I argue that a necessary condition for being wise is: understanding how to live well. The condition, by requiring understanding rather than a wide variety of justified beliefs or knowledge, as Ryan and Whitcomb respectively require, yields the desirable result that being wise is compatible with having some false beliefs but not just any false beliefs about how to live well—regardless of whether those beliefs are justified or not. In arguing for understanding how to live well as a necessary condition (...) for wisdom, I reject the view, proposed by both Ryan and Whitcomb, that subjects such as chemistry lies within the domain of wisdom. I show that the argued for condition yields the desirable result that being wise is not a common achievement, but that it is not something that can only plausibly be achieved in the modern era. (shrink)

A central problem of political philosophy is that of explaining how a state could have the moral authority to enforce laws, promulgate laws which citizens are thereby obliged to obey, give new duties to citizens and levy taxes. Many rival solutions to this problem of political authority have been offered by contemporary and recent philosophers but none has obtained wide acceptance. The current debate takes no cognisance of George Berkeley’s ‘Passive Obedience’, in which he defends the exceptionless duty of not (...) using force to resist the state and offers a rule-consequentialist account of morality which indicates an explanation of political authority as grounded in the social connectedness of human beings. I expound, criticise and develop Berkeley’s explanation to provide a promising solution to the problem of political authority. The solution impugns the political authority of all existing states as well as the duty of passive obedience. (shrink)

Reflections on the linkage between and the provocative force of problems in the analogy of city and soul, in the simile-bound characterization of the Good, and in the performative tension between what Plato has Socrates say about the philosopher's disinclination to descend into the city and what he has Socrates do in descending into the Piraeus to teach, with a closing recognition of the analogy between Socratic teaching and Platonic writing.

Despite the enormous growth in happiness research in recent decades, there remains a lack of consistency in the use of the terms happiness, satisfaction, contentment and well-being. In this article I argue for a sociologically grounded distinction between happiness and contentment that defines the former as positive affect and the latter as positive reflection. Contentment is therefore understood as a fulfilling relationship with the self and society and happiness involves pleasurable experiences. There is a history of similar distinctions in philosophy (...) and psychoanalysis, but much of the contemporary discourse fails to distinguish between individual and collective definitions of happiness. This article will argue that happiness and contentment ought not to be treated as competing approaches to the good life, but as complimentary forms of emotional experience. Further, I argue that the current interest in happiness can be linked to larger culture shifts involving neoliberalism and individualism. (shrink)

