Hilary Putnam developed a distinctive way of seeing and answering every self’s existential question: What, if anything, gives life meaning? Engaging with issues of meaning over the course of his intellectual and life journey led Putnam to a deeper appreciation of the distinctive character of the practices of philosophy and religious faith as well as the long history of their dynamic interaction. By sharing an account of his own personal journey, most explicitly in Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life,1 (...) Putnam generously offered us an aid to reflection on a topic of universal personal concern.The first part of this article acknowledges the plurality of pragmatist views on religious faith. The second part... (shrink)

Standard, or ordinary, modern philosophy, with its inadequately examined assumption of what amounts to a Cartesian-inspired epistemological stance accompanied today with materialist reductionist patterns of seeing and thinking, presents significant obstacles to recognizing the cognitive force of the diverse experiences that arise within and are made possible by our need and interest-based practices whose roots lie in our bio-social nature.1 This denial of epistemic value to experience has negative consequences in general but particularly for understanding the ethical dimension of our (...) lives, not the least being learning what is required to foster our ethical maturation in a pluralistic world. (shrink)

In his book Autonomous Knowledge J. Adam Carter argues that the possibility of radical cognitive enhancement shows the need for epistemology to be significantly updated. Reflection on the possibility of such enhancement shows that doxastic autonomy matters. If a belief fails to be autonomous, it cannot qualify as knowledge. Sects. 1-3 of this paper introduce the key components of Carter's autonomy framework and his considerations on the value of knowledge (including his proposed solution to the value problem, i.e. the challenge (...) of accounting for why knowledge has greater value than any of its proper parts). Sects. 4-7 offer a critical appraisal of Carter's framework. We are not convinced that Carter has succeeded in showing that there is an autonomous belief condition on knowledge. In this paper, however, we shall not engage with this issue. Instead, for the sake of our critical discussion, we shall assume that autonomous belief is a condition on knowledge and engage Carter on a cluster of issues concerning axiology. (shrink)

Attentional bias has been suggested to contribute to the persistence of substance use behavior. However, the empirical evidence for its proposed role in addiction is inconsistent. This might be due to the inability of commonly used measures to differentiate between attentional engagement and attentional disengagement. Attesting to the importance of differentiating between both components of AB, a recent study using the odd-one-out task showed that substance use was differentially related to engagement and disengagement bias. However, the AB measures derived from (...) the OOOT showed insufficient reliability to be used as a solid measure of individual differences. Therefore, the current study aimed to improve the reliability of the AB measures derived from the OOOT by using more distinct contrast stimuli, adding practice trials, increasing the number of trials, and by having participants perform the task in an alcohol-relevant context. We contrasted the original OOOT with the adapted OOOT and assessed AB in low- and high-drinking individuals. Participants were 245 undergraduate students who typically tend to drink either low or high amounts of alcohol. In one condition, AB was measured with the original OOOT in a typical laboratory context, whereas in the other condition, AB was measured with the OOOT-adapt in a bar context. The OOOT-adapt showed superior internal consistency, especially for the high-drinking group. Further, specifically the OOOT-adapt differentiated between low- and high-drinking participants showing that high drinkers engaged faster with alcohol cues than did low drinkers. Thus, the OOOT-adapt was found to be a promising candidate to reliably index AB in the context of alcohol use. The OOOT-adapt further showed superior criterion validity as it could differentiate between low- and high-drinking individuals, thereby adding to the evidence that AB might be involved in substance use behavior. (shrink)

The story of "natural law" - the idea that God has written a law on the human heart so that ethical norms derive from human nature - in twentieth-century Protestant ethics is one of rejection and resurgence. For half a century, luminaries like Karl Barth, Carl F. H. Henry, and Cornelius Van Til cast a shadow over natural law moral reflection because of its putative link to natural theology, autonomous reason, associations with Catholic theology, and ethical witness devoid of special (...) revelation. However, over the past twenty years, Protestant theologians have renewed their interest in the subject, often animated by debates on Christian involvement in the public arena and on matters of life, death, and gender and sexuality. Much of this engagement has happened within Reformed circles and has largely been conducted without reference to Roman Catholic construals of the natural law. Conversely, Catholic developments in natural-law thinking have paid little attention to the surge of interest on the Protestant side. As a result, Protestant and Catholic natural proponents - and even those skeptical of the natural law - are not in conversation with one another.The lack of dialog between the various schools of natural law has left a historic tradition within Christan moral thought underdeveloped in contemporary Protestant theology. By bringing together a variety of perspectives in much-needed conversation, this book helps readers to understand the various construals of natural law within the broader strands of Christian and classical traditions and clarifies its unique importance for Christian moral witness in a secular culture. The contributors address the following questions:What is natural law?Can moral norms be derived from immanent, creaturely ends? If so, how specific or action-guiding can those norms be? How extensive might these moral norms be?How does natural law endure despite Christian insistence on the noetic, epistemological effects of sin?What is the relationship between Christian reflection on natural law and the broader classical tradition's understanding of natural law?How do Catholic and Protestant construals of natural law differ?What is the relationship between faith and reason?What's the relationship between human nature and natural law?Does "natural law" mean: "secular moral reasons"? Or is "natural law" merely religious belief disguised as public reason?How does natural law relate to public reason?Does the affirmation of a "natural law" lead to a natural theology? Or are these distinct?What is the relationship between natural law and the laws of nature?Five views:Classical Natural Law - Michael PakalukNew Natural Law - Melissa MoschellaReformed Natural Law - W. Bradford LittlejohnLutheran Natural Law - Joel D. BiermanAnti-Natural Law - Peter J. Leithart. (shrink)

