Slavery has long stood as a mirror image to the conception of a free person in republican theory. This essay contends that slavery deserves this central status in a theory of freedom, but a more thorough examination of slavery in theory and in practice will reveal additional insights about freedom previously unacknowledged by republicans. Slavery combines imperium (state domination) and dominium (private domination) in a way that both destroys freedom today and diminishes opportunities to achieve freedom tomorrow. Dominium and imperium (...) working together are a greater affront to freedom than either working alone. However, an examination of slavery in practice, focusing on the experiences of American slaves, demonstrates that republicanisms’ acknowledged strategies for freedom-seeking, acquiring insulation from domination through law and through norms, do not encompass the full range of options. Slaves also seek freedom through physical absence, economic activity, and culture. The account of slavery and freedom developed here suggests republican accounts of freedom should either give up their focus on thresholds of freedom, or consider the possibility of a plural conception of freedom that extends beyond just freedom as non-domination to include freedom as collective world-making, or both. (shrink)

Understanding students’ learned hopelessness and academic self-esteem is important because the sense of controllability and competence perception can predict deficits in achievement-oriented behaviours and achievement performance. A survey was conducted to examine the role of learned hopelessness and academic self-esteem in academic achievement. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the mediational roles of learned hopelessness and academic self-esteem in the academic achievement of 165 Hong Kong junior secondary students. The findings implied that learned hopelessness and academic self-esteem are distinct (...) constructs which play separate mediational roles between prior academic failure and academic achievement. However, the model comparisons indicated that there was no direct effect of learned hopelessness on academic self-esteem or vice versa. (shrink)

For those open to the possibility that philosophical thought can improve life, David Hume's Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary have something to say. In the first comprehensive study of the Essays, Margaret Watkins engages closely with these neglected texts and shows how they provide important insights into Hume's perspective on the breadth and depth of human life, arguing that the Essays reveal his continued commitment to philosophy as a discipline that can promote both social and individual progress. Addressing topics (...) such as politics, war, slavery, the priesthood, the development of industry, aesthetics, emotional disorders, egoism, friendship, sexuality, gender relations, and the nature of philosophy itself, the volume examines Hume's purposes and aims against the backdrop of the eighteenth century society in which he lived. It will be of interest to scholars of modern thought in philosophy, politics, history, and economics. (shrink)

Taxonomies of the passions have long claimed to serve a quest for self-knowledge, by specifying conditions under which certain passions arise, formal objects they possess, and qualities essential to their particular feelings. I argue that David Hume's theory of the passions provides resources for a different kind of self-knowledge – a sceptical self-knowledge depending on our ability to articulate how the passions feel rather than always identifying our passions as tokens of an identifiable passion-type. These resources are distinctions between (...) four qualitative aspects that passions may possess – pleasantness or painfulness, calmness or violence, invigoration or softening, and directedness or lack thereof towards specific actions. Reflection on these aspects produces a more accurate understanding of the nature of our emotions and chastens our judgmental tendencies in ways that benefit both self and others. (shrink)

Recent criticisms of non-reductive accounts of color assume that the only arguments for such accounts are a priori arguments. I put forward a posteriori arguments for a non-reductive account of colors which avoids those criticisms.

RésuméPaul Boghossian et David Velleman ont soutenu que les théories physicalistes des couleurs — celles qui identifient les propriétés de couleur avec certaines propriétés physiques des objets ou de la lumière—ne peuvent accommoder l'intuition profonde selon laquelle nous ne pouvons pas être dans l'erreur au sujet des contenus représentationnels de nos expériences de couleur. Contre Boghossian et Velleman, je soutiens que cette intuition prétendue que les théories physicalistes ne réussisssent pas à accommoder, nest pas elle-même intuitivement plausible. En fait, (...) c'est clairement un avantage des théories physicalistes que selon elles, les experiences de couleur n'affichent pas avec evidence leurs contenus représentationnels. (shrink)

In their book, Equal Is Unfair, Watkins and Brook argue that equality of income and wealth is not needed in order to engage in the creative work required for human flourishing. One can live a successful life even though others have more resources and opportunities. It is contended here that this argument is convincing, but contrary to Watkins and Brook, it does not suffice to rule out all justifications for redistribution.

