In Studies on Early Modern Aristotelianism Paul Richard Blum shows that Aristotle’s thought remained the touchstone of modern philosophy; for it was the philosophy taught at universities. The concept of philosophy at Jesuit schools forms the first part of this book. Their impact on the sciences and mathematics in combination with Renaissance ideas of nature is the topic of the second part. The transformation of Aristotelian metaphysics and theology under the influence of the Renaissance is the third area of (...) this book. Surprising continuity from the late Middle Ages into modernity and the radical difference of subject centered modern philosophy from ‘teachable’ school philosophy are innovative in these studies. (shrink)

This book is an important study in the philosophy of the mind; drawing on the work of philosopher Wilfrid Sellars and the theory of critical realism to develop a novel argument for understanding perception and metaphysics.

In the modern day, it is understood that the role of the teacher comprises aspects of therapy directed towards the child. But to what extent should this relationship be developed, and what are its concomitant responsibilities? This book offers a challenging philosophical approach to the inherent problems and tensions involved with these issues.

Paul M. Pietroski, University of Maryland I had heard it said that Chomsky’s conception of language is at odds with the truth-conditional program in semantics. Some of my friends said it so often that the point—or at least a point—finally sunk in.

"This book is an important study in the philosophy of the mind; drawing on the work of philosopher Wilfrid Sellars and the theory of critical realism to develop a novel argument for understanding perception and metaphysics."--Publisher's website.

Focusing on the logistics of perception, this title introduces the author's understanding of 'picnolepsy' - the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed, or rather, the consciousness invented by the subject through its very absence: the gaps, glitches, and speed bumps lacing through and defining it.

A philosophical account of risk, such as this book provides, states what risk is, which attitudes to it are rational, and which acts affecting risks are rational. Attention to the nature of risk reveals two types of risk, first, a chance of a bad event, and, second, an act’s risk in the sense of the volatility of its possible outcomes. The distinction is normatively significant because different general principles of rationality govern attitudes to these two types of risk. Rationality strictly (...) regulates attitudes to the chance of a bad event and is more permissive about attitudes to an act’s risk. Principles of rationality governing attitudes to risk also justify evaluating an act according to its expected utility given that the act’s risk, if any, belongs to every possible outcome of the act. For a rational ideal agent, the expected utilities of the acts available in a decision problem explain the agent’s preferences among the acts. Maximizing expected utility is just following preferences among the acts. This view takes an act’s expected utility, not just as a feature of a representation of preferences among acts, but also as a factor in the explanation of preferences among acts. The view extends to evaluations of combination of acts, either simultaneous or in a sequence. It takes account of an agent’s attitudes to an act’s risk without weakening the standard of expected-utility maximization. The book’s theory of risk also grounds a justification of the risk-return evaluation of investments that finance advances, and a generalized version of this type of evaluation that a professional may use to advise clients about risks and that a government regulatory agency may use to make decisions about risks on behalf of the public. (shrink)

Commentary on Montero, B. (2020) What experience doesn’t teach: Pain-amnesia and a new paradigm for memory research, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 27 (11–12).

Mystical experiences of the natural world bring a sense of unity, knowledge, self-transcendence, eternity, light, and love. This is the first detailed study of these intriguing phenomena. Paul Marshall surveys and evaluates a wide range of explanations put forward by religious thinkers, philosophers, and scientists, and offers his own perspective on the nature of these experiences.

The aim of appraisal theory in the psychology of emotion is to identify the features of the emotion-eliciting situation that lead to the production of one emotion rather than another². A model of emotional appraisal takes the form of a set of dimensions against which potentially emotion-eliciting situations are assessed. The dimensions of the emotion hyperspace might include, for example, whether the eliciting situation fulfills or frustrates the subject’s goals or whether an actor in the eliciting situation has violated a (...) norm. Richard Lazarus’s well-known model of emotional appraisal has six dimensions, and the regions of the resulting hyperspace that correspond to particular emotions are summarized by Lazarus as the ‘core relational themes’ of those emotions. Anger, for examples, is elicited by the core relational theme ‘a demeaning offence against me and mine’, sadness by ‘having experienced an irrevocable loss’ and guilt by ‘having transgressed a moral imperative’ (Lazarus, 1991). (shrink)