Acknowledgments 1. Culture Is Essential 2. Culture Exists 3. Culture Evolves 4. Culture Is an Adaptation 5. Culture Is Maladaptive 6. Culture and Genes Coevolve 7. Nothing about Culture Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution.

What promised to be a refreshing addition to cumulative cultural evolution, by moving the focus from cultural transmission to technological innovation, falls flat through a lack of thoroughness, explanatory power, and data. A comprehensive theory of cumulative cultural change must carefully integrate all existing evidence in a cohesive multi-level account. We argue that the manuscript fails to do so convincingly.

Moral leadership matters. As world politics enters a new and dangerous era, judgment, constancy, moral purpose, and a willingness to overcome partisan politicking are essential for America's leaders. Tempered Strength finds the alternative standard of leadership that Americans are seeking in the classical philosophy of prudence. Ethan Fishman's new work brings together leading American political scientists—including Ronald Beiner, Kenneth L. Deutsch, and George Anastaplo—to discuss the evolution of a standard of prudential leadership both reasonable in nature and practical in scope. (...) Section One studies the meaning of prudence and its evolution in the history of political science from Aristotelian phronesis to Xenophon, Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Burke, and Michael Oakeshott. Section Two demonstrates how the theory of prudential leadership can be applied to practical political issues. (shrink)

Peter J Arnold; Sport, Moral Education and the Development of Character, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 18, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 275–281, htt.

This article outlines a training activity that can enable both business and governmental professionals to translate the principles in a code of ethics to a specific list of company-related behaviors ranging from highly ethical to highly unethical. It also explores how this list can become a concrete model to follow in making ethical decisions. The article begins with a discussion as to what will improve ethical decision making in business and government. This leads us to explore the factors that can (...) most easily lead to improvement, namely a comprehensive code of conduct and employee training. From there we look at the Critical Incident Technique as a training strategy that has the potential for identifying those behaviors that distinguish really outstanding behaviors from those that go by the book, and can be used to encourage more independent thinking and to set expectations for future decisions. If employees are given the skills and examples that will enable them to make better decisions, they can apply them to any situation. (shrink)

Shows that the dialogue in Plato's Phaedo is primarily devoted to presenting Socrates' final defense of the philosophical life against the theoretical and political challenge of religion.

Perceptual entitlement and basic beliefs Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11098-010-9603-3 Authors Peter J. Graham, University of California, 900 University Avenue, Riverside, CA USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116.

The Sleeping Beauty paradox in epistemology and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics both raise problems concerning subjective probability assignments. Furthermore, there are striking parallels between the two cases; in both cases personal experience has a branching structure, and in both cases the agent loses herself among the branches. However, the treatment of probability is very different in the two cases, for no good reason that I can see. Suppose, then, that we adopt the same treatment of probability in each (...) case. Then the dominant ‘thirder’ solution to the Sleeping Beauty paradox becomes incompatible with the tenability of the many-worlds interpretation. (shrink)

Behaviour norms are considered for decision trees which allow both objective probabilities and uncertain states of the world with unknown probabilities. Terminal nodes have consequences in a given domain. Behaviour is required to be consistent in subtrees. Consequentialist behaviour, by definition, reveals a consequence choice function independent of the structure of the decision tree. It implies that behaviour reveals a revealed preference ordering satisfying both the independence axiom and a novel form of sure-thing principle. Continuous consequentialist behaviour must be expected (...) utility maximizing. Other plausible assumptions then imply additive utilities, subjective probabilities, and Bayes' rule. (shrink)

As science learns more about how the brain works, and fails to work, the possibility for developing “cognition enhancers” becomes more plausible. And the demand for drugs that can help us think faster, remember more, and focus more keenly has already been demonstrated by the market success of drugs like Ritalin, which tames the attention span, and Prozac, which ups the competitive edge. The new drug Aricept, which improves memory, most likely will join them. Whether such drugs are good for (...) individuals, or for society, is an open question, one that demands far more public discussion. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

What is the best account of process reliabilism about epistemic justification, especially epistemic entitlement? I argue that entitlement consists in the normal functioning (proper operation) of the belief-forming process when the process has forming true beliefs reliably as an etiological function. Etiological functions involve consequence explanation: a belief-forming process has forming true beliefs reliably as a function just in case forming-true beliefs reliably partly explains the persistence of the process. This account paves the way for avoiding standard objections to process (...) reliabilism and situations epistemic entitlement within a normative framework of functions and functional norms. (shrink)