In an explanation, what does the explaining and what gets explained? What are the relata of the explanation relation? Candidates include: people, events, facts, sentences, statements, and propositions.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Comments on Margaret Watkins, The Philosophical Progress of Hume’s “Essays”Jacqueline Taylor (bio)After David Hume’s death, Adam Smith wrote a letter to Hume’s publisher, William Strahan, to recount some of the final words and the attitude of “our late excellent friend, Mr. Hume.”1 Despite declining health and increasing weakness, Hume faced his approaching demise “with great cheerfulness” (EMPL xlvi). He had recently been reading Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, (...) and although feeling he had every reason “to die contented,” Smith describes the “jocular excuses” Hume might make to Charon to delay his death (EMPL xlv). He first requests more time so that he can see how the public responds to the latest corrections he had been making to his works, but Charon replied that this would only lead Hume to want more time to make further corrections. Hume tries another tack: “Have a little patience, good Charon, I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of the public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition,” to which Charon replies, “You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years... Get into the boat this instant, you lazy loitering rogue” (EMPL xlvi). This imaginary dialogue makes evident Hume’s self-awareness as an author who cared greatly about both the correctness of his written works and the influence of these works on the public.In her book, Margaret Watkins argues that Hume’s concern to open the eyes of the public goes well beyond attempts to bring about the downfall of systems of superstition.2 She credits him with the broader aim of writing essays for a literate audience that would stimulate both public and individual improvement in various areas of human activity, including government, work, aesthetic experience, and intimate [End Page 155] relationships. The first three chapters of the book examine the case for Hume’s concern with public improvement. Chapter 1 focuses primarily on the political essays, and examines Hume’s account of governing and his criticism of the irrationality apt to arise with divisive political factionalism. Chapter 2 turns to inequalities of power and the circumstances that allow some to exercise to a greater degree the domineering tendency that is part of human nature. Watkins uses Hume’s essay on the population size of ancient and modern societies to reconstruct his view on the ills—to both masters and slaves—of ancient slaveholding. She complicates this discussion by looking at modern slaveholding in the colonies, and Hume’s puzzling lack of attention to this. In the ancient world, slaveholding resulted from war and conquest, and Watkins examines how ancient warfare also led to greater ferocity and anger in fighting and exacerbated cruelty (a trait Hume had deemed the worst vice in the Treatise [T 3.3.3.8]).3 This is another place where Watkins sees Hume taking stock of modern improvements. In the wide-ranging third chapter, entitled “Working,” Watkins considers economic circumstances as moral causes that can shape character, highlighting the importance for Hume of the commercial virtues, especially industry.4 She also shows that in the four essays on happiness, modeled on Hellenistic sects, each type of philosopher regards industry, or at least occupation, as essential to human happiness. Watkins concludes that the need for industry is thus something we are naturally motivated to seek out, and so an integral part of human nature. Chapter 4, on “Composing,” shows Watkins’s talents as a philosophical essayist in her own right, as she relates art and other forms of beauty to the cultivation of calm passions. We find here an insightful discussion of art, whether composing or consuming, as having particularly therapeutic effects on melancholy and other forms of nervous conditions. Chapters 5 and 6 take up, respectively, love for oneself and love for others. The former looks at the importance Hume places on both self-love and pride. Here Watkins draws primarily on Hume’s more morally theoretical works, both the Treatise and EPM, since they have more to say about self-valuing. Chapter 6 shows how we may fruitfully read... (shrink)

