Suppose a diner says, 'Can you pass the salt?' Although her utterance is literally a question (about the physical abilities of the addressee), most would take it as a request (that the addressee pass the salt). In such a case, the request is performed indirectly by way of directly asking a question. Accordingly this utterance is known as an indirect speech act. On the standard account of such speech acts, a single utterance constitutes two distinct speech acts. On this account (...) then, 'Can you pass the salt?' is both a question and a request. In a provocative essay, Rod Bertolet argues that there are no indirect speech acts. According to Bertolet, 'Can you pass the salt?' is only a question. It is a question that merely functions as a request (without also being one). In this paper we respond to Bertolet's skeptical argument. Appealing to Searle's theory of speech acts and to certain features of linguistic communication, we argue that, despite Bertolet's challenge, there is good reason to countenance indirect speech acts. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: 1. Astrobiology in societal context Constance Bertka; Part I. Origin of Life: 2. Emergence and the experimental pursuit of the origin of life Robert Hazen; 3. From Aristotle to Darwin, to Freeman Dyson: changing definitions of life viewed in historical context James Strick; 4. Philosophical aspects of the origin-of-life problem: the emergence of life and the nature of science Iris Fry; 5. The origin of terrestrial life: a Christian perspective Ernan McMullin; 6. The alpha and (...) the omega: reflections on the origin and future of life from the perspective of Christian theology and ethics Celia Deane-Drummond; Part II. Extent of Life: 7. A biologist's guide to the Solar System Lynn Rothschild; 8. The quest for habitable worlds and life beyond the Solar System Carl Pilcher; 9. A historical perspective on the extent and search for life Steven J. Dick; 10. The search for extraterrestrial life: epistemology, ethics, and worldviews Mark Lupisella; 11. The implications of discovering extraterrestrial life: different searches, different issues Margaret S. Race; 12. God, evolution, and astrobiology Cynthia S. W. Crysdale; Part III. Future of Life: 13. Planetary ecosynthesis on Mars: restoration ecology and environmental ethics Christopher P. McKay; 14. The trouble with intrinsic value: an ethical primer for astrobiology Kelly C. Smith; 15. God's preferential option for life: a Christian perspective on astrobiology Richard O. Randolph; 16. Comparing stories about the origin, extent, and future of life: an Asian religious perspective Francisca Cho; Index. (shrink)

Written across the disciplines of art history, literature, philosophy, sociology, and theology, the ten essays comprising the collection all insist on multidimensional definitions of evil. Taking its title from a moment in Shakespeare's Tempest when Prospero acknowledges his responsibility for Caliban, this collection explores the necessarily ambivalent relationship between humanity and evil. To what extent are a given society's definitions of evil self-serving? Which figures are marginalized in the process of identifying evil? How is humanity itself implicated in the production (...) of evil? Is evil itself something fundamentally human? These questions, indicative of the kinds of issues raised in this collection, seem all the more pressing in light of recent world events. The ten essays were originally presented at the First Global Conference on Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, held in March 2000 in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. (shrink)

