Some years ago I started to write a book on virtue ethics, in which I tried to meet early criticisms of what was then a new way of doing ethics. The book continued to be unsatisfactory, and I finally abandoned it, realizing that I needed to get clear about virtue before producing a defence of virtue ethics. This need should have been obvious, especially since I frequently teach Platonic dialogues where Socrates gets people to see that they are doing what (...) I was doing, namely developing ideas about something without first examining what it is. The need became even more obvious as the field rapidly expanded with the production of Humean, Nietschean, Kantian and consequentialist kinds of virtue ethics. Within the field of neo-Aristotelian ethics itself it became clear that different aspects can be stressed: the importance of practical wisdom can be developed, for example, without defending a naturalistic account of the relation of virtue to happiness.I finally wrote a book to explore and d .. (shrink)

This article is a critical notice of Sherri Irvin’s Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (2022). After introducing Irvin’s project, notably how she understands the role of “custom rules” for the display and conservation of, and participation in, works of contemporary art, I focus on two case studies that motivate her argument: Jan Dibbets’ work, All shadows that occurred to me (1969) and Sarah Sze’s Migrateurs (1997). According to Irvin, both works require the participation of museum conservators not merely for their (...) preservation, but also realization. Granting the latter, I consider its implications. Prior to the involvement of conservators the works in question appear indeterminate in crucial respects. The conservators’ role is to seek enough clarity about various rules governing the work to afford future installations of the work without consulting the artist. But both case studies reveal considerable artistic whimsy when it comes to abiding by the rules supposedly underwriting these works’ identity, raising worries for their persistence over time. Given their constitutive role, I consider whether there is room, on Irvin’s account, for the conservators to be right and the artist wrong about the nature of the works in question. (shrink)

Matthew Liao is to be commended for editing Moral Brains, a fine collection showcasing truly 12 excellent chapters by, among others, James Woodward, Molly Crocket, and Jana Schaich 13 Borg. In addition to Liao’s detailed, fair-minded, and comprehensive introduction, the book 14 has fourteen chapters. Of these, one is a reprint (Joshua Greene ch. 4), one a re-articulation of 15 previously published arguments (Walter Sinnott-Armstrong ch. 14), and one a literature review 16 (Oliveira-Souza, Zahn, and Moll ch. 9). The rest (...) are original contributions to the rapidly 17 developing field of neuroethics. (shrink)

Bryce Huebner’s Macrocognition is a book with a double mission. The first and main mission is “to show that there are cases of collective mentality in our world” . Cases of collective mentality are cases where groups, teams, mobs, firms, colonies or some other collectivities possess cognitive capacities or mental states in the same sense that we individually do. To accomplish this mission, Huebner develops an account of macrocognition, where “the term ‘macrocognition’ is intended as shorthand for the claim that (...) system-level cognition is implemented by an integrated network of specialized computational mechanisms” .The second mission of Huebner’s book is to elaborate an account of cognitive architecture that could set the groundwork for identifying under what conditions groups, and individuals indeed, are fruitfully and justifiably said to be minded. To this end, Huebner tackles several foundational issues in cognitive science, including traditional philosophical questions a .. (shrink)

Philosophy of science is a rapidly evolving and increasingly inclusive academic field. It is one of the most dynamic branches of philosophy. However, for the most part, philosophy of science has been taught historically by recounting and tracing through discussions and debates from the early to late twentieth century. Great texts of positivism, instrumentalism, demarcation, falsification, paradigm shifts, realism, observation and so on are handed out to students and critically assessed. There is something rather puzzling about this way of teaching (...) philosophy of science, since contemporary philosophy of science has moved on significantly and is arguably distinct from the historical subject, just as current science has many features different from the science of Kuhn’s and Popper’s day. Such philosophical work, however, often only seems to make a late appearance in such courses. It often seems that we teach philosophy of science solely as an exercise in point and refutation, leaving stu .. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 124-126, March 2022.

This review discussion examines two recent works on Gandhi, Richard Sorabji’s Gandhi and the Stoics: Modern Experiments on Ancient Values, and Ram Guha’s Gandhi Before India. The review makes the point that we can see Gandhi’s unusual philosophical method at work if the two books are read together. Sorabji has argued that it is essential to understand Gandhi’s philosophy before we can assess the consistency between what he thought, believed and did. Guha has recorded events in Gandhi’s early years that (...) can provide readers with details of Gandhi’s practise and experiments. (shrink)