The career of the American photographer Carleton E. Watkins spanned more than fifty years. It is his giant photographs of Yosemite, from the "best general view," that most effectively articulate his artistic vision. The J. Paul Getty Museum holds more than fourteen hundred pictures by Watkins, making him the best-represented nineteenth-century photographer in the collection. In Focus: Carleton Watkins features approximately fifty of these works, including mammoth plates, stereographs, albumen prints, and cabinet and boudoir cards. The plates are accompanied by (...) commentaries written by Peter E. Palmquist, an independent scholar of the history of photography. Mr. Palmquist, along with David Featherstone, Tom Fels, Weston Naef, David Robertson, and Amy Rule, were participants in a 1996 colloquium on Watkins and his career. An edited transcript of their discussion and a chronological overview of Watkins's life and art follow the plate section. (shrink)

Eric Watkins has argued on philosophical, textual, and historical grounds that Kant’s account of causation in the first Critique should not be read as an attempt to refute Hume’s account of causation. In this paper, I challenge the arguments for Watkins’ claim. Specifically, I argue (1) that Kant’s philosophical commitments, even on Watkins’ reading, are not obvious obstacles to refuting Hume, (2) that textual evidence from the “Disciple of Pure Reason” suggests Kant conceived of his account of causation as such (...) a refutation, and (3) that none of Hume’s early German critics provided responses to this account that would have satisfied Kant. Watkins’ reading of Kant’s account of causation is thus more compatible with traditional views about Kant’s relationship to Hume than Watkins believes. (shrink)

Dr Chaudhury is concerned to defend what is responsible and hopeful in contemporary ecological thinking, but to avoid the trap of denying that any positive contribution can be made by western science and technology. Critical rationalists do not need to agree with her suggestions and recommendations in order to welcome her positioning of environmental issues alongside the traditional human and political debates about freedom. The Indian perspective that informs this book is particularly impressive and interesting. David Miller (University of (...) Warwick) Professor Mahasweta Chaudhury is Professor for Philosophy at Calcutta University in India. In the late sixties she studied at the London School of Economics under Karl Popper, John Watkins, Alan Musgrave and Imre Lakatos. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Though This Be Madness, Yet There Is Method in ’T”A Positive Account of MadnessValentina Cardella, PhD (bio)What does it mean to be mad? How can we define mental disorder? The question is still widely discussed among psychiatrists and philosophers, and what exactly distinguishes sanity and insanity remains unclear. Despite this lack of clarity, the common conceptualization of madness is that mental disorders are impairments in rationality: people with mental (...) disorders are generally believed to have impairments in reasoning and logic (Bermúdez, 2001; Edwards, 1981; Harvey, Watkins, Mansell, & Shafran, 2004).Yet, the result of this conception is that we fail to understand madness. We do not understand how, for example, schizophrenic patients can be more logical than healthy people in some reasoning tasks (Mellet et al., 2006; Owen, Cutting, & David, 2007), or delusional patients can be perfectly rational in defending their ideas (Cardella, 2020), or depressive people can be more realistic than non-clinical subjects (Moore & Fresco, 2012). In contrast, if we consider rationality as the core feature of sanity, we fail to understand sanity, too, because normal people exhibit many kinds of biases and heuristics, and thus irrationality is widespread in the general population (Bortolotti, 2020; Johnson-Laird, 2006; Evans, 2002; Kahneman, Tversky, & Slovic, 1982).In his paper, Garson focuses on Late Modern theorists of madness (Locke, Kant, Wigan, and Heinroth) to reframe the problem and provide a positive account of mental disorder. These authors contrast madness to idiocy, rather than sanity, and therefore their conception of madness is very different: “while idiocy is marked by the diminished, or even abolished, functioning of the reasoning power, madness is marked by its perverse functioning. The mad person “has” reason, but deploys it in a perverse, improper, or unseemly manner” (Garson, 2023, p. 286).In his reading of Late Modern authors, Garson provides a new ontology of mental disorder, that goes beyond an absence of reason, and has also political and social implications. Furthermore, he reminds us that every scientific discipline has its philosophical assumptions. In defining madness, [End Page 305] we cannot help but choose a contrasting class, and each choice will have very different consequences. Even if psychiatry is a medical discipline, which aims to endorse a neutral view of mental disorder, it is impossible for it to be unbiased and impartial. All the more so, for it has to deal with human suffering and fragility.But, in this article, there is one crucial question that remains unanswered. In his analysis of Late Modern theorization of madness, Garson comes to the conclusion that madness is marked by a perverse deployment of reason. Yet, who decides when reason is deployed in a perverse manner? While the lack of rationality is something that we can detect easily enough, the task of defining precisely what is an ‘improper’ or ‘perverse’ use of reason is much harder. In other words, it seems to me that, in replacing the ‘lack of rationality’ paradigm with ‘the perverse rationality paradigm,’ the question of what is madness still remains open, and, most important, some normative aspects remain necessary. To recognize when rationality is improperly used, we have to adopt an evaluative stance, which defines what a proper use of reason would be.Valentina [email protected] University of MessinaValentina Cardella Valentina Cardella is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Language at the University of Messina, Italy. Her research interests encompass cognitive sciences, philosophy of language, and psychopathology.The author reports no conflicts of interest.Commentary submitted on June 13, 2023Accepted on June 13, 2023ReferencesBermúdez, J. L. (2001). Normativity and rationality in delusional psychiatric disorders. Mind and Language 16, 457–93. Google ScholarBortolotti, L. (2020). The epistemic innocence of irrational beliefs. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google ScholarCardella, V. (2020). Rationality in mental disorders: too little or too much? European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 16 (2), 13–36. Google ScholarEdwards, R. B. (1997). Mental health as rational autonomy. In Edwards, R. B. (ed.), Ethics of psychiatry: Insanity, rational autonomy, and mental health care. New York: Prometheus Books. Google ScholarEvans, J. (2002). Logic and human reasoning: an assessment of the deduction paradigm. Psychological Bulletin 128... (shrink)

