This research project substantially extends the reach of serial argument theory from its nearly exclusive application to close relationships, into the workplace. Data were gathered on general motivation to engage in a serial argument, specific goals, several tactics, and three outcome measures. Results indicated causal relations from goals and motivations to tactics, and from tactics to outcomes. A structural equation model was successful in fitting the whole system of variables. Results were generally compatible with those found in relational and classroom (...) settings, and help build the case that serial arguing has certain base characteristics that may not change much when settings are quite substantially different. (shrink)

What contemporary social and political significance, if any, can we draw from Nietzsche’s philosophy? The present essay looks into this question by first examining the broader debate regarding anti-foundational tendencies in post-Nietzschean discourses and their alleged threat to liberal democracies. Thatthese tendencies can indeed be traced back to Nietzsche, specifically through Martin Heidegger’s problematic transmission, will then be discussed along withthe more general theme of how metaphysics stands in socio-political practices and why metaphysics should be overcome. The sorts of problems (...) stemming fromHeidegger’s transmission of Nietzsche are philosophical and historical in nature, both of which make the contemporary socio-political significance of Nietzsche’sphilosophy difficult to discern. The essay examines some of these problems through a discussion of an historical encounter between Heidegger and Eugen Fink. The essay concludes with the thought that despite the various ways in which the name of Nietzsche haunts contemporary discourses, a promise for liberal democracy is also contained therein. (shrink)

Las tasas de producción y consumo de alimentos en el mundo se hacen insostenibles. Estados Unidos está a la cabeza de los países que exceden con creces su capacidad en esta materia. La causa principal es la incorporación de combustibles fósiles en la producción de alimentos desde 1950, tanto en forma de energía cinética, como también en los pesticidas y otros productos utilizados en su producción. Según el autor, literalmente nos estamos comiendo los hidrocarburos rápidamente y sin tener ninguna alternativa (...) con la cual reemplazarlos. Sólo un restablecimiento de un equilibrio entre capacidad productiva sostenible y consumo alimentario podría evitar la crisis que se avista en el horizonte. (shrink)

The author of the classic book Influencing Human Behavior here gives a brilliant overview of both ancient wisdom and contemporary science, in dialogue and cooperation with one another in the search for a new philosophy of life. Read the author recommended by Dale Carnegie in his classic books, now back in print in a brand new edition!

Should we hold beliefs only insofar as they are rationally supportable? According to Allen W. Wood, we're morally obliged to do so—and yet how does this apply to religious beliefs? _Unsettling Obligations_ examines these and related ethical and philosophical issues, taking and defending stances on many of them. Along with the theme of belief and evidence, other topics include a historical perspective of philosophy based on the Enlightenment rationalist tradition and a study of how our practical commitments help define (...) truth and value. (shrink)

One important proposal about the nature of well-being, prudential value or the personal good is that intrinsic values for a person ought to ‘resonate’ with the person for whom they are good. Indeed, virtually everyone agrees that there is something very plausible about this necessary condition on the building blocks of a good life. Given the importance of this constraint, however, it may come as something of a surprise how little reason we actually have to believe it. In this paper, (...) I'd like to do two things: first, to illustrate just how philosophically tenuous this thesis is, despite its apparent attraction, and to correct, or at least begin to correct, this state of affairs. My argument—which I call the ‘relationship to value’ argument—focuses in part on what it means to be a valuer—specifically, the peculiar relationship valuing agents bear to objects of value. (shrink)

The book uses evolutionary principles to explain tribalism, a way of thinking and acting that divides the world into Us versus Them and achieves cooperation within a group at the expense of erecting insuperable obstacles to cooperation among groups. Tribalism represents political controversies as supreme emergencies in which ordinary moral constraints do not apply and as zero-sum, winner take all contests. Tribalism not only undermines democracy by ruling out compromise, bargaining, and respect for the Other; it also reverses one of (...) the most important milestones of progress in how we understand morality: the insight that morality is not a list of commands to be unthinkingly followed, but rather that morality centrally involves the giving and taking of reasons among equals. Tribalism rejects this insight by branding the Other as a being who is incapable of reasoning. (shrink)

An important constraint on the nature of intrinsic value---the “Supervenience Principle” (SP)---holds that some object, event, or state of affairs ϕ is intrinsically valuable only if the value of ϕ supervenes entirely on ϕ 's intrinsic properties. In this paper, I argue that SP should be rejected. SP is inordinately restrictive. In particular, I argue that no SP-respecting conception of intrinsic value can accept the importance of psychological resonance, or the positive endorsement of persons, in explaining value.