Both in historical debates and in recent discussions, the Guise of the Good Thesis represents a genuine dogma of rationalism in moral philosophy. Many influential commentators have maintained that Kant belongs in that camp, even that he “explicitly endorses” the Thesis. Attributing the Thesis to Kant, however, faces scarce textual support and amounts to a dubious understanding of the relationship of Kant’s moral philosophy to previous rationalist views. I suggest that, in Kant’s view, the Thesis only applies to the (...) determination of the will through the moral law. The principle that prior rationalists regarded as descriptive acquires in Kant’s terms a normative status. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life by Kristen R. GhodseeMark A. AllisonKristen R. Ghodsee. Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023. 352 pp., hardcover, $29.99. ISBN 9781982190217.Kristen R. Ghodsee has written a wide-ranging, highly readable, and commendably radical vindication of utopian thought and (...) experimentation. Everyday Utopia is aimed at the educated lay reader—itself, perhaps, a utopian projection—rather than specialists. Nevertheless, all but the most erudite and cosmopolitan of scholars will encounter unfamiliar and compelling utopiana within its pages. While her earlier book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (2018), concentrated on "state-sponsored solutions" to the deprivations of capitalism and patriarchy, the present volume sets its sights squarely on the private sphere, and utopian visions "for rearranging our domestic lives" (17).Ghodsee situates this turn to the domestic in two contexts. The first is the COVID-19 pandemic, which revealed the frangibility of the international commitment to gender equality. "Women around the globe woke up and realized that decades of feminism had done little to reverse the social expectation that mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters should provide care for young children, elderly parents, and sick relatives, as well as perform the emotional labors that hold families together in times of crisis," she laments (xii). Everyday Utopia's second context is the spate of recent works of "popular neo-utopianism," including Rutger Bregman's Utopia for Realists (2017), Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019), and Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler's Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think (2012) (14). What Ghodsee finds wanting in this discourse is its myopic focus on the public sphere, and its unspoken presupposition that our private and domestic lives have no such need of utopian renovation. But it is just this presupposition [End Page 285] that the COVID-19 lockdown discredited, although many other indicators (runaway housing and childcare costs, the environmental crisis, the epidemic of loneliness) already suggested as much. Ghodsee rightly insists that "where we reside, how we raise and educate our children, our personal relationship to things, and the quality of our connections to friends, families, and partners impact us as much as tax policies, the price of energy, or the way we organize formal employment" (14). As utopian thinkers from Plato forward have understood, moreover, it is short-sighted to suppose that sweeping economic and political transformations are possible without a concomitant rethinking of the "intimate worlds" that subtend these public domains (15).Accordingly, Everyday Utopia devotes its succeeding chapters to examining alternatives to the dominant institutions of the contemporary private sphere, including the single-family household, the monogamous couple paradigm of childrearing and mating, and the institution of private property. In each case, Ghodsee plumbs the past and limns the present to highlight utopian alternatives to contemporary norms. Among this book's greatest strengths is its consistently international range of examples and admirably sustained commitment to feature "experiments that have received relatively less attention" in the extant literature (xv).Take, for example, the chapter on communal alternatives to single-family homes. Ghodsee includes many of the usual (and eminently worthy) suspects: Buddhist and Christian cenobite monasteries, Fourierist phalansteries, Israeli kibbutzim, and the Corbusier-inspired "microdistricts" of the former Eastern bloc (47). But we also learn of less canonical phenomena, such as the Neolithic proto-city of Çatalhöyük, "one of the first major settlements in the world," where as many as eight thousand people lived in an essentially contiguous structure, in highly egalitarian and likely non-consanguineous households (32). Or consider the Beguine nuns, a lay order founded in 1190 that survived, albeit in attenuated form, into the twentieth century. The Beguine lived communally in urban areas, enjoying liberties unthinkable not only to their cloistered counterparts, but to virtually all their female contemporaries: they brewed beer, made lace, taught school—and traversed the streets unchaperoned. The chapter concludes with a discussion of contemporary cohousing. In Denmark, roughly one percent of the population was living in co... (shrink)

Volume 52, Issue 10, September 2020, Page 1023-1027.

Platonists beginning in the Old Academy itself and up to and including Plotinus struggled to understand and articulate the relation between Plato’s Demiurge and the Living Animal which served as the model for creation. The central question is whether “contents” of the Living Animal, the Forms, are internal to the mind of the Demiurge or external and independent. For Plotinus, the solution depends heavily on how the Intellect that is the Demiurge and the Forms or intelligibles are to be understood (...) in relation to the first principle of all, the One or the Good. The treatise V.5 [32] sets out the case for the internality of Forms and argues for the necessary existence of an absolutely simple and transcendent first principle of all, the One or the Good. Not only Intellect and the Forms, but everything else depends on this principle for their being. (shrink)

This paper discusses the neo-logicist approach to the foundations of mathematics by highlighting an issue that arises from looking at the Bad Company objection from an epistemological perspective. For the most part, our issue is independent of the details of any resolution of the Bad Company objection and, as we will show, it concerns other foundational approaches in the philosophy of mathematics. In the first two sections, we give a brief overview of the "Scottish" neo-logicist school, present a generic form (...) of the Bad Company objection and introduce an epistemic issue connected to this general problem that will be the focus of the rest of the paper. In the third section, we present an alternative approach within philosophy of mathematics, a view that emerges from Hilbert's Grundlagen der Geometrie (1899, Leipzig: Teubner; Foundations of geometry (trans.: Townsend, E.). La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1959.). We will argue that Bad Company-style worries, and our concomitant epistemic issue, also affects this conception and other foundationalist approaches. In the following sections, we then offer various ways to address our epistemic concern, arguing, in the end, that none resolves the issue. The final section offers our own resolution which, however, runs against the foundationalist spirit of the Scottish neo-logicist program. (shrink)