David Spurrett, David Papineau; A note on the completeness of ‘physics’, Analysis, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 January 1999, Pages 25–29, https://doi.org/10.1093/anal.

David Sobel defends subjectivism about well-being and reasons for action: the idea that normativity flows from what an agent cares about, that something is valuable because it is valued. In these essays Sobel explores the tensions between subjective views of reasons and morality, and concludes that they do not undermine subjectivism.

Nosso artigo irá avaliar a contribuição de uma teoria intensional para projetos de filosofia da ciência. Esperamos explorar o conceito de intensão, que fez parte da polêmica semântica do século XX, para discutir a natureza dos enunciados da ciência e suas diferenças de profundidade. Optamos por dar a seguinte forma à argumentação: almejamos apresentar indícios para a plausibilidade da tese de que as intensões contribuem para marcar diferenças de conteúdo preditivo das proposições. Argumentaremos que essas diferenças falham em ser avaliadas (...) extensionalmente. Sugerimos explorar a diferença entre intensões carnapianas (Carnap 1891-1970) e millianas (Stuart Mill 1806-1873). A linha de contraste será traçada a partir dos problemas para os quais os autores elaboraram seu conceito: as primeiras para ampliar o universo extensional da interpretação com casos possíveis mapeados por um modelo (as quais chamaremos de extensionalidade estendida), e as segundas para resolver problemas de profundidade teórica, entendidos como questões de projeção e predição. A sequência do artigo avalia o desafio de Quine à concepção carnapiana de intensão, e explora a seguinte opção: a de que uma versão profunda (milliana) do conceito de intensão e analiticidade não seria alvo da crítica de Quine. Passamos, por fim, por um exame de possíveis alinhamentos e alianças com o racionalismo crítico recente (David Miller, J. Watkins), para concluir que o universo da filosofia da ciência está aberto a discutir a contribuição de uma noção não-extensional de significação. (shrink)

