contemporary Catholic intellectuals.

In American philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century there was small interest in Empiricism and almost no interest in Realism.

Arguments aimed at undermining certain accounts of the grounds of political obligations—no matter how successful they may be—fall far short of demonstrating that there are no such obligations. Doubts about the efficacy of these arguments in this latter regard seem even more justified when it is recognized that parallel lines of reasoning can be developed in the area of filial obligations , which arguments provide rather less than conclusive reasons for denying that there are filial obligations .Furthermore, we have good (...) reason to believe that there are political obligations if patriotism is a virtue, and also that patriotism is indeed a virtue. We therefore have a basis on which to affirm the existence of political obligations—a basis whose soundness is independent of the acceptability of particular accounts of the grounds of political obligation. Hence, even if standard accounts of the grounds of political obligations are problematic in certain respects, we should not regard this consideration as capable by itself of establishing that there are no such obligations. (shrink)

What is given to us in conscious experience? The Given is an attempt to answer this question and in this way contribute to a general theory of mental content. The content of conscious experience is understood to be absolutely everything that is given to one, experientially, in the having of an experience. Michelle Montague focuses on the analysis of conscious perception, conscious emotion, and conscious thought, and deploys three fundamental notions in addition to the fundamental notion of content: the (...) notions of intentionality, phenomenology, and consciousness. She argues that all experience essentially involves all four things, and that the key to an adequate general theory of what is given in experience lies in giving a correct specification of the nature of these four things and the relations between them. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the uses to which certain psychological phenomena—e.g. cases of seeing as, and linguistic understanding—are put in the debate about cognitive phenomenology. I argue that we need clear definitions of the terms ‘sensory phenomenology’ and ‘cognitive phenomenology’ in order to understand the import of these phenomena. I make a suggestion about the best way to define these key terms, and, in the light of it, show how one influential argument against cognitive phenomenology fails.

In 1759, at the height of the Seven Years' War, when Great Britain was suffering a series of military reversals, Montagu considered his country's plight in an historical context formed by the study of five ancient republics: Sparta, Athens, Thebes, Carthage, and Rome. Montagu's focus on the ancient republics gives his contribution a distinctive twist to the chorus of voices lamenting Britain's decline, and his analysis exerted influence in three momentous eighteenth-century crises: the Seven Years' War, the American War of (...) Independence, and the French Revolution. This is the first modern edition of Montagu's work. Edward Wortley Montagu (1713 -1776) was the son of a wealthy British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. He was a student of oriental languages at the University of Leiden, which apparently proved useful during the peace negotiations at Aix-la-Chapelle which concluded the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748. David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on English literature from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. He is the editor of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (2012) for Cambridge University Press. (shrink)

Roger Montague; VI—Happiness, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 67, Issue 1, 1 June 1967, Pages 87–102, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/67.1.

Although people generally agree that innocent targets of culpable aggression are justified in harming the aggressors in self-defence, there is considerable disagreement regarding whether innocents are justified in defending themselves when their doing so would harm other innocent people. I argue in this essay that harming innocent aggressors and active innocent threats in self-defence is indeed justified under certain conditions, but that defensive actions in such cases are justified as permissions rather than as claim rights. This justification therefore differs from (...) that of self-defence against culpable aggressors, since defensive acts of the latter type are justified as claim rights rather than mere permissions. I argue, however, that the two justifications are alike in that both rest on considerations of distributive justice. (shrink)

Even the most ardent defenders of a legal right to freedom of the press are likely to regard this right as having limitations; but how precisely the right should be limited is a matter of considerable disagreement. This issue is at least partly moral in character: it concerns the moral acceptability of laws which regulate or protect the activities of members of the press. I propose here to address this moral issue, and to do so within the broader framework of (...) considering whether establishing a legal right to freedom of the press—regardless of how it might be limited—is justifiable on moral grounds. In pursuing this investigation, I will devote special attention to familiar claims about the relation between press rights on the one hand, and “the people's right to know” on the other. (shrink)

This paper has a threefold purpose: to question the adequacy of two familiar proposals for explaining the permissibility of harming others in self-defense, to suggest an alternative explanation, and to answer some objections to this latter explanation. By and large, discussions of the proposals whose adequacy I will question focus on what they imply about the permissibility of self-defense in controversial cases. I will argue here that the proposals themselves contain large and significant theoretical gaps. Accordingly, examining their implications for (...) controversial cases is premature, since they don’t adequately explain permissible self-defense in even the clearest cases—that is, those in which people defend themselves against “culpable attackers”. (shrink)

A basic component of moral objections to embryonic stem cell research is the claim that human embryos have the same moral status as typical adult human beings. There is no reason to accept this claim, however, unless adult humans once existed as embryos—that is, unless the developmental history of adult humans contains embryos to which the adults are numerically identical. The purpose of this paper is to argue that there are no such identities, and hence that no adult human being (...) ever existed as an embryo. (shrink)