Philippa Foot's book, Natural Goodness, involves a large project including a theory of natural goodness, a theory of the virtues, and a theory of practical rationality. Natural goodness is the foundation for the rest and is used to support a more or less traditional list of the virtues and a theory of reasons for action. Though Foot's doctrine of natural goodness may provide an account of some sort of goodness, I argue that it is not adequate as a foundation for (...) practical rationality or as a defense of more or less traditional virtues. (shrink)

Much anthropocentric environmental argument is limited by a narrow conception of how humans can benefit from nature. E. O. Wilson defends a more robust anthropocentric environmentalism based on a broader understanding of these benefits. At the center of his argument is the biophilia hypothesis according to which humans have an evolutionarily crafted, aesthetic and spiritual affinity for nature. However,the “biophilia hypothesis” covers a variety of claims, some modest and some more extreme. Insofar as we have significant evidence for biophilia, it (...) favors modest versions which do not support a particularly robust anthropocentric environmental ethic. A significantly more robust environmental ethic requires the most extreme version of the biophilia hypothesis, for which there is the least evidence. (shrink)

Paul Ramsey has argued that the rule of double effect is morally significant because of the existence of indeterminate choices between incommensurable values. I interpret his argument as the following disjunctive syllogism. There are two sorts of principles we can appeal to in dealing with indeterminate choices: the rule of double effect and a commensurate reason principle. The second does not work, so we are left with the first. I respond, first, that this argument commits the fallacy of bifurcation and (...) second, that for all Ramsey has shown, and surprisingly, a commensurate reason principle can deal with indeterminate choices. (shrink)

In response to criticisms of his "Ambiguity in Moral Choice", Richard McCormick developed, in "Commentary on the Commentaries," an alternative view on proportionate reason. I interpret McCormick's view in terms of what I call "the undermining principle," "the theory of associated goods," "the necessity principle," and "the liberty principle." I argue that the first two are the heart of the theory and link McCormick's view to that of Peter Knauer. I then show that McCormick's view suffers from several problems, including (...) a lack of argumentation for his central undermining principle, and counterexamples to his necessity and liberty principles. (shrink)

This essay explores the unique perspective of medical students regarding the ethical challenges of providing full disclosure to patients and their families when medical mistakes are made, especially when such mistakes lead to tragic outcomes. This narrative underscores core precepts of the healing profession, challenging the health care team to be open and truthful, even when doing so is uncomfortable. This account also reminds us that nonabandonment is an obligation that assumes accountability for one’s actions in the healing relationship and (...) that apologizing for mistakes can serve to heal. It argues that even medical students have an obligation to speak up when actions violate their moral beliefs, even if this means confronting a superior. Ethical principles cannot be abandoned in fear of adverse evaluation or failure to conform. Healthcare workers have an obligation to address mistakes made around the time of a patient’s death with the patient’s family. This responsibility trumps any selfish desire to avoid unpleasant feelings of guilt or regret. Such events often bring closure to already anguished relatives and spouses, and may help to facilitate the grieving process. This includes pressing forward the need to apologize to patients and/or their families when mistakes are made and when decisions are made that lead to poor outcomes for the patient, even when benevolently intended. (shrink)

In this essay, I distinguish two significant act-utilitarian theories of moral education: the traditional rule of thumb view and the Harian intuition view. I argue that there are problems with the traditional view and that an act-utilitarian ought to adopt a version of the Harian view. I then explain and respond to a major objection to the intuition view given by Bernard Williams. Williams argues that the system of moral thought which the Harian view advocates we teach is inherently unstable (...) and is certain to undermine itself. I argue that there is reason to expect a great deal of stability in this system. (shrink)

One problem for any utilitarian alternative to act utilitarianism, such as rule utilitarianism, is the feeling that act utilitarianism is the most natural form of utilitarianism. Other forms seem unmotivated, inconsistent, or irrational. This argument is found in Smart, Foot and Slote. It turns on the assumption that utilitarianism must be motivated by the "teleological motivation," the idea that one must derive one's entire moral theory from the notion of the good. I respond that act utilitarianism itself has a problem (...) from the point of view of the teleological motivation, a problem solved, surprisingly, by several utilitarian alternatives including rule utilitarianism. (shrink)

