In this paper, I consider a form of skepticism that has a permissive conclusion, according to which we are rationally permitted to suspend judgment in an area, or to have beliefs in that area. I argue that such a form of skepticism is resistant to some traditional strategies of refutation. It also carries a benefit, namely that it increases voluntary control over doxastic states by introducing options, and therefore greater freedom, into the realm of belief. I argue that intellectual preferences (...) and dispositions provide decisive reasons that can settle our doxastic states in such cases. (shrink)

This chapter outlines three programs that aim to use biological insights in support of philosophical positions in ethics: Aristotelian approaches found, for example, in Thomas Hurka and Philippa Foot; Humean approaches found in Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard; and biologically grounded approaches found in of Elliott Sober and Brian Skyrms. The first two approaches begin with a philosophical view, and seek support for it in biology. The third approach begins with biology, and uses it to illuminate the status of morality. (...) This chapter pursues a version of the third program. A major accomplishment of evolutionary biology has been the explanation of biological altruism, which opens the door to a similar explanation of psychological altruism, or “fellow-feeling.” The chapter conjectures that humans have evolved a capacity for normative governance by socially shared rules. A process of cultural evolution led to the social rules with which we are familiar. This genealogical story poses a challenge, for the idea of moral truth plays no role in it. The story therefore lends support to non-cognitivism or anti-realist expressivism. The chapter concludes by exploring the implications of the genealogical story for moral knowledge, moral objectivity, and the idea of moral authority. (shrink)

In Hobbes, freedom of choice requires nonfrustration: the option you prefer must be accessible. In Berlin, it requires noninterference: every option, preferred or unpreferred, must be accessible—every door must be open. But Berlin’s argument against Hobbes suggests a parallel argument that freedom requires something stronger still: that each option be accessible and that no one have the power to block access; the doors should be open, and there should be no powerful doorkeepers. This is freedom as nondomination. The claim (...) is that freedom as noninterference is an unstable alternative between freedom as nonfrustration and freedom as nondomination. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 231-240 [Access article in PDF] Rescuing the Rescuers in Philip Hallie's Ethical Sublime Patrick Henry "Only stories or visions of transcending personal isolation and indifference can move me... hope, joy lie only in the transcendence of self-absorption—in expansion." —Philip Hallie I THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, Philip Hallie expressed strong distrust for abstract philosophy. He wanted his own philosophy constituted of flesh and (...) blood, and he believed in the centrality of narration in ethical writing. The personality of stories, the irrefutable nature of the individual's account had to form the essential basis in the teaching of ethics. It is no surprise, then, that in his posthumous Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm 1 Hallie leaves us with a series of powerful stories, biographical and autobiographical, as the final expression of his lifelong agonizing struggle to come to terms with his own ethical beliefs. There are no general proofs here. No abstract principles. No definitions of goodness and evil. Only stories that depict the being referred to by e. e. cummings as "manunkind" mysteriously achieving the "realizable ideal" of rescuer of strangers.Given Hallie's major work on the rescuers of Jews in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There, 2 it seems appropriate that he begin this particular account of "tales of good and evil" in that same [End Page 231] village. Thus, the first biography he presents is that of Magda Trocmé, the wife of the pastor of the Protestant Church in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, André Trocmé, who, with his fellow pastor Edouard Theis, is said to have inspired the rescue mission in the village. Hallie underscores the communal nonviolent effort by clergy and villagers alike in this "city of refuge." While he admires both André and Magda as practitioners of the "great virtues," he more readily identifies with Magda's secularism than with her husband's piety. He celebrates her generosity, her refusal to turn anyone away from her door, her "quiet habit of efficacious compassion," and her terse explanation as to why the rescuers in the village did what they had done: "What do you mean? It had to be done, that's all."As much as Hallie related to Magda's secularism, he was unable to identify fully with her because he felt tainted by the killing he had done as an artillery man in the United States Army during World War II. "I was a helpful killer who violated the negative demand against killing ["Thou shalt not kill"] in order to obey the positive one to spread life. But Magda and her villagers! Their ethical purity was beyond me. They obeyed the negative demands of ethics by hating and hurting no one even while they obeyed the positive demands of ethics by saving [thousands of refugees]." Compared to Magda and the villagers, Hallie clearly saw himself as someone operating in the grey zone.With the introduction of Joshua James and the community of Hull, Massachusetts, we ascend from Hallie's personal quagmire of moral ambiguity to the realm of the "ethical sublime." Here the author relates the story of James, whose mother and sister died at sea in 1837 when he was 11 years old, and who would go on to a career of life-saving activity on the Massachusetts coast. James founded the Life-Saving Rescue Service, an organization that evolved into the Coast Guard (or more specifically The Search and Rescue Service of the Coast Guard). He spent his entire life in Hull (1826-1902) and over the course of nearly sixty years saved hundreds of sailor's lives and tens of thousands of dollars worth of property.Many coastal villages around the world, Hallie explains, profited greatly from shipwrecks. Their cargoes and the stuff the ships were made of were highly valuable to the generally poor people who inhabited such villages. Yet the village of Hull, the smallest village in the state, having roughly... (shrink)