In an important departure from theories of causation, David Owens proposes that coincidences have no causes, and that a cause is something which ensures that its effects are no coincidence. In Causes and Coincidences, he elucidates the idea of a coincidence as an event which can be analysed into constituent events, the nomological antecedents of which are independent of each other. He also suggests that causal facts can be analysed in terms of non-causal facts, including relations of necessity. Thus, (...) causation is defined in terms of coincidence, and coincidence without reference to causation. David Owens challenges the ideas associated with Hume, Davidson and Lewis, constructing a theory which distinguishes nomological necessity and sufficiency from their logical counterparts. He is able to offer novel solutions to the major problems of causation, including the direction of causation, the logical form of causal statements, the distinction betwen causal connections and logical connections, and the relationship between psychological and physical causation. (shrink)

In this new textbook two Catholic ethicists with extensive teaching experience present a moral theology based on vision. David Matzko McCarthy and James M. Donohue draw widely from the Western philosophical tradition while integrating biblical and theological themes in order to explore such fundamental questions as What is good? The fourteen chapters in Moral Vision are short and thematic. Substantive study questions engage with primary texts and encourage students to apply theory to everyday life and common human experiences. The (...) book is accessibly written and flexible enough to fit into any undergraduate or seminary course on ethics. (shrink)

David Gauthier is one of the most outstanding and influential philosophers working in moral theory today, and his book Morals by Agreement has established him as a preeminent defender of contractarian moral theory. This volume brings together a selection of his best essays on contractarianism, many of which have become difficult to find.

As the President's Council on Bioethics emphasized in a recent report, rapid growth of biotechnologies creates increasingly many possibilities for enhancing human traits. This article addresses the claim that enhancement via biotechnology is inherently problematic for reasons pertaining to our identity. After clarifying the concept of enhancement, and providing a framework for understanding human identity, I examine the relationship between enhancement and identity. Then I investigate two identity-related challenges to biotechnological enhancements: (1) the charge of inauthenticity and (2) the charge (...) of violating inviolable core characteristics. My thesis is that a lucid, plausible understanding of human identity largely neutralizes these charges, liberating our thinking from some seductive yet unsound objections to enhancement via biotechnology. (shrink)

With contributions from medicine, psychology and philosophy, Pathways into the Jungian World looks at the central issues of commonality and difference in phenomenology and analytical psychology. The essays investigate how existential phenomenology and analytical psychology have been involved in the same fundamental cultural and therapeutic project. They both legitimize the subtlety, complexity, and depth of experience in an age when the meaning of experience has been abandoned to the dictates of pharmaceutical technology, economics and medical psychiatry. The contributors reveal how (...) Jung's relationship to the phenomenological tradition is being developed and rigorously show that the psychological resonance of the world is immediately available for phenomenological description. Contributors: Lionel Corbett, Veronica Goodchild, John Haule, David Michael Levin, Stanton Marlan, Bertha Mook, Robert Romanyshyn, Ronald Schenk, Charles E. Scott, Eva Marie Simms, Michael P. Sipiora, Mary Watkins, Mark Welman. (shrink)

In his writings, David Hume set out to bridge the gap between the learned world of the academy and the marketplace of polite society. This collection, drawing largely on his Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, which was even more popular than his famous Treatise of Human Nature, comprehensively shows how far he succeeded. From `Of Essay Writing' to `Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences' Hume embraces a staggering range of social, cultural, political, demographic, and historical (...) concerns. With the scope typical of the Scottish Enlightenment, he charts the state of civil society, manners, morals, and taste, and the development of political economy in the mid-eighteenth century. These essays represent not only those areas where Hume's arguments are revealingly typical of his day, but also where he is strikingly innovative in a period already famous for its great thinkers. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

