Full virtue and practical wisdom comprise the end of neo-Aristotelian moral development, but wisdom cannot be cultivated straight away through arguments and teaching. Wisdom is integrated with, and builds upon, habituation: the acquisition of virtuous character traits through the repeated practice of corresponding virtuous actions. Habit formation equips people with a taste for, and commitment to, the good life; furthermore it provides one with discriminatory and reflective capacities to know how to act in particular circumstances. Unfortunately, habituation is often understood (...) primarily as a method suitable only for children. This article examines whether Aristotle limited habituation to children and, if not, what the relationship between habituation and wisdom beyond childhood might look like. This article concludes that wisdom-guided habituation is also possible for adults who continue and confirm their already established virtuous habits. The implications of this for professional moral education are subsequently discussed. (shrink)

This book provides a novel formulation and defence of moral error theory. It also provides a novel solution to the so-called now what question; viz., the question what we should do with our moral thought and talk after moral error theory. The novel formulation of moral error theory uses pragmatic presupposition rather than conceptual entailment to argue that moral judgments carry a non-negotiable commitment to categorical moral reasons. The new answer to the now what question is pragmatic presupposition substitutionism: we (...) should substitute our current moral judgments, which pragmatically presuppose the existence of categorical moral reasons with ‘schmoral’ judgments that pragmatically presuppose the existence of a specific class of prudential reasons. These are prudential reasons that, when we act on them, contribute to the satisfaction of what the author calls ‘the fundamental desire’; namely, the desire to live in a world with mutually beneficial cooperation. (shrink)

If climate change represents a severe threat to humankind, why then is response to it characterized by inaction at all levels? The authors argue there are two complementary explanations for the lack of motivation. First, our moral judgment system appears to be unable to identify climate change as an important moral problem and there are pervasive doubts about the agency of individuals. This explanation, however, is incomplete: Individual emitters can effectively be held morally responsible for their luxury emissions. Second, doubts (...) about individual agency have become overly emphasized and fail to convincingly exonerate individuals from responsibility. This book extends the second explanation for the motivational gap, namely that the arguments for the lack of individual agency do in fact correspond to mechanisms of moral disengagement. The use of these mechanisms enables consumption elites to maintain their consumptive lifestyles without having to accept moral responsibility for their luxury emissions. (shrink)

Edition de la question 6 du deuxième Quodlibet du carme anglais Robert de Walsingham. Le texte présente la première critique dans l’école des Carmes d’Oxford de la doctrine de Dieu comme premier connu de Richard de Conington.

To understand why humans put much effort into celebrating cultural myths, it is crucial to approach this phenomenon as part of humans' broader social cognitive evolution. Specifically, humans' unique capacity to bond with others through shared/collective representations of shared experiences has likely caused individuals to use myths to assess not only coalitions' fitness interdependence, but also their cooperative prowess.

In our increasingly interactive and interdependent world, we are confronted almost daily with issues in international law: think, for instance, of the recent Pinochet and Öcalan cases, the crises in Iraq, Kosovo and East Timor, or the banana and hormone disputes in the WTO. Add to this continual reports about the activities of international organizations, from the UN to the European Union, and it becomes clear that international law is the order of the day. Whoever follows these international developments, as (...) I do, and whoever is committed to the construction of a solid legal order for the international community, finds himself constantly torn between hope and despair. Signs of hope in recent years include the approval of a statute for the International Criminal Court in Rome on July 17, 1998; the Pinochet decisions of the House of Lords of November 1998 and March 1999; and the coming into force of the Ottawa agreement on anti-personnel mines in March of 1999. Yet who could witness the course of events during the NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, and the long period of UN inaction against the violence that broke out in East Timor following the referendum, without feeling some sense of desperation? The mood of the present day, however, should not prevent us from taking a long-term perspective. What kind of international legal order are we moving towards on the threshold of the twenty-first century? Building up a solid international legal order is probably one of the greatest challenges facing humanity at present. Our national legal systems are strongly developed and during the last fifty years, Western Europe has succeeded in constructing an EU legal order which has made possible a peaceful society, welfare and the integration of peoples in Europe. But where do we stand on the world level? Is international law not all too slowly limping behind globalization? And yet, the century we are looking back on has been the century in which international law and the law of international organizations flourished: in the framework of the League of Nations, and then the UN, we have succeeded in codifying, consolidating and developing international law in numerous multilateral treaties ranging from human rights and maritime law to international labour, trade and environmental norms. Never before had the world witnessed such an extensive network of international organizations . Never before did states make such intensive use of treaties for arranging their mutual concerns: more than 30,000 are registered at the UN. (shrink)

