The grand and sweeping claims of many relativists might seem to amount to the argument that everything is relative--except the thesis of relativism. In this book, Steven Hales defends relativism, but in a more circumscribed form that applies specifically to philosophical propositions. His claim is that philosophical propositions are relatively true--true in some perspectives and false in others. Hales defends this argument first by examining rational intuition as the method by which philosophers come to have the beliefs they do. (...) Analytic rationalism, he claims, has a foundational reliance on rational intuition as a method of acquiring basic beliefs. He then argues that there are other methods that people use to gain beliefs about philosophical topics that are strikingly analogous to rational intuition and examines two of these: Christian revelation and the ritual use of hallucinogens. Hales argues that rational intuition is not epistemically superior to either of these alternative methods. There are only three possible outcomes: we have no philosophical knowledge ; there are no philosophical propositions ; or there are knowable philosophical propositions, but our knowledge of them is relative to doxastic perspective. Hales defends relativism against the charge that it is self-refuting and answers a variety of objections to this account of relativism. Finally, he examines the most sweeping objection to relativism: that philosophical propositions are not merely relatively true, because there are no philosophical propositions--all propositions are ultimately empirical, as the naturalists contend. Hales's somewhat disturbing conclusion--that intuition-driven philosophy does produce knowledge, but not absolute knowledge--is sure to inspire debate among philosophers. (shrink)

Winner of 2002 Edward Goodwin Ballard Prize In a penetrating and lucid discussion of the enigmatic relationship between the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Steven Galt Crowell proposes that the distinguishing feature of twentieth-century philosophy is not so much its emphasis on language as its concern with meaning. Arguing that transcendental phenomenology is indispensable to the philosophical explanation of the space of meaning, Crowell shows how a proper understanding of both Husserl and Heidegger reveals the distinctive contributions (...) of each to that ongoing phenomenological project. (shrink)

Spinoza's Ethics is one of the most remarkable, important, and difficult books in the history of philosophy: a treatise simultaneously on metaphysics, knowledge, philosophical psychology, moral philosophy, and political philosophy. It presents, in Spinoza's famous 'geometric method', his radical views on God, Nature, the human being, and happiness. In this wide-ranging 2006 introduction to the work, Steven Nadler explains the doctrines and arguments of the Ethics, and shows why Spinoza's endlessly fascinating ideas may have been so troubling to his (...) contemporaries, as well as why they are still highly relevant today. He also examines the philosophical background to Spinoza's thought and the dialogues in which Spinoza was engaged - with his contemporaries, with ancient thinkers, and with his Jewish rationalist forebears. His book is written for the student reader but will also be of interest to specialists in early modern philosophy. (shrink)

Motive and Rightness is the first book-length attempt to answer the question, Does the motive of an action ever make a difference in whether that action is morally right or wrong? Steven Sverdlik argues that the answer is yes. His book examines the major theories now being discussed by moral philosophers to see if they can provide a plausible account of the relevance of motives to rightness and wrongness. Sverdlik argues that consequentialism gives a better account of these matters (...) than Kantianism or certain important forms of virtue ethics. In carrying out the investigation Sverdlik presents an analysis of the nature of motives, and he considers their relations to normative judgments and intentions. A chapter is devoted to analyzing the extent to which motives are 'available' to rational agents, and the importance of feelings and unconscious motives. Historical figures such as Kant, Bentham, Mill and Ross are discussed, as well as contemporary writers like Korsgaard, Herman, Hurka, Slote and Hursthouse. Motive and Rightness is unusual in its interweaving of ethical theory, both historical and contemporary, with moral psychology, action theory, and psychology. (shrink)

An experiment investigated the relationship between the ability to encode verbal stimuli during an attentional lapse. The task employed a variation on the sustained attention to response task which involved the detection of an infrequent target against a background of words. As a manipulation, participants were either instructed to encode the stimuli or were merely exposed to the stimuli. Retrieval was measured using process dissociation. Irrespective of the instructions given to the participants during the task, participants were more likely to (...) retrieve information on the basis of recollection after an error was made than before, whilst the likelihood of retrieving information on the basis of familiarity remained invariant over the same period. The implications of this result for methods of investigating subjective experience are discussed. (shrink)