Over the course of a decade or so, Philip Kitcher has gradually come to embrace classical pragmatism, particularly John Dewey’s iteration of it, hailing it in his latest volume, Preludes to Pragmatism: Towards a Reconstruction of Philosophy, as “not only America’s most important contribution to philosophy, but also one of the most significant developments in the history of the subject, comparable in its potential for intellectual change to the celebrated turning points in the seventeenth century and in the wake (...) of Kant” (Kitcher 2012, xi). By Kitcher’s own account, this represents quite a turnabout, and so it is unsurprising that some have viewed Kitcher’s transformation warily. Philosophers are not immune to.. (shrink)

Sometimes dictators are benevolent. Sometimes masters are kind and gentle to their slaves. John Adams was a pretty good "husband" to Abigail Adams. But it seems like there’s something very wrong with being a dictator or a master or a spouse with the power that John Adams had over Abigail Adams in late 18th Century America. A theory of domination tries to pinpoint what’s distinctive about dictatorship and mastery and traditional husbanding, and what is distinctively wrong with such—even the benevolent, (...) kind, gentle, and pretty good varieties. -/- There has been a lot of thinking about domination over the last twenty-five or so years. This is due largely to the efforts of republican political philosophers, who have used domination and its absence — nondomination — as the primary moving part in their conceptions of freedom. Even so, perhaps because domination has often appeared in a supporting role for the analysis of other concepts, conceptualizing domination itself is still a fairly nascent endeavor. -/- Accounts of domination need at least two movements. First, domination is a subset of a social phenomenon with—at least more or less—unobjectionable varieties. Maybe this social phenomenon is power; maybe it’s the capacity to interfere with choice; maybe something else. Whatever it is, it’s plausible to think it’s not always bad. Sometimes it’s perfectly alright to have power over someone else; sometimes there’s nothing wrong with the capacity to interfere with someone’s choices. (For example, if what you’d rather do is go after your neighbor with a meat-axe, it’s a good thing if someone is in a position to interfere with you, or if your choice situation can be worsened, so that charging next door, axe in hand, without having to worry about a lengthy prison sentence is not among your options.) The first task of a theory of domination is to specify exactly what this broader social phenomenon is. -/- Next we need to figure out what gives domination its negative moral valence, and thus sets it apart from that broader social phenomenon. Republicans usually say that what makes domination morally problematic is its arbitrariness. Frank Lovett claims that domination is instantiated in a social relationship between A and B only if A is permitted to exercise power over B arbitrarily (2010, 120). Philip Pettit, until recently, claimed that domination is a capacity for arbitrary interference. Marilyn Friedman calls it “arbitrary interference in someone’s choices…”(2008, 265). If that’s right, and arbitrariness is the difference maker between forms of social power that aren’t domination and those that are, we need a story about what arbitrariness is. -/- Such are the two essential tasks of conceptualizing domination. I offer here what I think are important course-corrections for recent attempts to complete them. In §1 I set out some desiderata for a useful conception of domination before sketching the elements of earlier attempts I think we can’t do without. §2 addresses the problem of “cheap domination”. This is the problem of identifying ordinary, innocuous human interactions with anything we call domination. I don’t think we should do this, but some of the most influential accounts of domination on offer nowadays — in particular, Lovett’s and Pettit’s — have this result. Instead, I contend that only certain forms of social power can underwrite domination, and try to provide a principled way of identifying what these forms are like. Finally, in §3, I address the nature of arbitrariness. (shrink)

. The articles in this section were presented at the conference “Toward a Theology of Disease” sponsored by the Zygon Center in October, 2002. This was a second conference designed to address the question of what the science-religion dialogue could contribute to the larger discussion of the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS. The conference brought a wide range of perspectives to this question from different religious traditions. I draw them together here around the idea that Philip Hefner introduced in his (...) keynote address: our fragmented experience of the world. The notion of fragmentation opens the door for both a recognition of several possible approaches to building a theology of disease and the pluralism of religious traditions, as well as providing a framework for integrating our full awareness that HIV/AIDS is a problem without solutions and requiring a level of humility in posing any real answers. The essays clearly suggest that the question remains perplexing but that our efforts do show that a multifaith, multidisciplinary religion-science dialogue can contribute significantly to the larger discussion. (shrink)