Scholars and practitioners addressing the global food crisis have rarely incorporated perspectives from the world's religious traditions. This lacuna appears in multiple dimensions: until recently, environmentalists have tended to ignore food and agriculture; food justice advocates have focused on food quantities, rather than its method of production; and few scholars of religion have considered agriculture. Faith-based perspectives typically emphasize the dignity and sanctity of creation and offer holistic frameworks that integrate equity, economic, and environmental concerns, often called the three legs (...) of sustainability. Faith-based perspectives can provide new paradigms through which to assess food, consumption, and production and the attendant social relations; assess our scientific, economic, and social approaches; and acknowledge the moral and religious dimensions of the world food crisis. (shrink)

According to John A Barker, whether an argument begs the question is purely a matter of logical form. According to me, it is also a matter of epistemic conditions; some arguments which beg the question in some contexts need not beg the question in every context. I point out difficulties in Barker's treatment and defend my own views against some of his criticisms. In the concluding section, "Alleged difficulties with disjunctive syllogism," I defend the validity of disjunctive syllogism against the (...) views of Alan Ross Anderson and Nuel D Belnap, Jr., ask pointed questions about the notion of intensional disjunction, and suggest how my treatment of begging the question can be extended to deal with the so-called paradoxes of strict implication. (shrink)

On one manuscript page of the Opus postumum Kant twice recurs to a passage from Paradise Lost that, seven years earlier, he had cited to exemplify aesthetic ideas and the concept of succession.1 Now he calls on these same verses to perform an additional function, namely, to represent the a priori idea of a community of reciprocity. For Kant, the “insertion” of this idea serves as an “actus of cognition” that can enable experience of the “subjectively actual”.2In the cited passage (...) from Paradise Lost, Raphael instructs Adam about the “reciprocal … Male and Female Light” of the “two great Sexes” that “animate the World”. On the Opus postumum page, Kant names Milton... (shrink)

Reflection on testimony provides novel arguments for anti-individualism. What is anti-individualism? Sanford Goldberg's book defends three main claims under this heading: first, facts about the contents of beliefs do not supervene on individualistic facts about the believers ; second, an individual's epistemic entitlement to accept a piece of testimony depends on facts about her peers ; third, processes by which some humans acquire knowledge from testimony includes activities performed for them by others. Each of these three claims is argued (...) for separately from premises about the ways in which humans, adult and child, succeed in gaining knowledge by testimony. The three arguments provide the structure for Anti-Individualism.Goldberg's argument for the first claim – that the contents of beliefs do not supervene on individualistic facts about the believers – begins from uncontroversial facts about testimony. Gaining knowledge by testimony depends on knowing the meanings of some utterances, and it is possible to know the meaning of a person's utterance while knowing little that would distinguish this person from anyone else. The best explanation of how this is possible involves postulating linguistic norms which entail facts about the linguistic meanings of utterances. Now in some cases of testimony, a hearer acquires a belief whose content is the linguistic meaning of a speaker's utterance, where the linguistic meaning of this utterance is determined by linguistic norms. But linguistic norms might have been different from what they are even while the person's and her audience's non-relational properties remained unaltered. And in such a case, the hearer would have acquired a belief with a different content. Therefore, ‘Psychological facts such as believing that p do not supervene on the individualistic facts regarding the subject’ …. (shrink)

We applaud the effort to draw attention to generalizability concerns in twenty-first-century psychological research. Yet we do not feel that a pessimistic perspective is warranted. We outline a continuum of available methodological tools and perspectives, including incremental steps and meta-analytic approaches that can be readily and easily deployed by researchers to advance generalizability claims in a forward-looking manner.