When Nishida Kitarô wrote Studies of the Good, he was a high school teacher in Kanazawa far from Tokyo, the center of Japanese scholarship. While he was praised for his intellectual effort, there was no substantive agreement about the content of his ideas. Critics disagreed with the way he conceived of reality and of truth as contained in reality. Taken together, I believe that the responses to Nishida's early work give us a window on the state of Japanese philosophy (...) in the early twentieth century. In what follows, I give evidence for the existence of such a debate about the nature of truth and reality. After a sketch of Nishida's position, I outline the positions of two other contemporary thinkers: Katô Hiroyuki and Takahashi Satomi. With respect to Nishida, they offer markedly different takes on the question of universal truth: Katô favors an antireligious, scientific positivism while Takahashi accepts an existentialist notion of radical human finitude, in which human access to any certainty is denied. I conclude that one is confronted with a lively debate by Japanese philosophers inside Japan about the definition of truth and consequently about the nature of reality. (shrink)

This companion to Elliot Dorff's three books on Jewish ethics -- Matters of Life and Death , To Do the Right and the Good , and Love Your Neighbor and Yourself -- is designed for group as well as individual study. Through suggested readings from Dorff's books, probing questions, lively discussion topics, and simple writing exercises, readers will be able to analyze and clarify their own positions on a host of controversial issues: sex, surrogate motherhood, adoption, family abuse, responsibilities (...) for charitable giving, the ethics of war, suicide, and euthanasia, and more. (shrink)

Desert-realists maintain that those who do wrong without an excuse deserve blame. Desert-skeptics deny this, holding that though we may be responsible for our actions in some sense, we lack the kind of responsibility needed to deserve blame. In two recent papers, Randolph Clarke (Philosophical Explorations 16:153–164, 2013 and Journal of Ethics 20:121–137, 2016) advances an innovative defense of desert-realism. He argues for deserved-guilt, the thesis that the guilty deserve to feel guilt. In his 2013 paper, Clarke suggests two strategies (...) for defending deserved-guilt: the fitting-guilt strategy and the good-guilt strategy. In his 2016 paper, Clarke issues a challenge to the desert-skeptic: he calls on them to provide a non-desert based account of guilt’s fittingness. In the first two thirds of the paper, I respond to Clarke’s challenge to the desert-skeptic, showing that guilt felt by the guilty is alethic-fitting, reason-fitting, and value-fitting. None of these notions of fittingness, I argue, are desert based. In the last third of the paper, I show how the work done in previous sections affords us the tools to finely diagnose the failures of both the fitting-guilt and the good-guilt strategies. Here, I draw on one of Clarke’s own insights—namely, that desert is intimately connected to the value of justice. I propose that showing that guilt is fitting, or again non-instrumentally good, fails to show that it is deserved because to show that it is deserved one must show that guilt is fitting or good in a sense that implicates justice. (shrink)

For over thirty years, Robert Audi has produced important work in ethics, epistemology, and the theory of action. This volume features thirteen new critical essays on Audi by a distinguished group of authors: Fred Adams, William Alston, Laurence BonJour, Roger Crisp, Elizabeth Fricker, Bernard Gert, Thomas Hurka, Hugh McCann, Al Mele, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Raimo Tuomela, Candace Vogler, and Timothy Williamson. Audi's introductory essay provides a thematic overview interconnecting his views in ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of action. The volume concludes with (...) his comprehensive response essay that yields an illuminating dialog with all his critics and often extends his previous work. (shrink)