When do descriptive regularities become prescriptive norms? We examined children's and adults' use of group regularities to make prescriptive judgments, employing novel groups that engaged in morally neutral behaviors. Participants were introduced to conforming or non-conforming individuals. Children negatively evaluated non-conformity, with negative evaluations declining with age. These effects were replicable across competitive and cooperative intergroup contexts and stemmed from reasoning about group regularities rather than reasoning about individual regularities. These data provide new insights into children's group concepts and have (...) important implications for understanding the development of stereotyping and norm enforcement. (shrink)

Relativism is one of the most tenacious theories about truth, with a pedigree as old as philosophy itself. Nearly as ancient is the chief criticism of relativism, namely the charge that the theory is self-refuting. This paper develops a logic of relativism that (1) illuminates the classic self-refutation charge and shows how to escape it; (2) makes rigorous the ideas of truth as relative and truth as absolute, and shows the relations between them; (3) develops an intensional logic for relativism; (...) (4) provides a framework in which relativists can consistently promote ethical, mathematical, scientific, religious, and political truths (among others) as being relative; (5) argues that the notion of incommensurability is far less troubling than is commonly thought; and (6) argues that the concept of a perspective as needed by the theory is not prey to Davidson's well-known critique of conceptual schemes. The paper will not defend relativism as the correct theory of truth, nor will it provide a fully satisfying theory about the nature of a perspective. The logic of relativism is primarily meant to provide a formal framework in which relativists can consistently develop their theories. This alone is a considerable step forward, since the debate about relativism often founders upon the rock of self-refutation. It is argued that while 'everything is relative' is inconsistent, 'everything true is relatively true' is not. The latter is all a relativist really needs. (shrink)

:The ideal of public justification holds, at a minimum, that the most fundamental political and legal institutions of a society must be publicly justified to each of its members. This essay proposes and defends a new account of this ideal. The account defended construes public justification as an ideal of rational justification, one that is grounded in the moral requirement to respect the rational agency of persons. The essay distinguishes two kinds of justifying reasons that bear on politics and shows (...) how they inform the ideal of public justification. It also decouples public justification from contractualist political morality. The result is a novel account of public justification that departs markedly from how the ideal is commonly characterized, but shows how it retains its distinctiveness as an ideal of politics. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.THE PURE THEORY OF PUBLIC JUSTIFICATIONVolume 32, Issue 2Steven Wall DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052516000170Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle email.@free.kindle.com@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. THE PURE THEORY OF PUBLIC JUSTIFICATIONVolume 32, Issue 2Steven Wall DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052516000170Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. THE PURE THEORY OF PUBLIC JUSTIFICATIONVolume 32, Issue 2Steven Wall DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052516000170Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

John Harsanyi has offered an argument grounded in Bayesian decision theory that purports to show that John Rawls's original position analysis leads directly to utilitarian conclusions. After explaining why a prominent Rawlsian line of response to Harsanyi's argument fails, I argue that a seemingly innocuous Bayesian rationality assumption, the continuity axiom, is at the heart of a fundamental disagreement between Harsanyi and Rawls. The most natural way for a Rawlsian to respond to Harsanyi's line of analysis, I argue, is to (...) reject continuity. I then argue that this Rawlsian response fails as a defence of the difference principle, and I raise some concerns about whether it makes sense to posit the discontinuities needed to support the other elements of Rawls's view, although I suggest that Rawls may be able to invoke discontinuity to vindicate part of his first principle of justice. (shrink)

We present an investigation of the ways in which speakers' subjective perspectives are likely to affect the meaning of gradable adjectives like tall or heavy. We present the results of a study showing that people tend to use themselves as a yardstick when ascribing these adjectives to human figures of varied measurements: subjects' height and weight requirements for applying tall and heavy are found to be positively correlated with their personal measurements. We draw more general lessons regarding the definition of (...) subjectivity and the ways in which a standard of comparison and a significant deviation from that standard are specified. (shrink)