Preference-based theories of prudential value seem to generate an absurd result when combined with commonplace platitudes about prudential rationality: it would seem that if the satisfaction of our preferences is the source (or even a source) of prudential value, then prudential rationality must be neutral (in, at least, a troubling range of cases) between taking steps to achieve the objects of one's preferences and merely engineering one's preferences to take as their object(s) that which obtains. Either way, one seems to (...) conform to the prudential demand to promote one's well-being. But this is widely held to be counterintuitive. In this article, I argue that this verdict arises only given eminently controvertible interpretations of a preference-based axiology and of the constitution of prudential reasons. (shrink)

The demandingness of act consequentialism is well-known and has received much sophisticated treatment.1 Few have been content to defend AC’s demands. Much of the response has been to jettison AC in favor of a similar, though significantly less demanding view.2 The popularity of this response is easy to understand. Excessive demandingness appears to be a strong mark against any moral theory. And if excessive demandingness is a worry of this kind, AC’s goose appears cooked: attempts to show that AC is (...) not particularly demanding are implausible at best. Given that AC requires agents to promote goodness, and given that “goodness” here is most often construed as impartial and aggregative between persons, were I in a position to save others from death by sacrificing myself, I am morally required, on. (shrink)

My intent is to paint in rather broad strokes Bill Poteat’s intellectual agenda, as I came to understand it, and how Michael Polanyi fit into that agenda for Poteat alongside other major intellectual mentors. Bill’s agenda was to expose critically and, so far as possible, to counter the fateful consequences of what he called the “prepossessions of the European Enlightenment” regarding human knowing, human doing, and human being. Although his work involved conceptual analysis, the nature of this conceptual-archaeology was far (...) more profound than what usually goes by the name “conceptual analysis” or “cultural conceptual analysis.” In effect it sought first to bring to light how the conceptual resources by which modern intellectuals reflectively consider anything, fatefully result in a state of self-abstractedness – indeed, a kind of culturally constituted insanity – that loses touch with the actual, concrete object of one’s concern, with one’s actual concrete self, and with the wellsprings of one’s intellectual passion and creativity. Second, Bill sought to cure this cultural insanity, person by person, by ushering his students and readers into re-placement of themselves into themselves, in possession of themselves, within the concrete context of their embodied personhood. Poteat called attention to the way that our powers of reflection quite systematically forget their contextual rootedness in this cultural matrix and, beneath that, in our lived bodies – ultimately in our personhood. Polanyi served to assist Poteat in this endeavor, I believe, as much as, or more than, did any other of Poteat’s several intellectual mentors. (shrink)

Actions can be moral or immoral, surely, but can also be prudent or imprudent, rude or polite, sportsmanlike or unsportsmanlike, and so on. The fact that diverse methods of evaluating action exist seems to give rise to a further question: what distinguishes moral evaluation in particular? In this article, my concern is methodological. I argue that any account of the distinctiveness of morality cannot be prior to substantive inquiry into the content of moral reasons, requirements, and concerns. The genuine distinctiveness (...) of morality will become clear only after we have determined what those very reasons, requirements, and concerns really are. (shrink)

Some have argued that unipersonal concepts of God collapse into incoherence, so that such a being is no more possible than a square circle, or at least that such theologies are, as non-trinitarian, significantly less probable than some trinitarian theologies. I discuss the general strategy and examine recent arguments by William Lane Craig, C. Stephen Layman, Thomas V. Morris, and Richard Swinburne based on divine love, flourishing, and glory. I show why none of these arguments is compelling, as each has (...) at least one weak premise. (shrink)

Many have thought that an important feature of any just society is the establishment and maintenance of a suitable basic minimum: some set of welfare achievements, resources, capabilities, and so on that are guaranteed to all. However, if a basic minimum is a plausible requirement of justice, we must have a theory — a theory of what, precisely, the state owes in terms of these basic needs or achievements and what, precisely, is the proper structure of the obligation to provide (...) them. In Section 1, I will critically examine one recent influential account of the basic minimum: Martha Nussbaum's `human capabilities approach'. I argue that Nussbaum's account has several structural features, few of which are independently plausible, and which create insuperable difficulties when viewed in combination. The failure of Nussbaum's account is instructive, however. It provides motivation for the positive account I sketch in Section 2. Key Words: Martha Nussbaum • welfare • capabilities • autonomy. (shrink)

In this article, I critique a common claim that instrumental value is a form of extrinsic value. Instead, I offer an alternative dispositional analysis of instrumental value, which holds that instrumental value can, in certain circumstances, be an example of intrinsic value. It follows, then, that a popular account of the nature of final value – or value as an end – is false: the Moorean identification of final value with intrinsic value cannot properly distinguish between value as an end (...) and value as a means. (shrink)

