Descartes published his Meditations in First Philosophy in 1641. A French translation from the original Latin, which he saw and approved, followed six years later. The words ‘in First Philosophy’ indicate that the Meditations attack fundamental questions, the chief of them being the nature of knowledge and the nature of man. I shall deal almost entirely with his treatment of the first, the nature of knowledge; even when the two questions become mixed up, as they notoriously do, I shall not (...) encroach on to the second, the nature of man. The Meditations were intended to confirm Descartes' reputation as a philosopher (he was already pre-eminent as a mathematician and a scientist) and, to increase their impact, they were accompanied in their first publication by a series of comments solicited from notable theologians and philosophers together with Descartes' replies. These comments are called the Objections and numbered from one to six, but it is only an accident that there are six Meditations and six Objections. There are six Objections because there are six objectors (that is not quite true, the sixth Objection being a collection of comments from several people) and each Objection ranges over the whole work, although, of course, the different commentators focused upon the parts they found important or questionable. Many of the Objections, particularly those of Arnauld and Gassendi, contain acute and valuable criticisms. Descartes took exception to Gassendi's contribution and wished not to have it published. He maintained that Gassendi quite misunderstood him, but that doesn't seem true. It is true that Gassendi pokes fun at Descartes in addressing him first ‘O Soul’ and later, pretending to realize his mistake, ‘O Mind’, but no doubt the trouble was that Gassendi understood rather too well, fastening upon inconsequentialities in the argument and inconsistencies in the thought and finding, against both, formidable arguments. Inconsequentialities and inconsistencies there are, so much so that the work is a set of parts rested together to give the appearance of a construction, not fitted together really to make one. That did not prevent the Meditations having as great an influence on philosophical thought as any work from the day of its publication to our own, or prevent Descartes' ideas from occupying the minds of philosophers ever since. (shrink)

Ethical concepts are, or purport to be, normative. They make claims on us: they command, oblige, recommend, or guide. Or at least when we invoke them, we make claims on one another; but where does their authority over us - or ours over one another - come from? Christine Korsgaard identifies four accounts of the source of normativity that have been advocated by modern moral philosophers: voluntarism, realism, reflective endorsement, and the appeal to autonomy. She traces their history, showing (...) how each developed in response to the prior one and comparing their early versions with those on the contemporary philosophical scene. Kant's theory that normativity springs from our own autonomy emerges as a synthesis of the other three, and Korsgaard concludes with her own version of the Kantian account. Her discussion is followed by commentary from G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel, and Bernard Williams, and a reply by Korsgaard. (shrink)

Kant was an idealist. His idealism was in some ways, it is true, less extreme than that of Berkeley. He distinguished his own by calling it ‘transcendental’. It is less extreme than Berkeley's in two ways. First, Kant does not assert that everything which exists is essentially mental, as Berkeley does. Second, those things which he does hold to be essentially mental, he holds to be so in a weaker fashion. Nevertheless he was an idealist; he held that neither intuition (...) nor thought could concern any object that was not essentially related to our minds. Since intuition and thought together provide knowledge, and since we can have no knowledge except through them, it follows that every object of which we have knowledge is essentially within our minds. Moreover, there is at least one respect in which his idealism is more extreme than that of Berkeley. He held that the objects of intuition were essentially within our minds, whereas Berkeley held only that they were essentially within some mind. (shrink)

Every week of term, on Wednesday afternoons, during most of his years at University College, Ayer held a seminar. Strangely, he makes no mention of that seminar in his autobiography, although it was a more serious and productive affair than his Monday evening seminar, which he does mention. At the Wednesday seminar, conditionals were often the subject for discussion. They are intriguing things in themselves but the attention they received must have been due, in large part, to their central role (...) in Ayer's philosophy. Ayer was a phenomenalist, but he did not go so far as that prince of phenomenalists, George Berkeley, and assert that the things around us in space, chairs and tables, trees and rocks and lakes, the sun, moon and stars, were sensations, sensations of various kinds. Ayer's view was more that of John Stuart Mill, that these things were permanent possibilities of sensation. To assert the existence of a lake was to assert that if certain characteristic sensations occurred, then certain other characteristic sensations would follow. In that way, conditionals played a central role in Ayer's phenomenalism. That phenomenalism, however, needed to agree with an even more central element of his thought, the positivism he derived, perhaps from the philosophy of the Vienna Circle, perhaps from David Hume. According to that positivism, experience sets limits to understanding. If we can experience nothing but the presence or absence of sensations, then propositions concerning the presence or absence of sensations are all we can understand. Now a conditional concerning sensations does not imply the presence of sensations and, although it does imply the absence of sensations, it implies more besides. What Ayer's phenomenalism required, his positivism could not allow. (shrink)