Four-month-old infants sometimes can perceive the unity of a partly hidden object. In each of a series of experiments, infants were habituated to one object whose top and bottom were visible but whose center was occluded by a nearer object. They were then tested with a fully visible continuous object and with two fully visible object pieces with a gap where the occluder had been. Pattems of dishabituation suggested that infants perceive the boundaries of a partly hidden object by analyzing (...) the movements of its surfaces: infants perceived a connected object when its ends moved in a common translation behind the occluder. Infants do not appear to perceive a connected object by analyzing the colors and forms of surfaces: they did not perceive a connected object when its visible parts were stationary, its color was homogeneous, its edges were aligned, and its shape was simple and regular. These findings do not support the thesis, from gestalt psychology, that object perception first arises as a consequence of a tendency to perceive the simplest, most regular configuration, or the Piagetian thesis that object perception depends on the prior coordination of action. Perception of objects may depend on an inherent conception of what an object is. (shrink)

Suspended judgment poses a serious problem for Russellianism. In this paper I examine several possible solutions to this problem and argue that none of them is satisfactory. Then I sketch a new solution. According to this solution, suspended judgment should be understood as a sui generis propositional attitude. By this I mean that it cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, other propositional attitudes, such as belief. Since suspended judgment is sui generis in this sense, sentences that ascribe (...) this attitude to someone should not be analyzed in terms of other attitude ascriptions, such as belief ascriptions. Instead they should be understood as involving a semantically primitive predicate, corresponding to the state of suspended judgment. (shrink)

Contemporary discussions of skepticism often frame the skeptic's argument around an instance of the closure principle. Roughly, the closure principle states that if a subject knows p, and knows that p entails q, then the subject knows q. The main contention of this paper is that the closure argument for skepticism is defective. We explore several possible classifications of the defect. The closure argument might plausibly be classified as begging the question, as exhibiting transmission failure, or as structurally inefficient. Interestingly, (...) perhaps, each of these has been proposed as the correct classification of Moore's proof of an external world. (shrink)

Not simply set out in accompaniment of the Greek geometrical text, the diagram also is coaxed into existence manually (using straightedge and compasses) by commands in the text. The marks that a diligent reader thus sequentially produces typically sum, however, to a figure more complex than the provided one and also not (as it is) artful for being synoptically instructive. To provide a figure artfully is to balance multiple desiderata, interlocking the timelessness of insight with the temporality of construction. Our (...) account of the diagram complements those of Manders and Macbeth by more strongly emphasizing practical synthesis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE MOB AND THE VICTIM IN THE PSALMS AND JOB Robert Hamerton-Kelly Woodside Church IrecaiI a passage from Elie Wiesel's novel, Night, where, looking at the frail body of a young boy writhing on the gallows—his body weight was too light to kill him outright when he dropped through the trap door—someone asksthe narrator, "Where is nowyourGod?" This question is often on my mind, not least because for (...) the last seven years ofmy tenure at Stanford I studied ethnic conflict and filled my mind with the most discouraging images. I found myselfsaying on occasion that I felt ashamed to be a human being, which was only a slight exaggeration. I noted with wry amusement that a few years ago it was reported that the wolves were fleeing from the Caucasus in great numbers because ofthe human violence there, a sad irony in the light of Thomas Hobbes' motto, Homo homini lupus. I had long suspected thatthat was an insult to wolves, and now I had the proof. Lately we have Philip Gourewitch's new book on the Rwanda holocaust of 1994, where they killed one million people in ten weeks, not with weapons ofmass destruction butwith machetes and clubs primedwith six-inch nails, and Rwanda is a Christian country. The voice ofconscience cries out, "Where is our God?" in all this; why does He spend his time causing statues to ooze oil in suburban Massachusetts rather than defending the children of Kosovo against depraved nationalists.1 It is some comfort that the psalmist cried the same question and thus provides a convenient way into a meditation on violence in the Psalms. It occurs first in 42,3: "I have no food but tears / day and 1I refer to the phenomena reported in connection with the comatose teenage girl, Audrey Sosa, who is believed by some to be a channel for miracles. 152Robert Hamerton-Kelly night:/ and all day long men say to me,/ Where is now your God?" and again at 42,10, "Nearly breaking my bones / my oppressors insult me / as all day long they ask me / Where is now your God?" In 79, 10 it occurs in a national lament, "Why should the pagans ask, Where is their God?" and this recalls two prophetic oracles, in Joel 2,9, "Spare yourpeople Yahweh!/ Do not make your heritage a thing of shame, a byword for the nations./ Why should it be said amongthe nations,/ Where is their God?" and Micah 7,10 "When my enemy sees it (my vindication)/ she will be covered with shame,? she who said to me: Where is Yahweh your God?" So there are two classes of such sayings, one by an individual and one by the nation. Much ink has been spilled on the questions, Who is the victim?, and Who are the enemies? The answers have canvassed all the possibilities from the lone individual beset by spiritual temptations, or David himselfin his days and nights as a fugitive, to the nation beset by rival nations.2 The victim surrounded by persecutors is clearly a major category in the Psalms, present in two thirds ofthe collection; one hundred out ofthe one hundred and fifty explicitly or implicitly refer to a victim surrounded by enemies.3 Let me cut to the chase and recall that according to René Girard's mimetic theory, which I take as a point of departure, the situation of the victim surrounded by a mob ofenemies is a structural not an historical situation.4 The deep structure ofhuman history is a victim surrounded by the mob, a lamb slain since the foundation ofthe world. This deep structure controls the shape of emergent history but that emergence conceals its deep structure by turning history into myth. Myth covers up the blood stains and stifles the voice of the victim, myth accuses the victim, presents the victim as guilty or willing and the persecutors as innocent. To this day much that claims to be history is really myth. History happens only when the voice ofthe victim comes to word, and for that reason the gospel is irreducibly history and not myth. The 2Raymund Schwager (53ff) gives the following information... (shrink)