Despite the growing appreciation of the relevance of affect to cognition, analogy researchers have paid remarkably little attention to emotion. This paper discusses three general classes of analogy that involve emotions. The most straightforward are analogies and metaphors about emotions, for example "Love is a rose and you better not pick it." Much more interesting are analogies that involve the transfer of emotions, for example in empathy in which people understand the emotions of others by imagining their own emotional reactions (...) in similar situations. Finally, there are analogies that generate emotions, for example analogical jokes that generate emotions such as surprise and amusement. (shrink)

This book is animated by a shared conviction that philosophy of religion needs to change: thirteen new essays suggest why and how. The first part of the volume explores possible changes to the focus of the field. The second part focuses on the standpoint from which philosophers of religion should approach their field. In the first part are chapters on how an emphasis on faith distorts attempts to engage non-western religious ideas; on how philosophers from different traditions might collaborate on (...) common interests; on why the common presupposition of ultimacy leads to error; on how new religious movements feed a naturalistic philosophy of religion; on why a focus on belief and a focus on practice are both mistaken; on why philosophy's deep axiological concern should set much of the field's agenda; and on how the field might contribute to religious evolution. The second part includes a qualitative analysis of the standpoint of fifty-one philosophers of religion, and also addresses issues about humility needed in continental philosophy of religion; about the implausibility of claiming that one's own worldview is uniquely rational; about the Moorean approach to religious epistemology; about a Spinozan middle way between 'insider' and 'outsider' perspectives; and about the unorthodox lessons we could learn from scriptures like the book of Job if we could get past the confessional turn in recent philosophy of religion.The goal of the volume is to identify new paths for philosophers of religion that are distinct from those travelled by theologians and other scholars of religion. (shrink)

Paul Crittenden sets out to recover the past philosophical practice of treating developmental questions as an important part of ethical inquiry and to bring moral development, moral education, and moral philosophy back together again. The first part of this extremely thorough work is concerned with the main contemporary accounts of how children come to be moral beings. Against this background, the second part consists of historical studies of major accounts of morality in a developmental context. Crittenden stresses the necessity (...) of community for moral development and also address a number of conceptual questions, including the relationship between morality and religion. (shrink)

One dimension of the controversy over whether evaluative properties are presented in perceptual content has general roots in the debate over whether perceptual content, in general, is rich or austere. I argue that we need to recognise a level of rich non-sensory perceptual content, drawing on experiences of chicken sexing and speech perception, to capture what our experience is like and our epistemic entitlements. In both cases (and many others), we are not conscious of the precise perceptual cues that are (...) the basis for discriminations and, thus, the characterisation of the phenomenal content of such experiences must go beyond sensory properties. Nevertheless, this point is arguably insufficient to establish the perception of evaluative properties. Their representation requires the subject to respond in certain ways. I discuss how this should go for the case of pain and then, in outline, for moral properties. (shrink)

There is as yet... no unanimity among New Testament scholars as to the extent to which, or even whether at all, the category of divine man played a part in the interpretation of Jesus in the early Christian traditions.

The hermeneutical key to reading and interpreting the Gospel of Mark is the role which the Evangelist has given to the passion of Jesus as the primary perspective for understanding all the other traditions about Jesus incorporated in the Gospel.

A world of legal conflicts -- The limits of sovereigntist territoriality -- From universalism to cosmopolitanism -- Towards a cosmopolitan pluralist jurisprudence -- Procedural mechanisms, institutional designs, and discursive practices for managing pluralism -- The changing terrain of jurisdiction -- A cosmopolitan pluralist approach to choice of law -- Recognition of judgments and the legal negotiation of difference.

