Aristotle continues to be associated with natural law. Some scholars see this association as untenable; others adhere to Aquinas' reading, even if unconsciously. This article departs from both. It restores the plausibility of an Aristotelian natural law, but concludes that it is ultimately incompatible with Aristotle's doctrine. It is plausible because Aristotle does suggestively point towards it. He does so, however, in order to distance himself subtly from it. He must do so subtly because what he in fact points to (...) is a confusion associated with the virtue of justice. (shrink)

Recovering Reason: Essays in Honor of Thomas L. Pangle is a collection of essays composed by students and friends of Thomas L. Pangle to honor his seminal work and outstanding guidance in the study of political philosophy. These essays examine both Socrates' and modern political philosophers' attempts to answer the question of the right life for human beings, as those attempts are introduced and elaborated in the work of thinkers from Homer and Thucydides to Nietzsche and Charles Taylor.

This work completes Ross 's trilogy examining the inexhaustible complexity of the world and our relation to our surroundings.

Key ideas discussed in this guide include: art and aesthetics fun and free time nature and reason things, thoughts and being right This Routledge Critical ...

This chapter discusses the plausibility of the criticism against the thesis that external factors causally influence cognition and that they are, consequently, partly constitutive of cognition. The discussion should not be taken as implicitly proposing that the opposite theory is true, although the works of Adams and Aizawa suggest that they are defending internalism. This can be attributed to the fact that systems are, by definition, bounded; one must make assumptions about systems in developing cognitive models. This chapter defends the (...) position that metaphysical considerations should play no role in deciding how to model cognition. It further explains how there is no basis for a general fact of the matter about determining what is and what is not a cognitive system. (shrink)

The liberal state and the common tradition.--Fascism, communism and traditionalist reaction.--Liberty and authority.--Authority and tyranny.

The aim of this paper is to identify and partially defend a form of practical reason involved in a number of central cases of human action. Against the claims of rational choice theory that reasoning about action is primarily instrumental, it argues for a form of practical reason which allows for the indeterminate, open?ended and creative nature of the most important examples of human action. Rational choice theory not only gives a distorted account of the reasoning involved in these cases; (...) it also ? and more fundamentally ? misconceives the nature of human agency. What moves us to act are characteristically not our ?preferences?, but our ?desires?, and the logic of desire is not that of means to end, but of narrative coherence. The paper also argues that rational choice theory fails to recognize the essentially social nature of rationality, and in its ambition to construct social theory on the basis of rational choice it fails to recognize the fundamental role of trust in social relationships. (shrink)

Murphy (2006) criticizes psychiatric nosology from the perspective of the philosophy of science, arguing that the model of pathology as encapsulated in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders reflects a folk conception of the mental, and of malfunctioning, that is inadequately integrated with cognitive and behavioral neuroscience. The present paper supports this view through a case study of research on pathological gambling. It argues that recent modeling based on fMRI studies and behavioral genetics suggests a stipulative, non-seamless reduction (...) of pathological gambling to a specific disorder of the mesolimbic dopamine system. This argument is agnostic as between prior philosophical commitments to realism or empiricism. (shrink)

It is argued that claims about personal obligation (of the form "s ought to 0") cannot be reduced to claims about impersonal obligation (of the form "it ought to be the case that p"). The most common attempts at such a reduction are shown to have unacceptable implications in cases involving a plurality of agents. It is then argued that similar problems will face any attempt to reduce personal obligation to impersonal obligation.

Pessimistic empirical evidence about the reformatory and deterrent effects of punitive treatment poses a challenge for all justificatory theories of punishment. Yet, the dominant progressive view remains that punishment is required for the most serious crimes. This paper outlines an empirically sensitive prospectus for justifying punitive treatment through understanding the importance of reintegration. On this view, punishment can be viewed as a preferred alternative to the rigours of social ostracism, a common way of dealing with offenders in lieu of formal (...) criminal justice. Adopting reintegration as a primary aim encourages taking a longer view which focuses on desistance from criminality rather than only on reform at the point of release from formal punishment. The view outlined in this paper enables a vindication of reintegrative punishment even when it is not the most immediately efficient means of reforming offenders. In making this argument, I develop the modern retributive platform in criminal justice theory, identify various overlooked yet key nuances in the relationship between reintegration and reform, and argue for greater theoretical and practical attention to how the state can make the communities they serve more receptive to reintegrating offenders. (shrink)