The discovery-justification distinction stands as a pivotal issue within 20th-century philosophy of science. It subtly underpins many foundational topics and concepts pertinent to our comprehension of knowledge. Thomas Kuhn's contributions are indispensable in this regard, with his critiques playing a pivotal role in shaping both his initial model of scientific progress and its subsequent revisions. Kuhn addressed this dichotomy head-on in the first of his Thalheimer Lectures, presented in 1984. In this paper, we revisit Pablo Melogno's (2019) examination of Kuhn's (...) engagement with this theme. Concurring with Melogno, our analysis extends his interpretation by exploring Larry Laudan's objections to certain research programs focused on a logic of discovery. We further scrutinize specific assumptions about discovery heuristics that have been misinterpreted within Laudan's methodological framework, particularly the one stemming from Herbert Simon's pioneering work. By synthesizing these perspectives, we aim to set up a preliminary framework for a more refined understanding of how history and philosophy of science inform the epistemic practices of agents operating with bounded rationality. (shrink)

I argue for an evaluative theory of desire—specifically, that to desire something is for it to appear, in some way or other, good. If a desire is a non-doxastic appearance of value then it is no mystery how it can rationalize as well as cause action. The theory is metaphysically neutral—it is compatible with value idealism (that value reduces to desire), with value realism (that it is not so reducible), and with value nihilism (all appearances of value are illusory). (...) Despite this metaphysical neutrality the thesis opens up an epistemological gold mine. Non-doxastic value appearances can provide defeasible reasons for value judgements, in roughly the same way that perceptual appearances provide defeasible reasons for perceptual judgements. The paper presents a new line of argument for the evaluative theory—drawing on recent work on fitting attitudes—and rebuts some of the most pressing criticisms. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The paper shows textual and non-textual evidence that Henry Sidgwick endorses a version of the guise of the good doctrine and a version of the guise of the reasons view. He also rejects the guise of the pleasant doctrine, criticizing Mill’s views of the relations between pleasure, desire and desirability. Sidgwick also anticipates the guise of the apparent good view, i.e. the claim that desire connects with evaluative appearances, not with evaluative full-fledged judgments.

Recent years have witnessed a revival of scientific, political and philosophical discourse concerning the notion of ecological limits. This article provides a conceptual overview of descriptive ecological limit claims—i.e. claims that there are real, biophysical limits—and reviews work in political and social philosophy in which such claims form the basis of proposals for normative limits. The latter are classified in terms of three broad types of normative theorising: distributive justice, institutional/legal reform, and the good life. Within these three categories, (...) the article reviews normative proposals for limits on both aggregate‐level and individual‐level ecological exploitation. It also considers the relevance of political and ideological facts to the normative analysis of ecological limits, raising methodological questions about how normative theorists should respond to a world facing escalating ecological challenges. (shrink)

This article explores traditional views of advance care planning in the broader context of advance personal planning, which also accounts for legal and financial matters. Criticisms of existing processes are noted, while the significance of interprofessional collaboration is highlighted. Reframing the purpose of advance personal planning as planning for the rest of life, rather than the end-of-life, and adopting a more holistic perspective informed by theory may help individuals to view advance personal planning as a routine, preventative exercise that safeguards (...) their autonomy and well-being. Both lawyers and healthcare providers have an important role to play in reframing the purpose of advance personal planning. This revised approach is underpinned by the unification of two separate theoretical lenses: Preventive Law Theory and Therapeutic Jurisprudence. This combination enhances our understanding of what it means for people to truly achieve “the good result” (Holtz 2017) when planning ahead for their future legal, financial, health, and personal interests. Preventive Law Theory encourages an ongoing, collaborative relationship between lawyers and their clients, or healthcare providers and their patients, while Therapeutic Jurisprudence ensures an ethical approach to advance personal planning that accounts for all aspects of the individual’s well-being, including consideration of vulnerability, autonomy, and empowerment. (shrink)