This book seeks to arrive at a better understanding of the relationships between the objective and subjective aspects of time. It discusses the existence of fluent time, a controversial concept in many areas, from philosophy to physics. Fluent time is understood as directional time with a past, a present and a future. We experience fluent time in our lives and we adopt a temporal perspective in our ways of knowing and acting. Nevertheless, the existence of fluent time has been debated (...) for both philosophical and scientific reasons, thus creating a rift between the subjective and objective aspects of time. Starting from the basic notion of points of view, or perspectives, this book explores the relationships between objective or external time, as it has been conceptualized by science, and subjective or internal time, which is involved in our lived experiences. It establishes a general framework encompassing the nature, structure and mode of existence of points of view, in which the objective and subjective aspects of time can be integrated. The book mainly addresses researchers and postgraduates in philosophy and logic. Additionally, it offers inspiration for physicists and computer scientists involved in the modeling and simulation of complex behaviors for which the representation of internal time should be considered together with the notion of objective, external time. (shrink)

Kaci Hickox was a nurse who worked with persons who were infected with Ebola in West Africa. When she returned to the United States, the governors of New Jersey and Maine intervened to confine her to inpatient quarantine despite the fact that she was asymptomatic and had no serological evidence of infection. She defied the quarantine which resulted in enormous public attention and discussion of quarantine and public fear. This article summarizes the case discussing the history of the case, the (...) government actions, and the final legal rulings. (shrink)

The Brambell Report of 1965 recommended that animals should have the freedom to stand up, lie down, turn around, groom themselves and stretch their limbs. The Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC) developed these into the Five Freedoms, which are a framework for the analysis of animal welfare. The Five Freedoms are well known in farming, policy making and academic circles. They form the basis of much animal welfare legislation, codes of recommendations and farm animal welfare accreditation schemes, and are the (...) foundation of the Welfare Quality® assessment scheme. The Five Freedoms are also extensively employed for the education of veterinary and animal welfare science students. Hence they have proven to be of great practical utility. In this paper, the Five Freedoms framework is examined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for the analysis of animal welfare. Overall, the Five Freedoms are judged to be individually necessary and jointly sufficient as a framework for the analysis of animal welfare. FAWC has recently criticized the Five Freedoms for concentrating on negative aspects of welfare. However, it is shown here how the satisfaction of the Five Freedoms should lead to good welfare, from the animal’s point of view. The Five Freedoms are formulated as ideals of animal welfare. This has significant advantages that have likely contributed to their impact. However, the ideality of the Five Freedoms means that the framework is without power to determine what a satisfactory level of animal welfare is, in an ethical sense. (shrink)

I criticize Richard Swinburne's account of the need for and means of atonement in his "Responsibility and Atonement." I offer objections to his understanding and use of the notion of 'the gift of life' in his account of the need for atonement; and closely related to that, I show that his conclusions about duties to God as a benefactor do not follow from his reasons. Furthermore, when examined closely, these conclusions seem false. In relation to his account of the means (...) of atonement, I argue that the mechanism he provides to explain how Christ's actions benefit sinners does not work. (shrink)

How might we change ourselves without ending our existence? What could we become, if we had access to an advanced form of bioengineering that allowed us dramatically to alter our genome? Could we remain in existence after ceasing to be alive? What is it to be human? Might we still exist after changing ourselves into something that is not human? What is the significance of human extinction? Steven Luper addresses these questions and more in this thought-provoking study. He defends (...) an animalist account, which says that we are organisms, but claims that we are also material objects. His book goes to the heart of the most complex questions about what we are and what we might become. Using case studies from the life sciences as well as thought experiments, Luper develops a new way of thinking about the nature of life and death, and whether and how human extinction matters. (shrink)

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction: 'We': The Dangerous Thing -- 1 The Sellarsian Ethical Framework -- 2 Josiah Royce's Philosophy of Loyalty -- 3 Richard Rorty's Quasi-Sellarsian We -- 4 On the Prospects of Redescribing Rorty Roycely -- Bibliography -- Index.