This paper outlines Susan James’s analysis of Spinoza’s conception of practical imagination. It argues that there are three problems with her account. 1) The historical location James gives for the supposed shift away from rhetorical communication to egalitarian reasoning is problematic. 2) James uses the term ‘persuasion’ to describe both rational argumentation and rhetorical appeal to emotion as their genus or common denominator. 3) She relies on the traditional opposition between rhetorical capture of the mind through emotionally charged images and (...) empowerment of the mind through reasoning. (shrink)

Jury science is fraught with difficulty. Since legal and institutional hurdles render it all but impossible to study live criminal jury deliberation, researchers make use of various indirect methods to evaluate jury performance. But each of these methods are open to methodological criticism and, strikingly, some of the highest-profile jury research programmes in recent years have reached opposing conclusions. Uncertainty about jury performance is an obstacle for legal reform—ongoing debates about the ‘justice gap’ for complainants of sexual offences has rendered (...) these problems stark. This paper proposes a way to advance the debate. (shrink)

Amid all the talk about the "Collective Unconscious" and other sexy issues, most readers are likely to miss the fact that C.G. Jung was a good Kantian. His famous theory of Synchronicity, "an acausal connecting principle," is based on Kant 's distinction between phenomena and things-in-themselves and on Kant 's theory that causality will not operate among thing-in-themselves the way it does in phenomena. Thus, Kant could allow for free will among things-in-themselves, as Jung allows for synchronicity. Next to Kant, (...) Jung is close to. (shrink)

Non-well-founded set theories allow set-theoretic exotica that standard ZFC will not allow, such as a set that has itself as its sole member. We can distinguish plenitudinous non-well-founded set theories, such as Boffa set theory, that allow infinitely many such sets, from restrictive theories, such as Finsler-Aczel or AFA, that allow exactly one. Plenitudinous non-well-founded set theories face a puzzle: nothing seems to explain the identity or distinctness of various of the sets they countenance. In this paper I aim to (...) sharpen this puzzle, make clear who it does and does not apply to and, ultimately, to argue in favor of a plenitudinous theory like Boffa. (shrink)

Explores how we might think and live in the enchantment of the secular, modern world.

For the book that forms the basis for your debate, you’ve either been assigned to defend the thesis of the lead article or its antithesis. The thesis and antithesis are one another’s logical opposites – their contradictions. Consult the course webpage area to read the precise proposition you’re responsible for defending.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The aim of this report is to consider feasible conditions under which South Africa!!" processed (e.g., canned and other packaged) fruit industry would be internationally competitive and a profitable site of investment, and therefore able to resume a pattern of growth from which it departed in the early part of the present decade. This is in service of the wider aim of identifying, in a subsequent phase of the project, appropriate industrial policy measures which Government might put in place to (...) assist the industry, in accordance with sound principles of national welfare optimization and public finance. (shrink)

We propose a pluralist account of content for predictive processing systems. Our pluralism combines Millikan's teleosemantics with existing structural resemblance accounts. The paper has two goals. First, we outline how a teleosemantic treatment of signal passing in predictive processing systems would work, and how it integrates with structural resemblance accounts. We show that the core explanatory motivations and conceptual machinery of teleosemantics and predictive processing mesh together well. Second, we argue this pluralist approach expands the range of empirical cases to (...) which the predictive processing framework might be successfully applied. This is because our pluralism is practice-oriented. A range of different notions of content are used in the cognitive sciences to explain behaviour, and some of these cases look to employ teleosemantic notions. As a result, our pluralism gives predictive processing the scope to cover these cases. (shrink)

Problematic substance use (PSU) among nurses has wide‐ranging adverse implications. A critical integrative literature review was conducted with an emphasis on building knowledge regarding the influence of structural factors within nurses' professional environments on nurses with PSU. Five thematic categories emerged: (i) access, (ii) stress, and (iii) attitudes as contributory factors, (iv) treatment policies for nurses with PSU, and (v) the culture of the nursing profession. Conclusions were that an overemphasis on individual culpability and failing predominates in the literature and (...) that crucial knowledge gaps exist regarding the influence of structural factors on driving and shaping nurses' substance use. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to bring attention to Sismondi's forgotten ethical critique of laissez-faire capitalism. It is a forgotten critique because Sismondi has to a large extent been neglected in the literature. He has been too quickly labelled an economic romanticist. It is ethical because Sismondi questioned what he called chrematistics, which to him was becoming the chief end of economics. Chrematistics is the science of the increase of wealth conceived of abstractly and not in relation to man (...) or society. This was opposed to the provisioning principle which Sismondi saw as the key principle of economics. To Sismondi the object of economics is man not wealth. His critique of laissez-faire capitalism was from this perspective. This led Sismondi to propose state containment of capitalism so that the well-being of the whole community was attained. This proposal is an alternative to Marx's complete liquidiation of capitalism. Sismondi's ethical critique is important not only from the point of view of the history of political economy but also for an insight into what values and principles should be given priority in our economic systems today. (shrink)