This paper reviews the debate on the notion of biological function and on functional explanation as this takes place in philosophy. It describes the different perspectives, issues, intuitions, theories and arguments that have emerged. The author shows that the debate has been too heavily influenced by the concerns of a naturalistic philosophy of mind and argues that in order to improve our understanding of biology the attention should be shifted from the study of intuitions to the study of the actual (...) practice of biological inquiry. (shrink)

There is a strong intuition that we can listen to works of music, yet musical ontologies on which works of music are abstract objects, perhaps most notably, type theories of music, seem to imply that this is impossible. This problem has received relatively little attention in the literature. I here explore and develop a solution suggested by Julian Dodd and argue that it has at least two problematic consequences, namely (i) that some works of music cannot be listened to unless (...) one has already studied the relevant score or through a similar process learned roughly what the work requires of its performances and (ii) that it is possible for two people to listen to different musical works while listening to the same performance. (shrink)

C. Sturtewagen. ' Welcome Address' -- M. Lehnert. ' Practical Wisdom as a Measure of Recognition' -- A.P. Rots. ' Reclaiming Public Space: Shinto and Politics in Japan Today' -- P. Schwieger. ' Religion and Politics in Pre-Modern Tibet' -- E. Francis. ' Une autre conception de la royauté: de deux dynasties hindoues du sud de l'Inde' -- C.K. Neumann. ' Ḳadīmden: A Notion of Truth Turning into Legal Claims in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire' -- B. Martel-Thoumian. ' Itinéraires (...) chiites: pouvoir politique et religion dans le Dār al-islām médiéval' -- B. Dessein. 'Conclusions'. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in unethical work behavior. Several types of survey instruments to collect information about unethical work behavior are available. Nevertheless, to date little attention has been paid to design issues of those surveys. There are, however, several important problems that may influence reliability and validity of questionnaire data on the topic, such as social desirability bias. This paper addresses two important issues in the design of online surveys on unethical work behavior: the (...) response scale for questions regarding the frequency of certain types of unethical work behavior and the location of the background questions in an online survey. We present the results of an analysis of a double split-ballot experiment in a large sample (n = 3,386) on governmental integrity. We found that, when comparing response scales that have labels for all categories with response scales that only have anchors at the end, the latter provided answers with higher validity. The study did not provide support for the conventional practice of asking background questions at the end. (shrink)

If coherence is to have justificatory status, as some analytical philosophers think it has, it must be truth-conducive, if perhaps only under certain specific conditions. This paper is a critical discussion of some recent arguments that seek to show that under no reasonable conditions can coherence be truth-conducive. More specifically, it considers Bovens and Hartmann’s and Olsson’s “impossibility results,” which attempt to show that coherence cannot possibly be a truth-conducive property. We point to various ways in which the advocates of (...) a coherence theory of justification may attempt to divert the threat of these results. (shrink)

In this paper I consider whether there is a measure of coherence that could be rightly claimed to generalize the notion of logical equivalence. I show that Fitelson’s (2003) proposal to that effect encounters some serious difficulties. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that no mutual-support measure could ever be suitable for the formalization of coherence as generalized logical equivalence. Instead, it appears that the only plausible candidate for such a measure is one of relative overlap. The measure I propose (...) in this paper is quite similar to Olsson’s (2002) proposal but differs from it by not being susceptible to the type of counterexample that Bovens and Hartmann (2003) have devised against it. (shrink)