Versions of internalism have played important roles in metaethics, for example, in defending irrealist options such as emotivism. However, internalism is itself as controversial as the views it is used to defend. Standard approaches to testing the view, such as thought experiments about amoralists, have failed to gain consensus. Michael Huemer offers a defense of internalism of a different kind which he calls the “argument from interpretation.” He presents the argument as one Humeans could embrace, but versions could be accepted (...) by others, including Huemer himself. The argument begins from the assumption that a certain principle of charity is true and knowable a priori. But it can only be known a priori if internalism is true. Hence internalism is true. In this paper I argue that this important argument fails. My main objection makes use of recent work in empirical psychology. Huemer needs the principle of charity to be known a priori. I argue that rather than being an a priori issue, it is an empirical one and that the empirical evidence is strong enough to undermine his argument for internalism. (shrink)

Sanford C. Goldberg argues that a proper account of the communication of knowledge through speech has anti-individualistic implications for both epistemology and the philosophy of mind and language. In Part I he offers a novel argument for anti-individualism about mind and language, the view that the contents of one's thoughts and the meanings of one's words depend for their individuation on one's social and natural environment. In Part II he discusses the epistemic dimension of knowledge communication, arguing that the (...) epistemic characteristics of communication-based beliefs depend on features of the cognitive and linguistic acts of the subject's social peers. In acknowledging an ineliminable social dimension to mind, language, and the epistemic categories of knowledge, justification, and rationality, his book develops fundamental links between externalism in the philosophy of mind and language, on the one hand, and externalism is epistemology, on the other. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that treating organized groups as agents, in the way Lackey proposes to do, has implications that are more far-reaching than appears to be recognized in Lackey’s book itself. To bring this out I discuss (1) the epistemic significance of the Condorcet Jury Theorem, (2) a potential counterexample to her Group Epistemic Agent account of group justification, and (3) the bearing of group agency (as understood by Lackey) on the scope of the domain of group epistemology. (...) None of the points I am making is a decisive objection to the general framework Lackey adopts in her book; I offer them, instead, in an attempt to situate Lackey’s epistemology of groups into a more inclusive social epistemology framework. (shrink)

What determines whether an action is right or wrong? Morality, Rules, and Consequences: A Critical Reader explores for students and researchers the relationship between consequentialist theory and moral rules. Most of the chapters focus on rule consequentialism or on the distinction between act and rule versions of consequentialism. Contributors, among them the leading philosophers in the discipline, suggest ways of assessing whether rule consequentialism could be a satisfactory moral theory. These essays, all of which are previously unpublished, provide students in (...) moral philosophy with essential material and ask key questions on just what the criteria for an adequate moral theory might be. (shrink)

Externalism1 is the thesis that some propositional attitudes depend for their individuation on features of the thinker’s (social and/or physical) environment. The doctrine of self-knowledge of thoughts is the thesis that for all thinkers S and occurrent thoughts that p, S has authoritative and non-empirical knowledge of her thought that p. A much-discussed question in the literature is whether these two doctrines are compatible. In this paper I attempt to respond to one argument for an incompatibilist conclusion, Boghossian’s 1989 ‘Memory (...) Argument.’. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there are cases in which a speaker S's observation of the fact that her assertion that p is accepted by another person enhances the strength of S's own epistemic position with respect to p, as compared to S's strength of epistemic position with respect to p prior to having made the assertion. I conclude by noting that the sorts of consideration that underwrite this possibility may go some distance towards explaining several aspects of our (...) group life as epistemic subjects—in particular, groupthink and group polarization. (shrink)

Among epistemologists, it is common to assume that insofar as coherence bears on the justification of belief, the only relevant coherence relations are those _within_ an individual subject’s web of beliefs. After clarifying this view and exploring some plausible motivations for it, we argue that this individualistic account of the epistemic relevance of coherence fails to account for central facets of scientific practice. In its place we propose a social account of coherence. According to the view we propose, a scientist (...) _S_’s belief that _p_ is _prima facie_ unjustified if this belief negatively coheres with justified scientific claims in her scientific community. This account of coherence yields an epistemology for scientific belief which, we argue, has all of the benefits and none of the liabilities of its more individualistic predecessor. (shrink)

