Perceptual experience supports the assignment of confidences in belief – doxastic confidences. To explain this fact, many philosophers appeal to Perceptual Indeterminacy, which holds that perceptual content can be more or less determinate. Others instead appeal to Perceptual Confidence, which says that perceptual experience supports doxastic confidences because it assigns confidences too. Morrison argues that a primary reason to favour Perceptual Confidence is that it is uniquely capable of accounting for bell-shaped doxastic confidence distributions; we call this the bell curve (...) objection to Perceptual Indeterminacy. Here we show that two recent defences of Perceptual Indeterminacy, due to Nanay and Raleigh and Vindrola, fail to adequately address the bell curve objection. But we also argue that all is not lost for proponents of Perceptual Indeterminacy. They can counter the bell curve objection by embracing a third view, which we call Perceptual Noise. (shrink)

My subject on this occasion goes uneasily with my piety. Lordship did not as such much interest my teachers William E. Lunt and Joseph R. Strayer, who were leaders in their turn of the Medieval Academy of America. In their presidential addresses of 1954 and 1968 both scholars dealt magisterially with subjects each had studied for forty years. Lunt spoke on financial relations of the papacy with England, Strayer on the place of Normandy and Languedoc in the building (...) of an administrative monarchy in France. It is easy to see that in a considerable sense both historians were working on medieval government, and it is some measure of their achievement that even today no one wishing to be informed in this grand subject can do much better than read Lunt and Strayer. I wish I could discourse on my own years of research as did those admirable scholars. If I cannot, it is not simply because I lack the accumulated erudition to reflect summarily on my work; it is also because I lack the conceptual serenity of my teachers in our common subject matter. Like Lunt and Strayer I have worked on justice, finance, and the beginnings of parliamentary life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; unlike those mentors I became uneasy about the paradigm in which these studies were framed. I came to wonder how Strayer could have held students, myself included, spellbound with details about the deportment of judges or sergeants while saying nothing about the adequacy of concepts like “government” or “administration” to describe such behavior. Believing there was something timeless about the action of people in power, he was gifted at evoking the ways of modern bureaucrats in those “corridors of power” he knew from his own experience in Washington. He assumed with other historians of his day and ours that all societies have governments, so that he could speak of feudalism as essentially a “method of government,” of “political organization … reduced to the simplest possible terms.”. (shrink)

Discusses the Christian Platonism of W.R. Inge, Paul Elmer More, A.E. Taylor, and William Temple, as well as the Platonic themes in Whitehead's and Santayana's religious thought.

William Pennel Rock argues with Center fellows about the roles of love and reason in the dialogue.

This volume explores how conceptions of pragmatism set forth in American philosophy serve as orienting perspectives in psychotherapy. Drawing on the influential contributions of William James and John Dewey, the author demonstrates how realistic, comparative approaches to understanding strengthen everyday therapeutic practice. He also examines recent developments in neuroscience that shape training and practice in the broader field of psychotherapy, encompassing psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive and humanistic traditions. By following a clinical pragmatism, psychotherapy can be viewed as an instrumental project (...) that is governed by _results_ rather than a commitment to particular theoretical perspectives, empirical findings, or technical strategies. Through a variety of case studies, this volume emphasizes the crucial role of experiential learning in change and growth, and the recognition of the person as an individual. (shrink)

Milbank’s correlation of modern rationality with a myth of chaos and an ontology of violence can preclude a naive theological reception of the social sciences, but while Milbank suggests a critique that would trace modernity’s truncation of reason and its nihilistic outcome to the post-Thomist reification of the supernatural and to Scotus’ conceptualism, his option for Augustine’s supernaturalism appears regressive. Irony attends both the violence of Milbank’s performance on behalf of an ontology of peace and his non-analogical, typically Protestant construal (...) of the faith/reason relationship. Nonetheless, he also suggests resources for a positive move beyond the discourse of paradox and contradiction. (shrink)

There is an exciting semantic program, defended primarily in the recent works of Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman, which makes use of both classical truth-conditional semantic method and contemporary transformational syntax, and which is believed to provide illuminating semantical accounts of particular natural languages to which it is applied. I shall call this program, composed of Davidson’s and Harman’s common methodology together with the semantical and metatheoretical claims which it encapsulates, “the D-H Metatheory.”.

Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

In this book, William H. F. Altman turns to Demosthenes-universally regarded as Plato's student in antiquity-and Plato's other Athenian students in order to add external and historical evidence for Plato's original curriculum.