Broadly speaking, transhumanism is a movement seeking to advance the cause of post-humanity. It advocates using science and technology for a reconstruction of the human condition sufficiently radical to call into question the appropriateness of calling it “human” anymore. While there is not universal agreement among transhumanists as to the best path to this goal, the general outline is clear enough. Advances in genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, robotics and nanotechnology will make possible the achievement of the Baconian vision of “the (...) relief of man’s estate,” as they allow us to conquer disease, eliminate unhappiness, end scarcity and postpone, perhaps indefinitely, death itself. But fulfilling such long-standing dreams is only the beginning of what our new powers will make possible. Left to itself, the present trajectory of technological development necessarily aims at a future incomprehensible to beings such as we are – at no distant date an evolutionary leap in the way intelligence is embodied, and what it can accomplish. Transhumanism seeks to make sure no atavistic scruple obstructs this momentum, and to maximize its benefits and minimize its admitted risks. While there is no lack of illuminating print works advocating transhumanism, that its public face should be on the World Wide Web is as much a matter of course as once would have been the use by similar movements of the printed broadside or the public lecture. On the websites of the World Transhumanist Association (www. transhumanism.org) and the Extropy Institute (www.extropy. org) – premier among transhumanism’s many organizations – one finds authoritative statements explaining and justifying the transhumanist project. If transhumanism were primarily an academic school or a professional association, it would not be entirely fair to turn to these admittedly popular presentations for a critical look at the transhumanist vision. But as these are the documents by which transhumanism presents itself to the public as a movement, and through which it hopes to gain adherents, it is legitimate to make.... (shrink)

This article explores and challenges several common assumptions regarding what neutrality requires of us in assessing outcomes. In particular, I consider whether we should be neutral between different possible locations of the good: space, time, and people. I suggest that from a normative perspective we should treat space differently than time, and people differently than space and time. I also argue that in some cases we should give priority to people over space and time, and to time over space, (...) but that, controversially, in some cases we should give priority to time over people. (shrink)

Contemporary political philosophers are often uncomfortable with the notion that a conception of the good life can be developed out of liberalism. Liberalism, they say, should remain neutral out of respect for pluralism. Early liberals of the nineteenth century, however, understood their project as a vindication of the good life, along with a diagnosis of what threatens it. This article attempts to build a conception of the good life from liberal values and sensibilities, yet not run afoul (...) of the need to respect pluralism. It draws on early and contemporary liberals, as well as popular culture, to sketch a way of life that is fulfilling and available for us today. (shrink)

Dog ownership is believed to benefit owner wellbeing but, contrary to popular belief, there is limited evidence to suggest that simply owning a dog is associated with improved mental health. This mixed-methods study investigates whether dog owners with stronger relationships with their dogs experience better mental health. Participants completed an online survey. Owners’ health was measured using the validated PROMIS questions regarding depression, anxiety, emotional support, and companionship. The dog–owner relationship was measured using the validated MDORS scale, which has three (...) subscales: interaction, emotional closeness, and perceived costs. Univariable and multivariable linear regression analyses were conducted, adjusting for confounding factors. Additionally, positive and negative impacts of dog ownership on mental wellbeing were coded from open questions using thematic analysis. A stronger dog–owner relationship was associated with greater feelings of emotional support and companionship but poorer mental health in terms of anxiety or depression. However, the perceived costs subscale was consistently associated with better mental health outcomes. Direction of causality cannot be inferred as people with poor mental health may acquire dogs to help relieve symptoms, which qualitative analysis supported. Key themes included positive impacts on owner wellbeing and happiness through providing purpose, companionship and self-acceptance, pleasure and distraction, as well as lessening emotional pain and suffering and reducing risk behaviors. However, negative impacts of a strong relationship include anticipatory grief over loss of the dog, and concerns regarding the burden of responsibility and ability to meet dog’s needs. Perceived ability to adequately meet dog’s needs promoted personal growth and positive relationships with others, whereas perceived inability led to feelings of guilt, or anger/frustration, and reduced autonomy and sense of environmental mastery. Dog ownership contributes to both hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing in multiple ways, including supporting owners through periods of poor mental health and providing purpose. However, the burden of responsibility and owner and dog characteristics can create challenges, and owners may benefit from support in caring for their dogs and reducing problematic behaviors. (shrink)