The Addresses to the German Nation is one of Fichte's best-known works. It is also his most controversial work because of its nationalist elements. In this book, David James places this text and its nationalism within the context provided by Fichte's philosophical, educational and moral project of creating a community governed by pure practical reason, in which his own foundational philosophical science or Wissenschaftslehre could achieve general recognition. Rather than marking a break in Fichte's philosophy, the Addresses to the (...) German Nation and some lesser-known texts from the same period are shown to develop themes already present in his earlier writings. The themes discussed include the opposition between idealism and dogmatism, the role of Fichte's 'popular' lectures and writings in leading individuals to the standpoint of idealism, the view of history demanded by idealism and the role of the state in history. (shrink)

This article provides a systematic analysis of the proposal to use Covid‐19 vaccination status as a criterion for admission of patients with Covid‐19 to intensive care units (ICUs) under conditions of resource scarcity. The general consensus is that it is inappropriate to use vaccination status as a criterion because doing so would be unjust; many health systems, including the UK National Health Service, are based on the principle of equality of access to care. However, the analysis reveals that there are (...) several unique features of Covid vaccination status in the context of a pandemic that make this issue disanalogous to cases (such as lung cancer caused by smoking) discussed previously. First, there is equality in access to care at the point of vaccination; the unvaccinated refuse the offer of preventive care when they decline vaccination, weakening their claim to ongoing care if they become ill (this is qualitatively different from ‘poor lifestyle choices’ such as smoking). Second, the decision of one person to refuse vaccination substantially increases the risk that they will become seriously ill and need ICU care; the person who chooses not to get vaccinated thus potentially increases the pressure on intensive care bed provision, as well as increasing the risk that he or she will infect others who in turn might end up needing ICU care. Third, justice cuts both ways, and giving unvaccinated patients equal priority may itself be unjust when other patients have reduced their risk of ending up on the ICU by getting vaccinated. (shrink)

David Hume is commonly known as one of the greatest philosophers to write in English. He was also one of the foremost political and economic theorists and one of the finest historians of the eighteenth century. His political essays reflect the entire range of his intellectual engagement with politics - as political philosophy, political observation and political history - and function as an extension of and supplement to works such as his Treatise of Human Nature and his History of (...) England. The twenty-seven most important essays are presented in this fully annotated edition, together with excerpts from the History of England which illuminate their context. This major addition to the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, philosophy and the history of ideas. (shrink)

For over half a century there have been concerns about increases in the occurrence of academic misconduct by higher education students and this is now claimed to have reached crisis proportions (e.g. Mostrous & Kenber, 2016a ). This study explores the extent to which multi-national faculty judge the effectiveness of higher education institutions in dealing with such misconduct. A survey of multi-national higher education faculty was conducted to explore the perceived barriers to the implementation of academic integrity processes. It asked (...) faculty how likely some hypothetical scenarios of failures of such processes were to occur in the real world of higher education institutions. 63% of our participants perceived there to be institutional and/or faculty barriers to effectively dealing with academic misconduct. Mostly, they blamed the higher education model for this which, in the interests of mass education, has come to prioritise the need for institutions to focus more on their quantity of output as corporate business enterprises than on the integrity of their output as educators. In discussing participants’ comments, about the relationship of faculty to their employing institutions, Schein and Scheins’ ( 2016 ) theory of three levels of organisational culture was used. Participants’ comments suggested that, at the deepest level of organisational culture i.e. basic underlying taken-for-granted assumptions about beliefs and values, inadequate integrity measures have tended to become normalised. Despite the often considerable, efforts of the institutions, organisational barriers were noted which mitigate against faculty behaving professionally i.e. from doing a ‘good job’ in respect of student academic misconduct. Some blame was also placed on faculty. We argue that apparent institutional inability to effectively manage the integrity process, has potentially significant consequences for wider society. We discuss ways in which this situation might be improved including a recommendation that governments regulate this aspect of the corporate social responsibility of higher education institutions as they do other aspects, requiring that it be managed effectively. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution.