Being more than mere passive objects used at human will, technologies co-determine the values and structures that shape the EU agricultural system. Technologies actively shape human interpretation, human action and co-shape our moral standards and routines. It is therefore important to account for the moral significance of agricultural technologies when characterising the structures in place within EU agriculture as well as when trying to understand why a particular agricultural technology is favoured or strongly opposed. From this perspective on technology, an (...) interesting question to pose, is how, within their current use context, genetically modified crops mediate human interpretation and human practice? This technology is of particular interest, because after more than 30 years, the debate on GM crops is still profound and highly polarised within EU society. Yet, too often, this debate is devalued as being irrational or irrelevant, while we show in this article, based on a technological mediation analysis, how ethical concerns about agricultural practices have co-evolved with the technological development of GM crops. This qualifies public debate on GM crops in the EU as both legitimate and relevant, as, from this perspective on technology, it can be seen as an important way to both characterise and discuss how EU agriculture is and should be organised. Analysing technology in terms of the myriad ways in which it mediates the relationship between humans and their world, further allows us to make some suggestions about how to broaden the ongoing EU discussion beyond the current dichotomous Yes/no framing. (shrink)

\noindent\textbf{Introduction} Online interventions hold great potential for Therapeutic Change Process Research (TCPR), a field that aims to relate in-therapeutic change processes to the outcomes of interventions. Online a client is treated essentially through the language their counsellor uses, therefore the verbal interaction contains many important ingredients that bring about change. TCPR faces two challenges: how to derive meaningful change processes from texts, and secondly, how to assess these complex, varied and multi-layered processes? We advocate the use text mining and multi-level (...) models (MLMs): the former offers tools and methods to discovers patterns in texts; the latter can analyse these change processes as outcomes that vary at multiple levels. \noindent\textbf{Method} We (re-)used the data from \cite{Lamers2015} because it includes outcomes and the complete online intervention for clients with mild depressive symptoms. We used text mining to obtain basic text-variables from e-mails, that we analysed through MLMs. \noindent\textbf{Results} We found that we could relate outcomes of interventions to variables containing text-information. We conclude that we can indeed bridge text mining and MLMs for TCPR as it was possible to relate text-information (obtained through text mining) to multi-levelled TCPR outcomes (using a MLM). \noindent\textbf{Discussion} Text mining can be helpful to obtain change processes, which is also the main challenge for TCPR. We showed how MLMs and text mining can be combined, but our proposition leaves open how to obtain the most relevant textual operationalization of TCPR concepts. That requires interdisciplinary collaboration and discussion. The future does look bright: based on our proof-of-concept study we conclude that MLMs and text mining can indeed advance TCPR. (shrink)

It is well known that Carnap, early in his philosophical career, took most of metaphysics to consist of meaningless pseudostatements. In contrast to this meaning-theoretic critique of metaphysics, we develop what we take to be Carnap’s later value-based critique. We argue that this later critique is forceful against several central contemporary metaphysical debates, its origin in the principle of tolerance notwithstanding.

Wouter Van Haaften; The Justification of Conceptual Development Claims, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 24, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 51–70, https.

Die verschiedenen Aufsatze, die in diesem Band aus Anlass des 60. Geburtstages von Jan A. Aertsen gesammelt sind, widmen sich der Spannung zwischen der Metaphysik und dem Guten. Lasst sich eine Metaphysik denken, die vom Begriff des Guten ausgeht? Diese Spannung durchlauft die Philosophie in Antike und Mittelalter wie ein roter Faden und hat nicht selten zu Weiterentwicklung oder Neuorientierung Anlass gegeben. Die verschiedenen Aufsatze behandeln den Anspruch von Ethik und Metaphysik, Erste Philosophie zu sein (Carlos Steel); die Idee einer (...) praktischen Metaphysik (Theo Kobusch); die Metaphysik des Guten bei Gilbert von Poitiers (Scott MacDonald); den Begriff des Guten bei Thomas von Aquin (Rudi te Velde); die Stellung des Guten und das Metaphysikverstandnis Bonaventuras (Andreas Speer); das Gute als Ersterkanntes bei Berthold von Moosburg (Wouter Goris). Zusammen lesen sie sich als eine Deutung von der Moglichkeit und der Qualitat der Synthese von Platonismus und Aristotelismus, wie sie in der mittelalterlichen Transzendentalienlehre erstrebt wird. (shrink)