This book is a study of the philosophy of arithmetic in one of the most significant periods of its history—from Frege to Carnap—prefaced by an account of Kant. Potter aims at a philosophical history, a story told from an explicit interpretative perspective. These theories of arithmetic are seen as attempts to account for its “source of content” and “source of concepts.” Potter never explains these terms; I take the former to be the thing that, when we have knowledge of it (...) or insight into it, provides the ultimate justification for pure and applied arithmetical discourse. That is, Potter’s principal concern is both ontological and epistemological: what determines, and how do we know, the truth of the statements that express our putative arithmetical knowledge? The criterion of success of a theory of arithmetic is how well it explains arithmetic’s simultaneous necessity or apriority and empirical applicability. Potter divides the theories he discusses into four main types, determined by their accounts of the “source of content” and “concepts”: sensibility, thought, language, and the world. At the end, Potter finds that none succeeds in accounting for all of arithmetic: at best some capture the infinity of the natural numbers, but none gives the “source” of arithmetical concepts. But the “similarities … between the scopes of the various approaches” suggest a Gödelian moral for Potter’s tale: the philosophy of arithmetic must treat concepts of “thought structures or … contents,” where “reflection upon the meanings” of “propositions about these mental objects” is needed for their proofs. (shrink)

The days when Frege was more footnoted than read are now long gone; still, until very recently he has been read rather selectively. No doubt many had an inkling that there’s more to Frege than the sense/reference distinction; but few, one suspects, thought that his philosophy of mathematics was as fertile and intriguing as the present collection demonstrates. Perhaps, as Paul Benacerraf’s essay in this collection suggests, logical positivism should be held partly responsible for the neglect of this aspect of (...) Frege’s thought, since it contributed to the following common impression of Frege’s philosophy of mathematics: Frege’s project was to reduce arithmetic to logic, in order to provide an empiricist account of mathematical knowledge; Russell’s paradox showed that this was not possible, and that the best that can be done is to reduce arithmetic to set theory; so, Frege’s logicism is demonstrably a philosophical dead end. (shrink)

The environmental degradation caused by industrial agriculture, as well as the resulting social and health consequences, creates an urgency to rethink food production by expanding the moral imagination to include agricultural practices. Agricultural practices presume human use of the earth and acknowledge human dependence on the biotic community, and these relations mean that agriculture presents a separate set of considerations in the broader field of environmental ethics. Many scholars and activists have argued persuasively that we need new stories to rethink (...) agricultural practice, however, the link—the story that does and can shape agricultural practice—has not yet been fully articulated in environmental discourse. My analysis explores how language has shaped existing agricultural models and, more important, the potential of story to influence agricultural practice. To do this, I draw upon cognitive theory to illustrate how metaphoric and narrative language structures thought and influences practice, beginning with my contention that industrial agriculture relies on a discourse of mechanistic relations between humans and a passive earth, language that has naturalized the chemically intensive monocultures prevalent in much of the American Midwest. However, alternative agricultures, including organic agriculture, agro-ecology, and ecological agriculture, emphasize qualities such as interdependence and reciprocity and do so as a deliberate response to the perceived inadequacies of industrial agriculture and its governing narrative. Exploring the different discourses of agricultural systems can help us think through different modalities for human relations with the biotic community and demonstrate story’s potential role in altering practice. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on a few of the passages in the Nicomachean Ethics that challenge the standard hylomorphic interpretation of Aristotle’s anthropology. I proceed by reflecting on the manner in which Aristotle’s two ways of characterizing the human person follow from his accounts of the two most important intellectual virtues, phronesis and sophia. I attempt to argue for the following three points: first, that Aristotle’s presentation of a divided mind is the result of his consistency rather than inconsistency; (...) second, that there is not a clear way found in his Nicomachean Ethics to overcome this dual anthropology without doing violence to his account of intellectual virtue; and third, that there are several reasons why this dual anthropology should not be regarded as an aporetic failure. (shrink)

McTaggart argues that the A series, which orders events with reference to past, present, and future, involves an inescapable contradiction. The significant difference between the earlier version of his argument (Mind, 1908) and the version in The Nature of Existence, Volume II, Chapter 33 (1927), has often gone unnoticed. His arguments are all invalid; the conclusion can be rejected without rejecting any premiss. It is therefore unnecessary to adopt any philosophical thesis about time (e.g., that some token-reflexive analysis of tensed (...) statements is adequate) to avoid McTaggart's final conclusion that time is unreal. (shrink)