The first attempt to represent the Periodic system graphically was the Telluric Helix presented in 1862 by Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois, in which the sequence of elements was wound round a cylinder. This has hardly been attempted since, because the intervals between periodic returns vary in length from 2 to 32 elements, but Charles Janet presented a model wound round four nested cylinders. The rows in Janet’s table are defined by a constant sum of the first two quantum numbers, n (...) and l, so that they end with the s-block, headed by hydrogen and helium. By combining Janet’s table, Edward Mazurs’ version, in which each row represents an electron shell and Valery Tsimmerman’s use of a half square for each element, I have produced a representation that can be printed out and wound round to make a cylinder with manageable dimensions. In the unwound version, I have placed the s-block in the middle, to emphasise its pivotal nature, since it both ends each row and contributes electrons to the valence of elements in the next row; it thus does not necessarily belong either on the left or the right side of a table. The downward arrows that link subshells within each series graphically illustrate the Janet Effect. To acknowledge my debt to Chancourtois, Janet, Mazurs and Tsimmerman, I call my design the ‘Telluric Remix’. (shrink)

Is string theory a futile exercise as physics, as I believe it to be? It is an interesting mathematical specialty and has produced and will produce mathematics useful in other contexts, but it seems no more vital as mathematics than other areas of very abstract or specialized math, and doesn't on that basis justify the incredible amount of effort expended on it.

be tempted to treat them as independent and somewhat mysterious forces operating across the field of history, but rather as parts of the process of evolution of Western-European culture as a whole. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ...

Phenomenologists call for the abandoning of all philosophical theorizing in favor of a descriptive study of the "things themselves" as they are given. On its face, such a study of appearances would appear to have little to contribute to ontology, traditionally understood as the science of being and its most fundamental categories. But phenomenologists have not hesitated to draw ontological conclusions from their phenomenological investigations. Phenomenology and its ontological pretensions have come under attack, however, from philosophers of a wide variety (...) of persuasions . ;The project of this dissertation is to re-examine the relationship of phenomenology, conceived as a philosophical method, to ontology. I proceed by undertaking systematic critical examinations of the attempts of thee central figures in the phenomenological tradition to arrive at categorial ontological results upon the basis of phenomenological investigations. At issue are Brentano's descriptive psychological studies of so-called mental phenomena in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint , Husserl's static transcendental phenomenological study of the structures of pure consciousness in Ideas I, II, and III, and Sartre's phenomenological ontology of consciousness in Being and Nothingness. For each of these cases, I attempt to ascertain the precise way in which the application of phenomenological methods gives rise to specific ontological claims or "results". In none of these cases, I argue, does the thinker in question succeed in producing ontological assertions in a sufficiently phenomenological fashion. All, that is, depart to some extent from the phenomenological ideal of an ontology arrived at in accordance with an unprejudiced examination and description of "the things themselves". In the final chapter I ask whether the particular failures of these thinkers to have formulated ontological claims in a phenomenologically satisfactory manner implies the general failure of all phenomenological approaches to ontology. I argue that while principled reasons can be given why a truly phenomenological ontology must remain an unattainable ideal, it is an ideal that philosophers ought not abandon. (shrink)