This book provides a novel formulation and defence of moral error theory. It also provides a novel solution to the so-called now what question; viz., the question what we should do with our moral thought and talk after moral error theory. The novel formulation of moral error theory uses pragmatic presupposition rather than conceptual entailment to argue that moral judgments carry a non-negotiable commitment to categorical moral reasons. The new answer to the now what question is pragmatic presupposition substitutionism: we (...) should substitute our current moral judgments, which pragmatically presuppose the existence of categorical moral reasons with ‘schmoral’ judgments that pragmatically presuppose the existence of a specific class of prudential reasons. These are prudential reasons that, when we act on them, contribute to the satisfaction of what the author calls ‘the fundamental desire’; namely, the desire to live in a world with mutually beneficial cooperation. (shrink)

Fictional realists maintain that fictional characters are part of the world’s ontology. In an influential article, Anthony Everett argues that the fictional realist is thereby committing herself to problematic entities. Among these are entities that are indeterminately identical. Recently, Ross Cameron and Richard Woodward have answered Everett’s worry using the same strategy. They argue that the fictional realist can bypass the problematic identities by contending that they are merely semantically indeterminate. This paper concisely surveys Everett’s original argument, Cameron’s and Woodward’s (...) responses, and then argues that the strategy employed by Cameron and Woodward fails to satisfactorily answer Everett’s worries. (shrink)

"Absolute Beginners" is a multi-approach study of the founding role of the Absolute as the very beginning of knowledge in medieval philosophy (Henry of Ghent, Richard Conington), the subject being addressed from historical, methodological, ...

Like bundles of homogeneous light or particles that are scattered in physics experiments, says Goris, the homogeneous field of metaphysics was dispersed in the 14th century. He connects that dispersion to the contemporary rejection of metaphysics. His topics are the analysis of concepts, the contested primacy, scattering the homogeneous field of me.

Despite the Aristotelian renaissance in the philosophy of education, the development of virtue has not received much attention. This is unfortunate, because an attempt to draft an Aristotelian model of moral development can help philosophers to evaluate the contribution Aristotelian virtue ethics can make to our understanding of moral development, provide psychologists with a potentially richer account of morality and its development, and help educators to understand the developmental phase people are in. In the article, it is argued that the (...) Aristotelian categories of the ‘morally indifferent’, ‘un-self-controlled’, ‘self-controlled’ and ‘properly virtuous’ can be interpreted as the successive stages or levels of a comprehensive developmental model. For each stage, it will be made clear whether people are committed to virtue, whether they act virtuously or not, whether they act with pleasure or pain, and which desires and reasons they have for acting. The article closes with suggestions about what needs to be done if the proposed Aristotelian account of moral development is to become psychologically more realistic and educationally useful. (shrink)

Deductivism is not merely a logical technique, but also a theory of normativity: it provides an objective and universal standard of evaluation. Contemporary dialectical logic rejects deductive normativity, replacing its universal standard by an intersubjective standard. It is argued in this paper that dialectical normativity does not improve upon deductive normativity. A dialogico-rhetorical alternative is proposed.

According to the Buddhist concept of ‘dependent origination’ (pratītyasamutpāda), discrete factors come into existence because of a combination of causes (hetu) and conditions (pratyaya). Such discrete factors, further, are combinations of five aggregates (pañ caskandha) that, themselves, are subject to constant change. Discrete factors, therefore, lack a self-nature (ātman). The passing through time of discrete factors is characterized by the ‘characteristic marks of the conditioned’: birth (utpāda), change in continuance (sthityanyathātva), and passing away (vyaya); or, alternatively: birth (jāti), duration (sthiti), (...) decay (jarā), and impermanence (anityatā). In the interpretation of the precise nature of these characteristic marks of the conditioned, and their relation to the discrete factor they characterize, different opinions were prevalent within the Sarvāstivāda School of Buddhist philosophy, with, judging from later scholastic literature, the views of the Dārṣṭāntika/sautrāntika and the Vaibhāṣika sub-schools as most prominent ones. The Indian and Chinese Madhyamaka philosophers pointed to the fallacies in the Sarvāstivāda interpretations of the nature of the characteristic marks of the conditioned and their relation to the discrete factors they characterize, and, hence, to the fallacies in the Sarvāstivāda interpretations of the concepts ‘time’ and ‘temporality’. (shrink)

This article deals with a type of functional explanation, viability explanation, that has been overlooked in recent philosophy of science. Viability explanations relate traits of organisms and their environments in terms of what an individual needs to survive and reproduce. I show that viability explanations are neither causal nor historical and that, therefore, they should be accounted for as a distinct type of explanation.