In the broadest sense, Propositionalism is the view that knowing how to do something first requires our possessing appropriate propositional attitudes about an action. Non-propositionalism concerning knowing how, is the rejection of propositionalism. This distinction, and the rejection of propositionalism is typically traced back to Gilbert Ryle. In the 21st century, propositionalists have tried to turn the tables with a quick and decisive argument against non-propositionalism. According to the argument from pervasive inability, since (1) There are numerous cases in which (...) someone knows how to do something while possessing a pervasive inability to perform the action she knows how to do, and (2) these cases can be unproblematically explained to be instances of knowing how by propositionalism, but (3) these cases cannot be explained to be instances of knowing how by non-propositionalism, therefore (4) non-propositionalism must be rejected in favor of propositionalism. In this paper, through a careful examination of proposed cases, I argue that premise two is not true, and by correcting propositionalists’ mischaracterization of non-propositionalism, I argue that premise three is also not true. As a result, the argument from pervasive inability fails to provide a decision between propositionalism and non-propositionalism concerning knowing how. (shrink)

All humans laugh. However, there is little agreement about what is appropriate to laugh at. While laughter can unite people by showing how they share values and perspectives, it is also has the power to separate and divide. Humor that "crosses the line" can make people feel excluded and humiliated. This collection of new essays addresses possible ways that moral and ethical lines can be drawn around humor and laughter. What would a Kantian approach to humor look like? Do games (...) create a safe space for profanity and offense? Contributors to this volume work to establish and explain guidelines for thinking about the moral questions that arise when humor and laughter intersect with medicine, gender, race, and politics. Drawing from the work of stand-up comedians, television shows, and ethicists, this volume asserts that we are never just joking. (shrink)

Gustav Gustavovich Shpet (1879--1937) is undoubtedly best known for introducing Husserlian phenomenology to Russia. He applied to aesthetics and the philosophy of language the principles he had discovered in Husserl's Logical Investigations and Ideas I. But, perhaps without knowing it, he modified the phenomenology he had found in Husserl. His modifications show a thinker who is thoroughly grounded in Russian religious thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The result is a philosophy that combines Husserl's analysis of the (...) structure of consciousness with the fundamental Platonism of Orthodoxy, the doctrine of incarnation, and the related notion that matter is to be venerated. (shrink)

The Nothing That Is and the Nothing That Is Not is the final volume in a trilogy on interpretations of otherness in the postmodern era. The first two volumes are A Do-It-Yourself Dystopia: The Americanization of Big Brother and Leopards in the Temple: Selected Essays 1990-2000.

Increasing university students’ engagement with ethics is becoming a prominent call to action for higher education institutions, particularly professional schools like business and engineering. This paper provides an examination of student attitudes regarding ethics and their perceptions of ethics coverage in the curriculum at one institution. A particular focus is the comparison between results in the business college, which has incorporated ethics in the curriculum and has been involved in ethics education for a longer period, with the engineering college, which (...) is in the nascent stages of developing ethics education in its courses. Results show that student attitudes and perceptions are related to the curriculum. In addition, results indicate that it might be useful for engineering faculty to use business faculty as resources in the development of their ethics curricula. (shrink)

Bovine tuberculosis is an important and controversial animal health policy issue in England, which impacts humans, cattle and badgers. The government policy of badger culling has led to widespread opposition, in part due to the conclusions of a large field trial recommending against culling, and in part because badgers are a cherished wildlife species. Animal rights theorists argue that sentient nonhumans should be accorded fundamental rights against killing and suffering. In bovine TB policy, however, pro-culling actors claim that badgers must (...) be culled to avoid the slaughter of cattle. The first part of the paper compares AR theories of Regan, Francione, Cochrane, Garner and Donaldson and Kymlicka in the context of wildlife species. The second part of the paper applies these AR theories to bovine TB and badger control. AR theories are applied to badger control policy options of do nothing, badger culling, and badger vaccination. We conclude that AR theories are strongly opposed to badger culling. In general, culling is prohibited due to a badger’s right to life and its rights against suffering. The AR theories support a do-nothing, i.e. non-culling, non-vaccination approach to badger control. In the case of the AR theories of Regan and Francione, this is based on abolitionist positions with respect to farming. For Cochrane, Garner, and Donaldson and Kymlicka, the do-nothing policy option is preferred because badger vaccination causes a degree of suffering which generally is not for the individual’s benefit. (shrink)