Aristotle argued that citizenship is like friendship, and this book applies his argument to modern society. Modern citizens may lack the concept of civic friendship, but they persist in many practices and passions that were once considered essential to it. Citizens share many similarities with friends: prejudices held in common, favoritism towards each other, and - despite disagreement on specifics - underlying agreement about what is important, such as freedom and equality. Aristotle's theory reminds us that civic friendship is a (...) factual condition of healthy societies, not a pie-in-the-sky ideal. By recognizing when it occurs and understanding it, we can build on it to counteract societal polarization. Civic friendship offers an alternative to populism and nationalism by engaging some of the same passions. In an era increasingly marked by tribalism and identity politics, this timely study will be of interest to a wide range of readers in political science, classics, and philosophy. (shrink)

In the postwar years Jean-Paul Sartre set himself the task of writing a book on ethics. His concern was to take up issues raised by his existentialist ontology and to resolve problems in his bleak account of the human situation in Being and Nothingness. "I am searching," he said, "for an ethics for the present time." For several years he prepared background notes, but then put the material aside as too abstract and idealistic, leaving it for publication after his (...) death. Years later he returned to ethics, this time in the hope of developing an account related to the Critique of Dialectical Reason. But once again he left the inquiry incomplete. There was yet a third attempt towards the end of his life when Sartre was blind and weak, a poignant witness to his abiding interest in ethics. This took the form of interviews with Benny Lèvy, which appeared in a controversial publication just before his death. Sartre in Search of an Ethics is a study of each of these stages in his ethical quest, with a focus on the major themes of his existentialist and dialectical ethics in the context of some of his main philosophical and literary writings. (shrink)

Drawing on his extensive classroom experience and linguistic expertise, Paul Ryan offers a commentary that is both rich in detail and—in contrast to earlier, more austere commentaries on the Phaedrus—fully engaging. Line by line, he explains subtle points of language, explicates difficulties of syntax, and brings out nuances of tone and meaning that students might not otherwise notice or understand.

This paper demonstrates that a rationale for a circumscribed form of desire-based justification can be developed out of a contemporary Kantian account as a natural extension of that account. It maintains that certain of Christine Korsgaard's recent arguments establish only that desires must have certain features antithetical to instrumentalism in order to justify. Other arguments purport to establish the standard (stronger) result: that because desires do not have these features, they cannot justify. Her arguments for this strong result, it contends, (...) cannot be reconciled with central commitments in her epistemology and philosophy of mind. The consistent implementation of these commitments opens up a surprising space within what is still readily recognizable as a Kantian ethics--the space for desire-based justification. (shrink)

This collects some of the remarks made at the 2016 Pacific APA Memorial session for Patrick Suppes and Jaakko Hintikka. The full list of speakers on behalf of these two philosophers: Dagfinn Follesdal; Dana Scott; Nancy Cartwright; Paul Humphreys; Juliet Floyd; Gabriel Sandu; John Symons.

An agent often does not have precise probabilities or utilities to guide resolution of a decision problem. I advance a principle of rationality for making decisions in such cases. To begin, I represent the doxastic and conative state of an agent with a set of pairs of a probability assignment and a utility assignment. Then I support a decision principle that allows any act that maximizes expected utility according to some pair of assignments in the set. Assuming that computation of (...) an option's expected utility uses comprehensive possible outcomes that include the option's risk, no consideration supports a stricter requirement. (shrink)

_Realism for the 21st Century_ is a collection of thirty essays from John Deely—a major figure in contemporary semiotics and an authority on scholastic realism and the works of Charles Sanders Peirce. The volume tracks Deely’s development as a pragmatic realist, featuring his early essays on our relation to the world after Darwinism; crucial articles on logic, semiotics, and objectivity; overviews of philosophy after modernity; and a new essay on “purely objective reality.”.

Inhalt: Descartes und das scholastische Argumentieren - Scholastik und Humanismus im Bildungsprogramm der Jesuiten - Nikolaus Cusanus - Marsilio Ficino - Giordano Bruno - Studienordnung und Philosophiebegriff: die Ratio studiorum SJ - Der ...

Both science itself, and the human culture of which it is a part, would benefit from a story of science that encourages wider engagement with and participation in the processes of scientific exploration. Such a story, based on a close analysis of scientific method, is presented here. It is the story of science as story telling and story revising. The story of science as story suggests that science can and should serve three distinctive functions for humanity: providing stories that may (...) increase human well-being, serving as a supportive nexus for human exploration and story telling in general, and exemplifying a commitment to skepticism and a resulting open-ended and continuing exploration of what might yet be. Some practical considerations that would further the development and acceptance of such a story of science as a widely shared nexus of human activity are described. (shrink)