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This paper explores Bakhtin’s reception of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre with a view to assess how Bakhtin’s interest in this early chronotopical masterpiece can be understood in the wider context of his utopian thinking and his political eschatologies. Bakhtin reads Goethe’s novel as a critique of totalitarian forms of Socialist Realism as well as Dostoyevsky’s bourgeois realism. Like his contemporary Ernst Bloch, Bakhtin praises the complexity and richness of Goethe’s concept of realism. In the wake of Hermann Cohen, Georg Simmel (...) and Friedrich Gundolf to whom Bakhtin alludes and whom he quotes, Goethe is regarded as a modern literary and anthropological role model, the epitome of Bildung. For Bakhtin, Goethe’s and Rabelais’ writings about the carnivalesque constitute complementary forms of reflection of and agents for social and cultural transformation in modernity. (shrink)

Some recent developments in ecology, economics, and ethics can be brought together within a remarkably simple yet general theoretical framework. Two applications of this framework involve the effects of species diversity on ecosystem productivity, and of economic inequality on biodiversity loss, respectively. In each of these two cases, part of the overall causal relationship is mediated by a diminishing-returns relationship at the lower level (the level of the population or the person, respectively). But same-level (ecosystem or societal, respectively) and/or higher-level (...) (landscape or inter-societal) mechanisms also come in play. In the diversity-productivity case, the proposed theoretical perspective enables one to quantify how much more "the whole is... than the sum of the parts". These aspects of the ecological and economic realms have interesting parallels in the domain of "pure" ethics. (shrink)

In this article, we report the outcome of a sociological inquiry into nursing knowledge of death and dying, specifically ‘the good death’. A genealogical approach informed by actor‐network theory and appreciative inquiry were used to compose a broad socio‐material account of how nurses concern themselves with the care of the dying and end‐of‐life care. Our enquiry revealed similarly to other studies, that there was no shared or overarching model of care. Key themes derived from nurses' translations of ‘the (...) class='Hi'>good death’ were re‐presented pictorially as six pillars and two processes to comprise a new diagram of The Personalised Ideal Death. (shrink)

In loving memory of Herbert Marcuse, who in the 1920s heard Husserl and in the 1960s came to be the voice of the rebelling students.

"The Eternal City, Rome offers endless insights through its millennia of history, its centrality to European art and religion, and the generations of travelers that have sought it out. This book from philosopher Scott Samuelson offers readers a thinker's tour of Rome. Samuelson shows how people have made sense of Rome as a scene of human nature and then envisioned the good life-philosophers such as Lucretius and Seneca, but also poets and artists such as Horace and Caravaggio, filmmakers like (...) Fellini, and adventurers like Rosa Bathurst. He roots these explorations and visions in the city of Rome itself: Samuelson introduces us to some of the most famous sites in Rome by sharing illuminating moments in their histories; and he discusses great works of art to be found in Rome by getting to the heart of the knotty ethical and emotional questions they pose. And, practicing philosophy in place, he tackles head-on the profound questions that most tours of Rome only bracket: What does it mean to see the Forum through the eyes of Cicero? Does all this art about God really signify anything? Should visitors really be impressed by these incredible sites built on the slaughter and domination of others? What does all this history tell us about who we are? And, most important, how can an afternoon Negroni help us find the good life? Samuelson's aim is to provide an eclectic guide to Rome and happiness-a portable approach, blending history and philosophy, for tourists and dreaming readers alike"--. (shrink)