This volume contains new and original papers on Martin Heidegger's complex relation to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy. The authors not only critically discuss the many aspects of Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche, they also interpret Heidegger's thought from a Nietzschean perspective. Here is presented for the first time an overview of not only Heidegger's and Nietzsche's philosophy but also an overview of what is alive - and dead - in their thinking. Many authors through a reading of Heidegger and Nietzsche deal with (...) current issues such as technology, ecology, and politics. This volume is of interest for everyone interested in Heidegger's and Nietzsche's thought. Contributors include: Babette Babich, Charles Bambach, Robert Bernasconi, Virgilio Cesarone, Stuart Elden, Michael Eldred, Markus Enders, Charles Feitosa, Véronique Fóti, Luanne T. Frank, Jeffery Kinlaw, Theodore Kisiel, William D. Melaney, Eric Sean Nelson, Abraham Olivier, Friederike Rese, Karlheinz Ruhstorfer, Harald Seubert, Robert Sinnerbrink, Robert Switzer, Jorge Uscatescu Barrón, Nancy A. Weston, Dale Wilkerson, Angel Xolocotzi, Jens Zimmermann. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to articulate a version of qualitative hedonism, grounded in the value theory of the British Moralists. I argue that this view is novel, presents substantial advantages over alternative hedonisms (including rival approaches to qualitative hedonism and its quantitative cousin), and can avoid classic challenges to qualitative hedonism that emerged in the post‐Mill era. If I succeed, this is a significant result for substantive value theory, given the dismissiveness with which qualitative hedonism is generally treated in (...) the literature on the good. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege is one of the founding figures of analytic philosophy, whose contributions to logic, philosophical semantics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mathematics set the agenda for future generations of theorists in these and related areas. Dale Jacquette's lively and incisive biography charts Frege's life from its beginnings in small-town north Germany, through his student days in Jena, to his development as an enduringly influential thinker. Along the way Jacquette considers Frege's ground-breaking Begriffschrift, in which he formulated his (...) 'ideal logical language', his magisterial Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, and his complex relation to thinkers including Husserl and especially Russell, whose Paradox had such drastic implications for Frege's logicism. Jacquette concludes with a thoughtful assessment of Frege's legacy. His rich and informative biography will appeal to all who are interested in Frege's philosophy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Perfectionism, the view according to which the good for an x is constituted by flourishing as an x, is a venerable account of the good, the popularity of which has only grown in recent decades. In this paper, I assess the merits of perfectionism in its traditional form, and argue in favor of a refinement. Specifically, I focus on traditional perfectionism’s account of the Central Axiological Category (CAC)---the kind ("x") that subjects fall into for the purposes of determining their (...) good. I argue that shifting our understanding of the CAC from the traditional human category to the category of valuer is faithful to the most significant perfectionist insights, and does not succumb to the numerous and substantial challenges for the traditional understanding. (shrink)

Designed for courses in environmental ethics, this reader is also an attractive supplement to contemporary moral issues or any applied ethics courses. It features readings in environmental ethics, including Paul Taylor's seminal essay The Ethics of Respect for Nature and works by Vice Preseident Al Gore, Jr. and J. Baird Callicott. Features: * Includes only readings of highest quality, chosen to be accessible to students who do not have an extensive knowledge of philosophy. * Exposes students to all major areas (...) of environmental ethics, including wilderness, pollution and animals. * Ideal length is appropriate as a core text or supplement to a variety of contemporary ethics courses. * Extensive bibliography provides a unique resource for research materials in this growing field. * Essays contain philosohical arguments as well as critique. * Presents an agenda of protection and stewardship that involves students in the management of our planets ecosystem. (shrink)

This chapter first identifies what is extremely valuable and distinctive in the approach to Ethics Glover takes in Humanity. It then goes on to argue that Glover's approach is incomplete, because it is insufficiently empirical and, more importantly because it lacks a conceptual framework capable of identifying the full range of topics for empirically informed Ethics research. The needed conceptual framework must incorporate social moral epistemology, which focuses on the interaction between the moral‐epistemic virtues and vices of individuals and the (...) moral‐epistemic functions of institutions. Through the use of historical examples of the sort Glover appeals to in Humanity, this chapter shows that work in Ethics must pay more attention to the ethics of believing and to the role that institutions play in the formation of systems of belief. (shrink)

(2013). The Authority of Competence and Quality as Extrinsic. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 78-99. doi: 10.1080/09608788.2012.689752.