_From one of America’s most distinguished constitutional scholars, an intriguing exploration of America’s most famous political tract and its relevance to today’s politics_ In _An Argument Open to All,_ renowned legal scholar Sanford Levinson takes a novel approach to what is perhaps America’s most famous political tract. Rather than concern himself with the authors as historical figures, or how _The Federalist_ helps us understand the original intent of the framers of the Constitution, Levinson examines each essay for the _political_ (...) wisdom it can offer us today. In eighty-five short essays, each keyed to a different essay in _The Federalist,_ he considers such questions as whether present generations can rethink their constitutional arrangements; how much effort we should exert to preserve America’s traditional culture; and whether _The Federalist_’s arguments even suggest the desirability of world government. (shrink)

Everything red is colored, and all squares are polygons. A square is distinguished from other polygons by being four-sided, equilateral, and equiangular. What distinguishes red things from other colored things? This has been understood as a conceptual rather than scientific question. Theories of wavelengths and reflectance and sensory processing are not considered. Given just our ordinary understanding of color, it seems that what differentiates red from other colors is only redness itself. The Cambridge logician W. E. Johnson introduced the terms (...) determinate and determinable to apply to examples such as red and colored. Chapter XI, of Johnson's Logic, Part I (1921), “The Determinate and the Determinable,” is the main text for discussion of this distinction. (shrink)

The scenario of the brain in a vat, first aired thirty-five years ago in Hilary Putnam's classic paper, has been deeply influential in philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, and metaphysics. This collection of new essays examines the scenario and its philosophical ramifications and applications, as well as the challenges which it has faced. The essays review historical applications of the brain-in-a-vat scenario and consider its impact on contemporary debates. They explore a diverse range of philosophical issues, from intentionality, external-world (...) scepticism, and the nature of truth, to the extended mind hypothesis, reference magnetism, and new versions of realism. The volume will be a rich and valuable resource for advanced students in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind and language, as well as anyone interested in the relations between language, thought and the world. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide a defense of rule consequentialism that does not appeal to the “guiding teleological idea” according to which the final ground of moral assessment must lie in effects on well-being. My defense also avoids appeals to intuition. It is a contractualist defense. Many forms of contractualism can, with only minor tweaking, be used to defend rule consequentialism. In this paper I show how one specific form of contractualism does the job. This argument is inspired by a (...) version of contractualism briefly discussed by Tim Mulgan and by his claim that it converges with rule consequentialism, given certain restrictions. I show that Mulgan’s own argument for convergence is seriously flawed, but that a variation on his contractualism does converge with rule consequentialism, and it does it without Mulgan’s own restrictions. Though Mulgan himself does not treat convergence as an argument for rule consequentialism—his own argument is heavily intuitionistic—I claim that convergence provides significant support for rule consequentialism. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice is a wide-ranging and important book on a much-neglected topic: the injustice involved in cases in which distrust arises out of prejudice. Fricker has some important things to say about this sort of injustice: its nature, how it arises, what sustains it, and the unhappy outcomes associated with it for the victim and the society in which it takes place. In the course of developing this account, Fricker also develops an account of the epistemology of testimony. (...) Focusing my attention on that account, my central claims are two. First, at least some of Fricker's arguments against existing (inferentialist and non-inferentialist) views in the epistemology of testimony are less than fully persuasive, and the (non-inferentialist) view she ends up endorsing is not all that different from the views she criticizes. Second, her reasons for harboring doubts regarding the role of a principle of default entitlement within a non-inferentialist account are not persuasive. Neither of these claims affects the overall argument Fricker is trying to run. Rather, they suggest that Fricker may have picked more fights than she needed to in the epistemology of testimony. If so, we have reason to detach Fricker's important work on epistemic injustice from some of the details of the story she tells regarding the epistemology of testimony. (shrink)

This paper reviews recent philosophical work on assertion, with a special focus on work exploring the theme of assertion's norm. It concludes with a brief section characterizing several open questions that might profitably be explored from this perspective.