"_Heidegger and Modernity_ is an intervention in the Heidegger debate in France which many may see as decisive. Its central claim is that the responses of left Heideggerians to continuing disclosures regarding Heidegger's Nazi affiliations fail to come to terms with central ambiguities in his philosophical responses, both early and late, to modernity and technology.... Incisive and hard hitting, Luc Ferry and Alain Renault have condensed in a short and tightly organized book both a judicious and well-informed account of the (...) Heidegger question and an implicit defence of humanism which has a strong political resonance."—Liam O'Sullivan, _Political Studies_. (shrink)

The present account, based on introspective comments, deals with motivation and hedonic tone as subjective factors which affect continuous work at high speeds. Actual introspective reports are given. The earlier papers in the series described the experimental procedure and presented objective data.

According to a posteriori physicalism, phenomenal properties are physical properties, despite the unbridgeable cognitive gap that holds between phenomenal concepts and physical concepts. Current debates about a posteriori physicalism turn on what I call “the perspicuity principle”: it is impossible for a suitably astute cognizer to possess concepts of a certain sort—viz., narrow concepts—without being able to tell whether the referents of those concepts are the same or different. The perspicuity principle tends to strike a posteriori physicalists as implausibly rationalistic; (...) further, a posteriori physicalists maintain that even if the principle is applicable to many narrow concepts, phenomenal concepts have unique features that render them inferentially isolated from other narrow concepts ). I argue, on the contrary, that the case for the perspicuity principle is quite strong. Moreover, not only have versions of the PCS repeatedly failed, likely, all versions will, given the strange combination of lucidity and opacity that the PCS has to juggle. I conclude that a posteriori physicalists currently lack a principled objection to classic anti-physicalist arguments. (shrink)

Von einem Roman erwarten wir, dass sich seine Handlung zielstrebig auf ein Ende hin bewegt. Bis ins 19. Jh. wurden auch Vorgänge in einer von Gott eingerichteten Wirklichkeit auf diese Weise verstanden. Romane konnten daher beanspruchen, in ihrer Zielstrebigkeit die Wirklichkeit abzubilden. Durch Charles Darwin geriet diese Weltsicht in eine Krise. Die Studie zeigt, wie sich das Erzählen in einer als ziellos und zufällig aufgefassten Wirklichkeit veränderte. Wie können Romane die so verstandene Wirklichkeit abbilden? Diese Frage wird beispielhaft an literarischen (...) und ästhetischen Texten von Friedrich Theodor Vischer und Gottfried Keller erörtert. (shrink)

Much has been written about Wilfred Cantwell Smith's account of the nature of religion, particularly by those who, broadly speaking, may be called Religionswissenschaftler. Surprisingly little, though, has been written about his theology. In part at least, this can be attributed to the incipience of his theological thought within the broad parameters of his studies of religion. Theological ideas have been more imbedded in the wealth of materials aimed at the elucidation of the nature of belief, faith, religious truth, and (...) cumulative tradition than presented in any overt and systematic way. But the recent appearance of the third volume of his trilogy, Towards a World Theology, enables us to concentrate more directly on his theological thought and, in light of this, to reflect upon the theological nuances of his earlier work. (shrink)

Hundreds of cottages and cabins, mansions and houses line the shores of Lake Minnetonka, one of Minnesota's most beautiful lakes and site of some of the state's most coveted properties. Legendary Homes of Lake Minnetonka invites readers into thirty of these dwellings - built by families like the Washburns, the Pillsburys, and the Daytons. Evocative words and stunning color photographs guide readers through these beautifully designed and furnished homes. Portrayed in elegant detail are interiors of renovated Victorian cottages and rustic (...) cabins, as well as those of houses designed by modernist masters like William Lescaze and Philip Johnson. Photographer Karen Melvin takes viewers through the front door, showing living rooms furnished with Mies van der Rohe couches and Frank Lloyd Wright chairs and walls adorned with works by Robert Motherwell and Damien Hirst. Author Bette Jones Hammel relates the homes' histories of ownership and details the many renovations they have seen over time, renovations that have attempted to retain the homes' character and extend their lifespan. For the best views of the exteriors of these homes, you would need a boat. To see the interiors, you would need an invitation. Hammel and Melvin have chosen the most interesting houses - both architecturally and historically - and painstakingly scouted out the best vantage points, both inside and out, to provide a personal tour of these spectacular homes. (shrink)