There are two broad views in the epistemology of testimony, conservatism and liberalism. The two views disagree over a particular necessary condition on testimonial justification: the positive reasons requirement (PRR). Perhaps the most prominent objection levelled at liberalism from the conservative camp stems from gullibility; without PRR, the thought goes, an objectionable form of gullibility looms large for liberals. In this paper I aim to make two main contributions: to introduce a new metric for adjudicating this debate; and to argue (...) that, from the perspective of this new metric, the liberal view is stronger than has been appreciated. Drawing on work from James (The Will to believe and other essays in Popular Philosophy, Harvard University Press, 1896), Goldman (Epistemology and Cognition, Harvard University Press, 1986), and Kelp et al. (Synthese 197:5187–5202, 2020), I firstly countenance the distinction between positive and negative epistemic measures. Positive measures concern, roughly, the acquisition of truths, whereas negative measures concern the avoidance of falsehoods. Both, it is argued, are relevant to epistemic justification, but this debate has proceeded in such a way as to overemphasise the importance of the latter over the former. Once this distinction is made, new conceptual terrain opens for the liberal. Rather than being resigned to a predominantly defensive role—of mitigating worries about negative measures—the liberal can go on the offensive, and explore the independent epistemic strengths of their position. The upshot is that liberals have a new way to dispel their most prominent objection. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper, I argue that the traditional philosophical approach of taking cognitively and emotionally competent adult people to be the prototypical instances of agency should be revised in light of current work in the behavioral sciences. Logical consistency in application is better served by taking simple goal-directed and feedback-governed systems such as insects as the prototypes of the concept of agency, with people being agents ?by extension? in the same sense as countries or corporations.

We examine moving spotlight theories of time: theories according to which there are past and future events and an objective present moment. In Section 1, we briefly discuss the origins of the view. In Section 2, we describe the traditional moving spotlight view, which we understand as an ‘enriched’ B-theory of time, and raise some problems for that view. In the next two sections, we describe versions of the moving spotlight view that we think are better and which solve those (...) problems. In Section 3, we describe a version of the view that combines permanentism – the thesis that all things always exist – with propositional temporalism, the thesis that some propositions are sometimes true and sometimes false. In Section 4, we discuss a version of the view that is like an ‘enriched’ presentism. We conclude with some brief thoughts on issues that remain outstanding. (shrink)

Contemporary Philosophy in Focus will offer a series of introductory volumes to many of the dominant philosophical thinkers of the current age. Each volume will consist of newly commissioned essays that will cover all the major contributions of a preeminent philosopher in a systematic and accessible manner. Author of such groundbreaking and influential books as Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel C. Dennett has reached a huge general and professional audience that extends way beyond the confines of academic philosophy. (...) He has made significant contributions to the study of consciousness, the development of the child's mind, cognitive ethnology, explanation in the social sciences, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary theory. This volume is the only truly introductory collection that traces these connections, explores the implications of Dennett's work, and furnishes the non-specialist with a fully-rounded account of why Dennett is such an important voice on the philosophical scene. (shrink)

This paper critically discusses Amartya Sen’s case for broadening the basket of wellbeing indicators in development policy beyond income and consumption expenditure. I first argue that, contrary to what Sen has suggested, the theoretical and practical motivations that he gives for this do not form a mutually complementary set. In the second, policy-focused, part of the paper I present problems Sen’s approach to measurement raises in the context of a case study from rural South Africa. I conclude by suggesting that (...) development indicators should be regarded as narrower – in particular, that we should give privileged attention to women’s incomes – rather than broader. Keywords: development policy; well-being proxies; welfare; Amartya Sen Word count: 11,315.. (shrink)

This paper is as much about knowledge in general, as it is about the particular inquiry that occasions it.