In "Causes and "If P, Even If X, still Q," Philosophy 57 (July 1982), Ted Honderich cites my "The Direction of Causation and the Direction of Conditionship," journal of Philosophy 73 (April 22, 1976) as an example of an account of causal priority that lacks the proper character. After emending Honderich's description of the proper character, I argue that my attempt to account for one-way causation in terms of one-way causal conditionship does not totally lack it. Rather than emphasize the (...) singularity of an effect, as Honderich does, I emphasize the multiplicity of independent factors in a causal circumstance. (shrink)

Marina Sbisà has long advocated that we think of the illocutionary force of a speech act in terms of the act’s (predictable) systematic effects on the normative relationship between a speaker and her audience. Building on this idea, I argue that the hypothesis of distinctive speech act norms can be used to explain how participants in a conversation coordinate the normative expectations they have of one another in conversation. Such an explanation earns its keep by explaining how speakers render themselves (...) illocutionarily intelligible to their audiences—thereby enabling us to articulate the sense of mutuality that characterizes speech exchanges. One important upshot of my reflections is that we should reject both Austin’s thesis that the successful performance of an illocutionary act depends on audience uptake and Sbisà’s claim that Austin’s thesis is required if we are to make sense of the illocutionary dimension of speech in terms of an act’s systematic effects on participants’ normative expectations of one another. (shrink)

This paper sketches the place of Arthur Pap’s work in the complex history of modality in the analytic tradition of philosophy, contrasting it with that of the early Wittgenstein. They represent two principal paths of the philosophical history of modality that converge in the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle. Clarifying these paths go some way towards turning aside a myth, with some sway in contemporary philosophy, which occludes a philosophically fruitful view of the philosophical-historical realities of modality in analytic (...) philosophy. (shrink)

What do speech reports tell us about the act being reported? When such a question is pursued in connection with reports of the form ‘S said that p,’ answers typically focus on the semantic content of the speech act. Indeed, there is a familiar line of research that aims to exploit our understanding of speech reports, in order to reach conclusions about the semantic content of sentences or expressions. In this chapter I want to focus attention on another matter: the (...) illocutionary force of the act being reported. In particular, I want to argue that there is a use of speech reports of a related form, reflection on which can help us discern aspects of the force of the act being reported. The use I have in mind is what I call the buck-passing use of speech reports, as when one speaker, challenged to defend a claim or belief of hers, does so by reporting another speaker as having said so. The thesis of this paper is that the legitimacy of this practice depends on two key pragmatic features of the reported speech. This result can be seen as establishing a non-trivial desideratum for theories of the illocutionary force of the type of act in question. (shrink)

I revise J L Mackie's first account of casual direction by replacing his notion of "fixity" by a newly defined notion of "sufficing" that is designed to accommodate indeterminism. Keeping Mackie's distinction between casual order and casual direction, I then consider another revision that replaces "fixity" with "one-way conditionship". In response to the charge that all such accounts of casual priority beg the question by making an unjustified appeal to temporal priority, i maintain that one-way conditionship explains rather that assumes (...) objective temporal dependence as well as objective casual dependence. (shrink)

Torture has become the subject of intense debate in recent years. One facet of that debate is whether there are any circumstances during which it might be an appropriate response by a respectable government. One might wonder precisely why torture receives so much more attention than, say, the "collateral damage" that is an inevitable aspect of contemporary warfare. But the debate also involves what counts as "torture," as distinguished from "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" methods of interrogation or even "coercive but (...) acceptable" methods. This article argues that we sometimes overemphasize the significance of particular acts — i.e., x either is or is not torture — as against the importance of the phenomenology of torture, which involves creating a structure of complete domination and, therefore, complete vulnerability. This is similar to the phoenomenology of slavery. Indeed, in this 150th year since the Supreme Court's decision in the Dred Scott case, it is important to contemplate the full meaning of Chief Justice Taney's declaration that blacks had "no rights" that whites were "bound to respect." Can a liberal political order ever carve out a set of persons — such as suspected terrorists — who indeed have "no rights" that the state is obligated to respect? If the answer is no, then what are the implications for the process by which the United States, presumably a liberal political order, conducts interrogations even of those suspected of being "the worst of the worst"? (shrink)