Although climate change jeopardizes the fundamental human rights of current as well as future people, current actions and ambitions to tackle it are inadequate. There are two prominent explanations for this motivational gap in the climate ethics literature. The first maintains that our conventional moral judgement system is not well equipped to identify a complex problem such as climate change as an important moral problem. The second explanation refers to people’s reluctance to change their behaviour and the temptation to shirk (...) responsibility. We argue that both factors are at play in the motivational gap and that they are complemented by crucial moral psychological insights regarding moral disengagement, which enables emitters to dissociate self-condemnation from harmful conduct. In this way, emitters are able to maintain their profligate, consumptive lifestyle, even though this conflicts with their moral standards with respect to climate change. We provide some illustrations of how strategies of moral disengagement are deployed in climate change and discuss the relationship between the explanations for the motivational gap and moral disengagement. On the basis of this explanatory framework, we submit that there are three pathways to tackle the motivational gap and moral disengagement in climate change: making climate change more salient to emitters and affirming their self-efficacy; reconsidering the self-interested motives that necessitate moral disengagement; and tackling moral disengagement directly. (shrink)

Abating the threat climate change poses to the lives of future people clearly challenges our development models. The 2011 Human Devel- opment Report rightly focuses on the integral links between sustainability and equity. However, the human development and capabilities approach emphasizes the expansion of people’s capabilities simpliciter, which is ques- tionable in view of environmental sustainability. We argue that capabilities should be defined as triadic relations between an agent, constraints and poss- ible functionings. This triadic syntax particularly applies to climate (...) change: since people’s lives and capabilities are dependent on the environment, sus- tainable human development should also include constraining human activi- ties in order to prevent losses in future people’s well-being due to the adverse effects of exacerbated climate change. On this basis, we will advocate that the goals of sustainable human development should be informed by a fra- mework that consists of enhancing capabilities up to a threshold level, as well as constraining the functionings beyond this threshold in terms of their green- house gas emissions. (shrink)

Bovens and Hartmann propose to analyze coherence as a confidence-boosting property. On the basis of this idea, they construct a new probabilistic theory of coherence. In this paper, I will attempt to show that the resulting measure of coherence clashes with some of the intuitions that motivate it. Also, I will try to show that this clash is not due to the view on coherence as a confidence-boosting property or to the general features of the model that Bovens and Hartmann (...) use to analyze coherence. It will turn out that there is at least one other measure that is similarly based on the concept of a confidence-boosting property, but does not have the same counterintuitive results. (shrink)