Consider the distinctive qualitative property grass visually appears to have when it visually appears to be green. This property is an example of what I call sensuous color. Whereas early modern mechanists typically argue that bodies are not sensuously colored, Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) disagrees. In cases of veridical perception, she holds that grass is green in precisely the way it visually appears to be. In defense of her realist approach to sensuous colors, Cavendish argues that (i) it is impossible (...) to conceive of colorless bodies, (ii) the very possibility of color experience requires that bodies are sensuously colored, and (iii) the attribution of sensuous colors to bodies provides the best explanation of color constancy. Although some passages might suggest that Cavendish endorses a reductive account of sensuous color, according to which sensuous color reduces to a body's microscopic surface texture (or some other mechanistically respectable property), I argue that she accepts a nonreductive account, on which sensuous color is not thus reducible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Scandal of White Complicity in US Hyper-Incarceration: A Nonviolent Spirituality of White Resistance by Alex Mikulich, Laurie Cassidy, and Margaret PfeilNancy M. RourkeThe Scandal of White Complicity in US Hyper-Incarceration: A Nonviolent Spirituality of White Resistance Alex Mikulich, Laurie Cassidy, and Margaret Pfeil new york: palgrave macmillan, 2013. 203 pp. $90.00As a white American Catholic ethicist, I often envy my Protestant counterparts’ legacy of acknowledging (...) and fighting racism. Catholic moral theology lacks Protestantism’s bodies of literature, activism, and bold ecclesial statements addressing racism in the United States. (For more on this, see Bryan Massingale’s Racial Justice and the Catholic Church.) The Scandal of White Complicity in US Hyper-Incarceration demonstrates how Catholicism might approach American racism using several elements of Catholic theology.The book opens with series editor Mary Jo Iozzo’s introduction to the Content and Context in Theological Ethics series, of which this is the fifth book. A personal and reflective foreword by Sr. Helen Prejean follows. Then the book’s argument begins with a description of the United States’ practice of mass incarceration and brief discussions of what is meant by “whiteness” and “complicity.” This book employs a phenomenological understanding of race and of whiteness, taking whiteness as habitus. The literature about this approach to race and to identity is enormous, but familiarity with that literature is not necessary to follow this book’s presentation, argument, or use of the idea.Each of the book’s three authors has written a two-chapter section. Alex Mikulich’s explanation of white habitus speaks on levels of social thought and of the individual’s experience. Laurie Cassidy’s section looks at the culture of hyperincarceration and the development of the “dangerous black man” myth, and Margaret Pfeil’s section on spirituality works from the beatitudes, John of the Cross, and a wide array of other sources to describe a political spirituality of resistance for white Christians.This book would be most useful to masters-level graduate students in theological ethics or anyone preparing to begin teaching in areas of ethics related to racism or criminal justice (particularly in Catholic institutional settings). Rather than drawing exclusively on Catholic social teaching to talk about white participation in racism, these authors more satisfyingly put many Catholic traditions into action. For example, the book demonstrates careful use of the concepts of complicity, responsibility, participation, and intention; it considers specific [End Page 195] actions while maintaining focus on systems’ structures; and it uses a wide range of Catholic thinkers, including Metz, Copeland, Soelle, Gutiérrez, Carmelite Sr. Constance FitzGerald, Lonergan, Day, and John of the Cross.This book assumes and asserts that racism still exists, that whiteness exists and aims to make itself invisible, and that racism is kept alive through social structures that flow from white habitus. However, the book does not assume the reader’s agreement with any of these. Instead, the book first makes the case that these things are true and then takes next steps toward responsive practices of resistance. Rhetorically tinged homiletic shortcuts are not used to bolster this argument. For example, in similar works, the question of moral culpability for racist social structures is sometimes managed only with a discussion of how such structures distribute benefits and harms unequally. In this book, that argument is not used alone but in tandem with a careful look at the intention of one’s participation in such structures.Minor problems exist. The book would have benefited from one more round of editing to eliminate minor punctuation and writing problems, and the Catholic moral concept of “scandal” receives little systematic attention despite its presence in the title. Otherwise, the book demonstrates well what Catholic moral theology could do if applied to American white racism. Here’s hoping that this is just the beginning of more such scholarship.Nancy M. RourkeCanisius CollegeCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The usual treatment of a dinner table utterance of ‘Can you pass the salt?’ is that it involves an indirect request to pass the salt as well as a direct question about the hearer’s ability to do so: an indirect speech act. These are held to involve two illocutionary forces and two illocutionary acts. Rod Bertolet has raised doubts about whether consideration of such examples warrants the postulation of indirect speech acts and illocutionary forces other than the literal ones. In (...) a recent article, Mary Kate McGowan, Shan Shan Tam, and Margaret Hall claim to show that these doubts are unfounded. The purpose of this paper is to show that they have not established this. (shrink)

THE GOOD 8 THE CLEVER say, those charming verses of Miss Wordsworth's, the first Principal of Lady Margaret Hall. A text, however familiar, is read at the beginning of the discourse, so I shall begin by reading the verses: I WISH to take,  ...