In this paper I will be arguing that there are cases in which a subject, S, should have known that p, even though, given her state of evidence at the time, she was in no position to know it. My argument for this result will involve making two claims. The uncontroversial claim is this: S should have known that p when another person has, or would have, legitimate expectations regarding S’s epistemic condition, the satisfaction of these expectations would require that (...) S knows that p, and S fails to know that p. The controversial claim is that these three conditions are sometimes jointly satisfied. I will spend the majority of my time defending the controversial claim. I will argue that there are two main sources of legitimate expectations regarding another’s epistemic condition: participation in a legitimate social practice ; and moral and epistemic expectations more generally . In developing my position on this score, I will have an opportunity to defend the doctrine that there are “practice-generated entitlements” to expect certain things, where it can happen that the satisfaction of these expectations requires another’s having certain pieces of knowledge; to contrast practice-generated entitlements to expect with epistemic reasons to believe; to defend the idea that moral and epistemic standards themselves can be taken to reflect legitimate expectations we have of each other; to compare the “should have known” phenomenon with a widely-discussed phenomenon in the ethics literature—that of culpable ignorance; and finally to suggest the bearing of the “should have known” phenomenon to epistemology itself. (shrink)

Over the past 50 years, Jorge J.E. Gracia has been a seminal figure in Latin American philosophy, philosophy of race and ethnicity, metaphysics and ontology, medieval philosophy, and the theory of interpretation. This book commemorates Gracia’s legacy with a critical investigation of his deep and wide-ranging impact.

_Edward Bibring Photographs the Psychoanalysts of His Time_ provides us with a unique pictorial window into a fascinating period of psychoanalytic history. It is the gift of Edward Bibring, a passionate photographer who, Rolleiflex in hand, chronicled international psychoanalytic congresses from 1932 to 1938. The period in question spans the ascendancy of Hitler, the great exodus of analysts to England and the U.S., and the Anschluss of 1938. A year after the Paris Congress, the last meeting photographed by Bibring, Europe (...) would be in flames. At Wiesbaden in 1932, we find an ever dignified Ernest Jones relaxing aboard a sight-seeing ship, and Helene Deutsch and Heinz Hartmann delightfully at ease at a coffee shop. At the Lucerne Congress of 1934, Anna Freud, Ludwig Jekels, Wilhelm Reich, Grete Bibring, Max Eitingon, and Franz Alexander happily converse outside a hotel. At Marienbad in 1936, there are smiling new faces: Annie Reich, Ernst Kris, Otto Fenichel, Edward Glover, and others. At Budapest in1937 the women – Anna Freud, Vilma Kovacs, Dorothy Burlingham, and Elisabeth Geleerd – speak animatedly among themselves. A demure Margaret Mahler and a chic Marianne Kris make their appearance. In 1938, we see a series of table shots, where analysts, now with suit jackets removed and even a few collars loosened, relax with their food, wine, and cigars. Bracketed by Sanford Gifford’s brief introduction and biographical sketches of all the captured parties, Bibring’s photographs, digitized and enlarged, retain just enough graininess to evoke a different era in the history of psychoanalysis. It is heartening to see the paragons of “classical psychoanalysis” as warmly human, their analytic reserve supplanted by relaxed affability. But it is sobering to remember that the high spirit engendered by Congresses – in Bibring’s time no less than our own – may overlay the gravest political developments and the deepest personal anxieties. (shrink)

Alfred Hitchcock’s first cinematic success, The Lodger (1926, silent), provides a case study of contagious violence in the modern metropolis. The film is ostensibly a crime thriller centered on the search for the Avenger, a serial killer modeled on Jack the Ripper. But Hitchcock raises the stakes by introducing a love plot in which the detective and the suspected killer compete for the same woman, who may or may not be the slayer’s next target. In the course of this triangular (...) struggle, the hostility between rivals for the same object of desire escalates to the point of eroding any secure distinction between the cop and the killer, innocence and guilt, legal authority and criminal transgression. As if in homage to .. (shrink)

"Gray Matters is a thorough examination of the main topics in recent philosophy of mind. It aims at surveying a broad range of issues, not all of which can be subsumed under one position or one philosopher's theory. In this way, the authors avoid neglecting interesting issues out of allegiance to a given theory of mind." --Book Jacket.