Over the past decade or so, several commentators have called for mission-driven research programs on solar geoengineering, also known as solar radiation management (SRM) or climate engineering. Building on the largely epistemic reasons offered by earlier commentators, this paper argues that a well-designed mission-driven research program that aims to evaluate solar geoengineering could promote justice and legitimacy, among other valuable ends. Specifically, an international, mission-driven research program that aims to produce knowledge to enable well-informed decision-making about solar geoengineering could (1) (...) provide a more effective way to identify and answer the questions that policymakers would need to answer; and (2) provide a venue for more efficient, effective, just, and legitimate governance of solar geoengineering research; while (3) reducing the tendency for solar geoengineering research to exacerbate international domination. Thus, despite some risks and limitations, a well-designed mission-driven research program offers one way to improve the governance of solar geoengineering research relative to the ‘investigator-driven’ status quo. (shrink)

Business and society (B&S) scholarship that uses the theoretical perspective of institutionalism combines different research approaches to values. Within the B&S literature drawing on institutionalism, we identified and categorized the research on values according to a spectrum of normative and/or descriptive approaches (including both and neither approaches). Primarily, we focused on how the normative and descriptive approaches interrelate and integrate. We argue that drawing on John Dewey’s pragmatism and Philip Selznick’s institutionalism can help further an integrative approach, which holds great (...) potential for advancing theorization in the B&S field while increasing its practical relevance. (shrink)

For many years, moral philosophers have been debating the conceptual and moral status of the distinction between intending harm and foreseeing harm. In this paper, after surveying some of the objections to the moral significance of this distinction in general, I focus on the special case of state action, arguing that whatever reasons we have to be suspicious about the distinction's moral significance in general, we have very good reasons to believe it lacks intrinsic moral significance when applied to state (...) action. After arguing for this claim, I pursue in a preliminary way some of its implications. (shrink)

In his thoughtful defence of very modest moral enhancement, David DeGrazia1 makes the following assumption: ‘Behavioural improvement is highly desirable in the interest of making the world a better place and securing better lives for human beings and other sentient beings’. Later in the paper, he gives a list of some psychological characteristics that ‘all reasonable people can agree … represent moral defects’. I think I am a reasonable person, and I agree that most if not all items on (...) the lists do represent moral defects—I certainly would regard them as such in a close family member or friend. But if I were in the business of ‘making the world a better place and securing better lives for human beings and other sentient beings’, I would hesitate to prescribe moral enhancement for everyone with these acknowledged defects. A lot of good work, from removing tumours to negotiating treaties, may be best done by people with serious moral defects.For a simple consequentialist, a moral defect is just a trait that tends to make the world a worse place. Not being a consequentialist, I think that moral defects should be identified independently of their tendency to produce worse outcomes. For this reason, I think it's necessary to qualify DeGrazia's starting assumption—I think behavioural improvement may sometimes be undesirable if our goal is to make the world a better place. My reasons will be familiar to readers of Bernard Williams.As …. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Jacques Derrida's extensive early writings devoted considerable attention to "being as presence," the reality underlying the history of metaphysics. In Derrida on Being as Presence: Questions and Quests, David A. White develops the intricate conceptual structure of this notion by close exegetical readings drawn from these writings. White discusses cardinal concepts in Derrida's revamping of theoretical considerations pertaining to language--signification, context, negation, iterability--as these considerations depend on the structure of being as presence and also as they ground "deconstructive" reading. (...) White's appraisal raises questions invoking a range of problems. He deploys these questions in conjunction with thematically related quests that arise given Derrida's conviction that the history of metaphysics, as variations on being as presence, has concealed and skewed vital elements of reality. White inflects this critical apparatus concerning being as presence with texts drawn from that history--e.g., by Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Hume, Kant, Whitehead. The essay concludes with a speculative ensemble of provisional categories, or zones of specificity. Implementing these categories will ground the possibility that philosophy in general and metaphysics in particular can be pursued in ways which acknowledge the relevance of Derrida's thought when integrated with the philosophical enterprise as traditionally understood. (shrink)