This book argues that a radical political gesture can be found in Søren Kierkegaard’s writings. The chapters navigate an interdisciplinary landscape by placing Kierkegaard’s passionate thought in conversation with the writings of Georg Lukács, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. At the heart of the book’s argument is the concept of “indirect politics,” which names a negative space between methods, concepts, and intellectual acts in the work of Kierkegaard, as well as marking the dynamic relations between Kierkegaard and the (...) aforementioned thinkers. Kierkegaard’s indirect politics is a set of masks that displaces identities from one field to the next: theology masks politics; law masks theology; political theory masks philosophy; and psychology masks literary approaches to truth. As reflected in Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin, and Adorno, this book examines how Kierkegaard’s indirect politics sets into relief three significant motifs: intellectual non-conformism, indirect communication in and through ambiguous identities, and negative dialectics. Bartholomew Ryan is currently a postdoctoral fellow (2011- ) at the Instituto de Filosofia da Nova, New University of Lisbon, Portugal. He holds degrees from Aarhus University, Denmark (PhD), University College, Dublin (MA), and Trinity College, Dublin (1999). He was visiting lecturer at the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin (2007-2011) and Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford (2010), and was a guest scholar at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre in Copenhagen (2007 and 2005) and Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College, Minnesota (2005). He has written extensively on Kierkegaard, and also published articles on Nietzsche, Pessoa, Joyce, Shakespeare and Schmitt. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics 2.4 Aristotle raises a puzzle about moral habituation. Scholars take the puzzle to concern how a learner could perform virtuous actions, given the assumption that virtue is prior to virtuous action. I argue, instead, that Aristotle is concerned to defend the necessity of practice, given the assumption that virtue is reducible to virtuous action.

Russell Hardin writes from a particular perspective, that of rational choice theory. His broad—and ambitious—overall project is to “understand the sway of groups in our time” or, in an alternative formulation, “to understand the motivations of those who act on behalf of groups and to understand how they come to identify with the groups for which they act”.

If you developed Alzheimer disease, would you want to go all the way to the end of what might be a decade‐long course? Some would; some wouldn't. Options open to those who choose to die sooner are often inadequate. Do‐not‐resuscitate orders and advance directives depend on others' cooperation. Preemptive suicide may mean giving up years of life one would count as good. Do‐it‐yourself methods can fail. What we now ask of family and clinicians caring for persons with dementia, and of (...) patients given no better option than to go on with lives they may not want, is unacceptable. To explore how one might better control one's own dying and avoid burdening others with overwhelming care and morally painful choices, we propose a thought experiment: an advance directive implant that would enable persons with early dementia, while competent, to arrange their own deaths without the subsequent intervention of anyone else. (shrink)

Although neglected by psychology, self-respect has been an integral part of philosophical discussion since Aristotle and continues to be a central issue in contemporary moral philosophy. Within this tradition, self-respect is considered to be based on one's capacity for rationality and leads to behaviors that promote autonomy, such as independence, self-control and tenacity. Self-respect elicits behaviors that one should be treated with respect and requires the development and pursuit of personal standards and life plans that are guided by respect for (...) self and others. In contrast, the psychological concept of self-esteem is grounded in the theories of self-concept. As such, self-esteem is a self-evaluation of competency ratios and opinions of significant others that results in either a positive or negative evaluation of one's worthiness and inclusionary status. The major distinction between the two is that while competency ratios and others' opinions are central to self-esteem, autonomy is central to self-respect. We submit that not only is self-respect important in understanding self-esteem, but that it also uniquely contributes to individual functioning. Research is needed to establish the central properties of self-respect and their effects on individual functioning, developmental factors, and therapeutic approaches. (shrink)

I defend moral objectivism against charges that it cannot plausibly preserve or explain morality's action-guiding nature. I take as my starting point the intuitive view that morality has a special connection to motivation: one who genuinely accepts a moral verdict must have a motivating reason to follow its dictates and, indeed, must often enough be motivated to act as it recommends. ;Many have argued that this connection vindicates subjectivism. Some argue that there can be no universally accessible truths whose acknowledgements (...) necessarily give one reason to act, because all reasons for action are based on desires that vary across rational agents. I argue against the Humean doctrine, implicit in this claim, that beliefs alone cannot move rational agents. The 18th-century metaphors of "passive" belief and "active" desire rest on arguments which either beg the question, equivocate, or misunderstand what would be involved in attributing the appropriate motivational power to belief. Others ground their objection in morality's holistic tie to desire, claiming that desires distort truth, rather than reveal it to us. I argue that there is nothing mysterious about the idea that possession of certain desires can be preconditions to seeing how things are. (shrink)

Local knowledge (both technological and sociological) and communication systems represent a logical starting point and a rich body of resources for successful agricultural research, development, and extension (RD&E). Drawing upon concrete examples from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, this essay presents an overview of definitions, topics, and applications of local knowledge in agricultural RD&E. Also noted are caveats, future research and training needs, and human values issues related to the study and utilization of local knowledge systems and their products.