Isdale, William; Savulescu, Julian The High Court of Australia, for the second time, recently found that the National School Chaplaincy and Student Welfare Program is funded unconstitutionally, and so is invalid in its current form. The program, though, can be reconstituted through tied grants to state governments. The question is, should it be? While the NSCSWP serves some legitimate policy objectives, the program in its pre-existing form is objectionable for at least two reasons. It should either be revived as (...) a secular student welfare program or left extinguished. (shrink)

_Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint,_ by William V. Spanos, explores the affiliative relationship between Arendt’s and Said’s thought, not simply their mutual emphasis on the importance of the exilic consciousness in an age characterized by the decline of the nation-state and the rise of globalization, but also on the oppositional politics that a displaced consciousness enables. The pairing of these two extraordinary intellectuals is unusual and controversial because of their ethnic identities. In (...) radically secularizing their comportment towards being, their exilic condition enabled them to undertake inaugural critiques of the culture of the nation-state system of Western modernity. As variations on the theme of exile, the five chapters of this book constitute reflections on what is foundational and abiding in both Arendt’s and Said’s work. They not only document the heretofore unnoticed affiliation between the two thinkers. They also shed light on Arendt’s and Said’s proleptic activist explorations of the urgent “question of Palestine,” especially on the fraught present situation, which bears increasing witness to the irony that the Israeli nation-state’s “solution” has, from the beginning, systematically repeated the degradations the Jewish people suffered at the hands of German nationalism. (shrink)

The French philosopher Michel Foucault's work has had a significant impact on feminist and lesbian/gay scholarship in the United States. These explorations of gender and/or sexuality in which feminist, lesbian, and gay scholars rely on Foucault's ideas carry significant implications for the organization of knowledge in our culture beyond the issues of gender and sexuality narrowly defined. Many feminist, lesbian, and gay scholars in the United States initially read Foucault primarily as a historian. Since roughly 1985, many such scholars have (...) increasingly considered and critiqued the philosophical implications of his work, elaborating an account of the assumptions about gender and sexuality that reside at the core of ostensibly universal descriptions of human subjectivity. ;Participants in debates about the "social construction" of sexuality during the 1980s observed that Foucault did not originate social constructionist work in the field, widespread assumptions to the contrary notwithstanding. Indeed, the social constructionist position differs importantly from Foucault's analysis of sexuality as the truth of subjectivity. Historians in the United States have modified many of the substantive claims in Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. More recently, scholars have attended less to Foucault's substantive claims in favor of his approach to questions of knowledge and subjectivity. ;Feminist, lesbian, and gay scholars have long suspected that gender and sexuality play a major role in authorizing subjects to produce knowledge. Many such scholars continue within existing modes of inquiry to substitute their own, sympathetic versions of their selves for prejudicial, hegemonic versions. Scholars working off of Foucault and other poststructuralist thinkers increasingly suspect that prejudicial assumptions about gender and sexuality lie embedded in the very definition of current modes of inquiry, and thus require a fundamental reconceptualization of knowledge. (shrink)

Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society.

Although one of the most important and prolific thinkers of all time, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) spent his life as a courtier, wasting time in diplomatic business or preparing documents to shore up claims of lineage or territory for his patrons. He also spent a good deal of time on practical matters of engineering, such as his dreams of a system of windmills that would have ameliorated the chronic flooding of the Harz silver mines, and on his visionary mechanical calculators. (...) Most of his working life was spent in Hannover, pursuing philosophy when he could spare the time from his professional activities, but nonetheless maintaining an astonishing pace of philosophical, mathematical, and scientific writing (of which very little was published in his own lifetime), as well as a relentless correspondence with all the important intellectual figures of his day. When Leibniz died in 1716, his funeral was scandalously insignificant, but time's revenge has been sweet. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 35, Issue 7, Page 680-687, September 2021.

Philosophy has not an easy time after the Second Vatican Council. As a response to this situation, the late Pope John Paul Ⅱ wrote the encyclical "Fides et ratio" and appealed to the Catholics the need for a sound philosophy. One of the philosophers he recommended in his encyclical is the French philosopher Jacques Maritain. Maritain was a prominent figure in philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century. He died in 1973. After a period of relative silence after his (...) death, his works rekindled the interest of scholars' especially Catholic philosophers. The establishment of numerous associations, academic conferences, the publication of books, papers and review dedicated to the study of his works are the witnesses to this revival of interest. There are several reasons for this return. The depth and the range of Maritain's thought, his reflection on the human person, the state and the common good, his defense for the freedom and dignity of human being, his commitment to the Catholic faith, his claim on the balance of sense perception, rational cognition, wisdom, faith and mystical thinking in human knowledge are sources of inspiration for thinkers in a world of relativism, skepticism and distrust of reason. But the most important one is that he is able to reflect on the traditional thinking of Christianity and out of his own critical thinking addresses problems of today's world. Many Catholic thinkers are helped by Maritain to have a deeper insight of their own thought from his confidence in the truth and his bold realism. (shrink)