Christine Korsgaard has become one of the leading interpreters of Kant's moral philosophy. She is identified with a small group of philosophers who are intent on producing a version of Kant's moral philosophy that is at once sensitive to its historical roots while revealing its particular relevance to contemporary problems. She rejects the traditional picture of Kant's ethics as a cold vision of the moral life which emphasises duty at the expense of love and value. Rather, Kant's work is (...) seen as providing a resource for addressing not only the metaphysics of morals, but also for tackling practical questions about personal relations, politics, and everyday human interaction. This collection contains some of the finest current work on Kant's ethics and will command the attention of all those involved in teaching and studying moral theory. (shrink)

Christine M. Korsgaard is one of today's leading moral philosophers: this volume collects ten influential papers by her on practical reason and moral psychology ...

Agency and identity -- Necessitation -- Acts and actions -- Aristotle and Kant -- Agency and practical identity -- The metaphysics of normativity -- Constitutive standards -- The constitution of life -- In defense of teleology -- The paradox of self-constitution -- Formal and substantive principles of reason -- Formal versus substantive -- Testing versus weighing -- Maximizing and prudence -- Practical reason and the unity of the will -- The empiricist account of normativity -- The rationalist account of normativity (...) -- Kant on the hypothetical imperative -- Against particularistic willing -- Deciding and predicting -- Autonomy and efficacy -- The function of action -- The possibility of agency -- Non-rational action -- Action -- Attribution -- The psychology of action -- Expulsion from the garden : the transition to humanity -- Instinct, emotion, intelligence, and reason -- The parts of the soul -- Inside or outside -- Pull yourself together -- The constitutional model -- Models of the soul -- The city and the soul -- Platonic virtues -- Justice : substantive, procedural, and platonic -- Kant and the constitutional model -- Defective action -- The problem of bad action -- Being governed by the wrong law -- Or five bad constitutions -- Conceptions of evil -- Degrees of action -- Integrity and interaction -- Deciding to be bad -- The ordinary cases -- Dealing with the disunified -- Kant's theory of interaction -- My reasons -- Deciding to treat someone as an end in himself -- Interacting with yourself -- How to be a person -- What's left of me? (shrink)

Content skepticism about practical reason is doubt about the bearing of rational considerations on the activities of deliberation and choice. Motivational skepticism is doubt about the scope of reason as a motive. Some people think that motivational considerations alone provide grounds for skepticism about the project of founding ethics on practical reason. I will argue, against this view, that motivational skepticism must always be based on content skepticism. I will not address the question of whether or not content skepticism is (...) justified. I want only to establish the fact that motivational skepticism has no independent force. (shrink)

Many forms of virtue ethics, like certain forms of utilitarianism, suffer from the problem of indirection. In those forms, the criterion for status of a trait as a virtue is not the same as the criterion for the status of an act as right. Furthermore, if the virtues for example are meant to promote the nourishing of the agent, the virtuous agent is not standardly supposed to be motivated by concern for her own flourishing in her activity. In this paper, (...) I propose a virtue ethics which does not suffer from the problem. Traits are not virtues because their cultivation and manifestation promote a value such as agent flourishing. They are virtues in so far as they are habits of appropriate response to various relevant values. This means that there is a direct connection between the rationale of a virtue and what makes an action virtuous or right. (shrink)

The twelfth-century narrative Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān by Ibn Ṭufayl recounts the life of Ḥayy, a feral man who teaches himself philosophy while living on a desert island. Ibn Ṭufayl gives two explanations of how Ḥayy came to the island. In one version, Ḥayy generates spontaneously on the island; in another, he washes up on the island as an infant. This paper attempts to resolve these contradictory narratives by appealing to a previously unexplored source text for Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, Sarāʾir al-nutaqāʾ (...) by Jaʿfar b. Manṣūr al-Yaman. Sarāʾir is an esoteric Ismāʿīlī text in which the author uses stories about Adam and other prophets to elaborate a Neoplatonist-inspired theology. Jaʿfar distinguishes between Adam as a symbol of the atemporal origination (ibdāʿ) of all natural forms, and the corporeal Adam of Ismāʿīlī history. Due to narrative and conceptual similarities between Jaʿfar’s and Ibn Ṭufayl’s treatment of their protagonists, I argue that the two versions of Ḥayy’s nativity allegorize the duality of Neoplatonic cosmology. Spontaneous generation dramatizes the atemporal creation of the human form, whereas the infant Ḥayy’s landing on the island reinforces the philosophical belief in the eternity of species. Both Jaʿfar and Ibn Ṭufayl appeal to the Neoplatonic doctrine of emanation to reconcile the eternity of the physical world with belief in God’s creative agency. The resemblance of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān to Sarāʾir prompts broader reconsidera­tion of Ismāʿīlī influence on non-Ismāʿīlī intellectual culture. (shrink)