The essays in this volume, first published in 1986, examine the philosophical foundations of social choice theory. This field, a modern and sophisticated outgrowth of welfare economics, is best known for a series of impossibility theorems, of which the first and most crucial was proved by Kenneth Arrow in 1950. That has often been taken to show the impossibility of democracy as a procedure for making collective decisions. However, this interpretation is challenged by several of the contributors here. Other central (...) issues discussed in the volume include the possibility of making interpersonal comparisons of utility, the question of whether all preferences are equally to be valued, and the normative individualism underlying the theoretical tradition. Criticisms of social choice theory are advanced and suggestions for alternative approaches are developed. (shrink)

Much of what we believe we know, we know through the testimony of others. While there has been long-standing evidence that people are sensitive to the characteristics of the sources of testimony, for example in the context of persuasion, researchers have only recently begun to explore the wider implications of source reliability considerations for the nature of our beliefs. Likewise, much remains to be established concerning what factors influence source reliability. In this paper, we examine, both theoretically and empirically, the (...) implications of using message content as a cue to source reliability. We present a set of experiments examining the relationship between source information and message content in people's responses to simple communications. The results show that people spontaneously revise their beliefs in the reliability of the source on the basis of the expectedness of a source's claim and, conversely, adjust message impact by perceived reliability; hence source reliability and message content have a bi-directional relationship. The implications are discussed for a variety of psychological, philosophical and political issues such as belief polarization and dual-route models of persuasion. (shrink)

In A Professor's Duties, distinguished philosopher Peter J. Markie adds to the expanding discussion of the ethics of college teaching. Part One concentrates on the obligations of individual professors, primarily with regard to issues about what and how to teach. Part Two expands Professor Markie's views by providing a selection of the most significant previously published writings on the ethics of college teaching.

The use of socially learned information (culture) is central to human adaptations. We investigate the hypothesis that the process of cultural evolution has played an active, leading role in the evolution of genes. Culture normally evolves more rapidly than genes, creating novel environments that expose genes to new selective pressures. Many human genes that have been shown to be under recent or current selection are changing as a result of new environments created by cultural innovations. Some changed in response to (...) the development of agricultural subsistence systems in the Early and Middle Holocene. Alleles coding for adaptations to diets rich in plant starch (e.g., amylase copy number) and to epidemic diseases evolved as human populations expanded (e.g., sickle cell and G6PD defi- ciency alleles that provide protection against malaria). Large-scale scans using patterns of linkage disequilibrium to detect recent selection suggest that many more genes evolved in response to agriculture. Genetic change in response to the novel social environment of contemporary modern societies is also likely to be occurring. The functional effects of most of the alleles under selection during the last 10,000 years are currently unknown. Also unknown is the role of paleoenvironmental change in regulating the tempo of hominin evolution. Although the full extent of culture-driven gene-culture coevolution is thus far unknown for the deeper history of the human lineage, theory and some evidence suggest that such effects were profound. Genomic methods promise to have a major impact on our understanding of gene-culture coevolution over the span of hominin evolutionary history. (shrink)

Historically, the hypothesis driving emotion research has been that emotion’s data-base—in language, physiology, and behavior— is organized around specific mental states, as reflected in evaluative language. It is suggested that this approach has not greatly advanced a natural science of emotion and that the developing motivational model of emotion defines a better path: emotion is an evolved trait founded on motivational neural circuitry shared by mammalian species, primitively prompting heightened perceptual processing and reflex mobilization for action to appetitive or threatening (...) survival cues. As the field moves forward with increasingly sophisticated measurement technology and assessing more complex affective functioning, scientific understanding of human emotion will proceed best within the framework of this mammalian brain model. (shrink)

Ambitiously identifying fresh issues in the study of complex systems, Peter J. Taylor, in a model of interdisciplinary exploration, makes these concerns accessible to scholars in the fields of ecology, environmental science, and science studies. Unruly Complexity explores concepts used to deal with complexity in three realms: ecology and socio-environmental change; the collective constitution of knowledge; and the interpretations of science as they influence subsequent research. For each realm Taylor shows that unruly complexity-situations that lack definite boundaries, where what (...) goes on "outside" continually restructures what is "inside," and where diverse processes come together to produce change-should not be suppressed by partitioning complexity into well-bounded systems that can be studied or managed from an outside vantage point. Using case studies from Australia, North America, and Africa, he encourages readers to be troubled by conventional boundaries-especially between science and the interpretation of science-and to reflect more self-consciously on the conceptual and practical choices researchers make. (shrink)

The article sums up a number of points made by the author concerning the response to Darwinism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and repeats the claim that a proper understanding of the theory's impact must take account of the extent to which what are now regarded as the key aspects of Darwin's thinking were evaded by his immediate followers. Potential challenges to this position are described and responded to.