In this commentary, I discuss three aspects of Monique Deveaux’s account. First, the method of Grounded Normative Theorizing she adopts to engage directly with the contexts and views of those experiencing poverty fits within a range of proposals to enhance the methodology of moral and political philosophy, and I would call on all philosophers working in this space to further develop these innovative methodologies. Second, Deveaux extends the capabilities approach by focusing on the group-based character of poverty and making the (...) case for building the collective capabilities of poor-led social movements. While I do not substantially disagree with this argument (in practice), I argue that we should be careful to avoid normative collectivism (as a theoretical assumption). Finally, Deveaux discusses political solidarity with people experiencing poverty. I argue that this should be based on esteeming each other’s various contributions in more diverse ways than only in narrow economic terms. Treating people in poverty and poor-led social movements as agents of justice, as Deveaux advocates, is a significant step in this endeavour. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How to Reason Beyond Reason? Toward a Philosophical Understanding of MadnessWouter Kusters, PhD (bio)To analyze the situation of madness on the ground, we need a grounded perspective, close to the situation at hand. The closer we come to the subject under scrutiny, the clearer its outlines, fine-grained details, and its dynamics, and the better we reach an explanation and understanding. The closer the approach, however, the higher the chances (...) are of becoming myopic and losing the connections with broader—or higher—perspectives: the view from above. It has been due to philosophical and historical approaches from above to the practices of philosophically inspired psychiatry that we may gain new insights into what is going on on the ground—and underground. This article by Garson provides such a view that may lead to a change in perspective, a new way to draw boundaries on the ground, to discover similarities and dissimilarities through space and time, without thereby losing the lived connection to the problematic ground.Garson proposes to replace a binary opposition of madness (in the sense of sick or insane) versus sanity (in the sense of healthy), with a triad of concepts, sanity, madness, and idiocy, taken from the work of philosophers of psychiatry avant la lettre in the early modern times, Locke, Kant, Wigan, and Heinroth. This triad is to be understood in terms of reason, where idiocy consists of the diminishment of some aspects of reason, while madness would be characterized by a perversion of reason. By examining how this perversion—or more neutrally said, this change—of reason was conceived by the four thinkers, Garson sheds a new light on research and theory within the philosophy of madness and the philosophy of psychiatry today. He examines the question of “how is it that the mad person “has” reason, but is still not reasonable?” with the help of the four authors mentioned above (of which I discuss three).In answering this question, Garson refers specifically to my work as an example of “exactly the kind of ontology we need for rethinking madness in a positive manner—not necessarily ‘positive’ in the sense of good, helpful, or ennobling, but in the sense of going beyond a mere lack, absence, or failure.” I wholeheartedly agree with this assessment, [End Page 317] and Garson’s proposal of this tripartite schema is helpful and valuable for thinking through how we can further nourish a positive view of madness, especially with reference to Mad Pride.Locke and HeinrothGarson discusses some fragments from Locke and concludes that according to Locke “the mad person, in contrast to the idiot, possesses reason by virtue of possessing an intact inferential capacity. What ultimately makes them mad, and not reasonable, is that their premises are flawed by the unhinged power of association.” So, with Locke the capacity for inferential logic is not disturbed, and in that sense reason is intact. The unreasonable behavior would be due, according to Locke, to an unbridled increase in imagination and associations, which are taken for reality. Instead of reason the capacity to align imagination and reality is afflicted. When we translate this Lockean view into contemporary terms, we could say that it is not their cognition, their way of processing stimuli that is problematic, but their being overwhelmed by impressions or stimuli. This is akin to “bottom-up” theories: Something is wrong with perception or experience, and ‘higher’ capacities of cognition and reasoning remain intact. Reason may seem ‘perverted,’ but at a closer look, this is a result of their being victim to anomalous experience, too many stimuli or too strong imaginations.Heinroth also explicitly distinguishes madness from idiocy, that is, from a diminishment of mental capacities. Instead, he considers madness as a reaction to what Garson calls “a reality that is too awful to bear.” Madness is then “a wholesome desire of nature to cure a perversion through another perversion.” Again, madness is then not in itself a diminishment of reason, but an attempt to cure something that went wrong, in a way that is also only seemingly wrong (perverted reason). Madness then is again within reason, but this core of intact reason is... (shrink)

This article is about changes in dominant modes of social conduct, particularly involving relationships between the sexes. Changes in behavioural codes and ideals were noted in the course of a comparative analysis of etiquette books published in the Netherlands from 1930 to 1985. There was a gap of approximately thirteen years during which, with one exception, no books on this subject were published. There was, however, an upsurge of books on liberation and self-realization, coupled with a relative loosening of behavioural (...) codes and ideals. Since the start of the 1980s, there appears to have been a tightening of these codes and ideals, both as regards relationships between men and women and in general. These changes are presented as developments in the sense of informalization and formalization, aspects of civilizing processes. The article commences with a short elaboration upon the concepts of informalization and formalization, goes on to present the results of the comparative analysis of the etiquette books, and concludes that nowadays a formalization of preceding informalization is taking place, a stage in the long-term process of informalization. (shrink)