In this paper, I set an aspect of what it is to live a flourishing life against the backdrop of neo liberal trends that continue to influence educational policy across the globe. The view I set out is in sharp contrast to any narrow assumption that education’s main task is the measurement of high performing individuals who will thus contribute to an economically viable society. Instead, I explore and argue for a conception of what constitutes a flourishing life that is (...) embedded in a more pragmatist analysis of what education may be. The argument begins with developing the centrality of embodiment to aesthetic sensibility and goes on to suggest how collective understanding of this within a community could constitute a sense of performance and thus contribute to the educational aim of developing a full and flourishing life. The argument is that this way of seeing life could have implications for educational practice, the role of the teacher and could help to reconfigure how education is experienced by the young. (shrink)

Christine Swanton presents a new target centred virtue ethics, which is opposed to orthodox virtue ethics in two major ways. She rejects the 'natural goodness' metaphysics of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics in favour of a 'hermeneutic ontology' of ethics, and she offers a new target centred framework for assessing rightness of acts.

John Watling; IX*—Are Causes Events or Facts?, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 74, Issue 1, 1 June 1974, Pages 161–170, https://doi.org/10.1093/.

Christine M. Korsgaard is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. She was educated at the University of Illinois and received a Ph.D. from Harvard. She has held positions at Yale, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago, and visiting positions at Berkeley and UCLA. She is a member of the American Philosophical Association and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has published extensively on Kant, and about (...) moral philosophy and its history, the theory of practical reason, the philosophy of action, and personal identity. Her two published books are The Sources of Normativity (1992) and Creating the King- dom of Ends (1996). (shrink)

What do we mean when we say we act "for a reason"? What is the connection between Reason, as a faculty, and the reasons of our actions? This article maintains that Aristotle and Kant had a similar answer to this question. Moreover: the answer they give can help us to clarify the controversy between moral realism and empiricism regarding the ontological and epistemological status of what we call the reason of an action.

Christine M. Korsgaard presents a compelling new view of our moral relationships to the other animals. She offers challenging answers to such questions as: Are people superior to animals, and does it matter morally if we are? Is it all right for us to eat animals, experiment on them, make them work for us, and keep them as pets?

Physicians often express frustration with the ‘system’ in which they work. Over time, this frustration may put them at risk of burnout and disengagement, which may impact patient care. In this study, we aimed to understand the nature of the system flaws that physicians identified in their published narratives and to explore their self-representation as agents of change. We reviewed all reflective narratives published in four medical journals between January 2015 and December 2017. By consensus, we identified those that addressed (...) system flaws. Using content and narrative analysis, we analyzed the types of flaws and the physicians’ orientation to the flawed system. We identified seven recurring system flaws—five related to medical culture: failures of communication, erosive impact of the hidden curriculum, inadequate health advocacy, frenzied pace of work, and experience of stigma. Less frequently, physicians’ narratives also exposed limited and disparate healthcare resources and restrictive institutional practices as impeding patient-centered care. Physicians expressed agency to create change foremost when writing about flaws related to medical culture. While physicians are challenged by system flaws, they strive to practice in ways that do not succumb to them. We saw tension between the elements outside the physician’s control and those within it. This tension becomes a source of distress when the compromises that emerge from system flaws move physicians away from the values that define their professional identity. (shrink)

La pensée de Walter Benjamin constitue la tentative aussi lucide que désespérée d’un intellectuel de contrer ce qu’il sait inévitable : la déshumanisation d’un monde dont la tradition et les valeurs culturelles ont été liquidées par l’expérience de la grande guerre et l’avènement de la barbarie fasciste qui fera de l’histoire une catastrophe. Les stratégies politiques et esthétiques que Benjamin développe afin de combattre la menace du fascisme peuvent être résumées sous la notion de « barbar...