We investigate claims about the frequency of "know" made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers’ claims about the comparative frequency of different uses of philosophically interesting expressions. Second, we aim to show how using linguistic corpora as tools for investigating meaning is a productive methodology, in the sense that it yields discoveries about the use of language that philosophers would have overlooked if they remained in (...) their "armchairs of an afternoon", to use J.L. Austin’s phrase. Third, we discuss facts about the meaning of "know" that so far have been ignored in philosophy, with the aim of reorienting discussions of the relevance of ordinary language for philosophical theorizing. (shrink)

Rawls famously argues that the parties in the original position would agree upon the two principles of justice. Among other things, these principles guarantee equal political liberty—that is, democracy—as a requirement of justice. We argue on the contrary that the parties have reason to reject this requirement. As we show, by Rawls’ own lights, the parties would be greatly concerned to mitigate existential risk. But it is doubtful whether democracy always minimizes such risk. Indeed, no one currently knows which political (...) systems would. Consequently, the parties—and we ourselves—have reason to reject democracy as a requirement of justice in favor of political experimentalism, a general approach to political justice which rules in at least some non-democratic political systems which might minimize existential risk. (shrink)

Drawing on Nietzsche's prolific early notebooks and correspondence, this book challenges the polarized picture of Nietzsche as a philosopher who abandoned classical philology.

Rather than representing a break with his earlier philosophical undertakings, The Birth of Tragedy can be seen as continuous with them and Nietzsche's later works. James Porter argues that Nietzsche's argumentative and writerly strategies resemble his earlier writings on philology in his 'staging' of meaning rather than in his advocacy of various positions. The derivation of the Dionysian from the Apollinian, and the interest in the atomistic challenges to Platonism, are anticipated in earlier works. Also the theory of the all-too-human (...) subject is a thread that runs throughout Nietzsche's oeuvre, critically undoing what his philosophy appears to erect, confirming that Nietzsche is a most unreliable witness to his own meaning. As well as studying the relation of The Birth of Tragedy to later writings, the author examines it on its own terms as a self-standing and complete piece of imagining, with close regard to the self-presentation of the work itself. (shrink)

Current understandings of the sublime are focused by a single word and by a single author. The sublime is not a word: it is a concept and an experience, or rather a whole range of ideas, meanings and experiences that are embedded in conceptual and experiential patterns. Once we train our sights on these patterns a radically different prospect on the sublime in antiquity comes to light, one that touches everything from its range of expressions to its dates of emergence, (...) evolution, role in the cultures of antiquity as a whole, and later reception. This book is the first to outline an alternative account of the sublime in Greek and Roman poetry, philosophy, and the sciences, in addition to rhetoric and literary criticism. It offers new readings of Longinus without privileging him, but instead situates him within a much larger context of reflection on the sublime in antiquity. (shrink)

Some public health behavioral intervention research studies involve deception. A methodological imperative to minimize bias can be in conflict with the ethical principle of informed consent. As a case study, we examine the specific forms of deception used in three online randomized controlled trials evaluating brief alcohol interventions. We elaborate our own decision making about the use of deception in these trials, and present our ongoing findings and uncertainties. We discuss the value of the approach of pragmatism for examining these (...) kinds of ethical issues that can arise in research on public health interventions. (shrink)

This is the first modern attempt to put aesthetics back on the map in classical studies. James I. Porter traces the origins of aesthetic thought and inquiry in their broadest manifestations as they evolved from before Homer down to the fourth century and then into later antiquity, with an emphasis on Greece in its earlier phases. Greek aesthetics, he argues, originated in an attention to the senses and to matter as opposed to the formalism and idealism that were enshrined by (...) Plato and Aristotle, and through whose lens most subsequent views of ancient art and aesthetics have typically been filtered. Treating aesthetics in this way can help us perceive the commonly shared basis of the diverse arts of antiquity. Reorienting our view of the ancient vocabularies of art and experience around matter and sensation, this book dramatically changes how we look upon the ancient achievements in these same areas. (shrink)

Contrary to common assumptions, appeals to rewards and punishments play a central role in Scripture. We find these appeals in both the Old and New Testaments, and in every major biblical genre. Moreover, these appeals almost always presuppose that the one addressed by a promise, threat, or inducement will respond out of some self‐referential desire to enjoy something good or to avoid an evil. Similarly, they take for granted that such desires provide legitimate motives for obedience or fidelity. In short, (...) appeals to rewards and punishments, with their implied endorsement of a kind of self‐referential desire, play a central part in scriptural depictions of the divine‐human relationship. They strongly suggest that men and women naturally and properly expect good things from their Creator, and fear the consequences of divine displeasure. These observations do not necessarily commit us to some version of eudaimonism. Nonetheless, eudaimonism, considered broadly as a positive normative perspective on happiness, will always be relevant to Christian ethics, insofar as it offers starting points and theoretical tools for addressing unavoidable theological questions. (shrink)

Kristeller's article ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics’ is a classic statement of the view, now widely adopted but rarely examined, that aesthetics became possible only in the eighteenth-century with the emergence of the fine arts. I wish to contest this view, for three reasons. Firstly, Kristeller's historical account can be questioned; alternative and equally plausible accounts are available. Secondly, ‘the modern system of the arts’ appears to have been neither a system nor (...) an agreed upon entity, but only a historical construct of Kristeller's own making that matches up with no known historical reality. Thirdly, while the concept of the fine arts existed in the eighteenth century, the assumption that it had an impact on the rise of aesthetic theory remains unproven and unnecessary. A more satisfactory account of aesthetic thought in antiquity can be given, once the ‘fine-arts’ objection has been cleared away. (shrink)

This paper examines Aquinas's contention that the virtues are necessarily connected, in such a way that anyone who fully possesses one of them, necessarily possesses them all. It is argued that this claim, as Aquinas develops it in the "Summa Theologiae", is more complex, interesting, and plausible than it is often taken to be. On his view, the cardinal virtues can be said to be connected in two senses, corresponding to the two senses in which certain virtues can be said (...) to be cardinal, namely, as general qualifications of all virtuous action and as particular normative ideals having a specific content. This distinction suggests, in turn, that Aquinas's claim that the virtues are connected should be understood as a psychological thesis about what is characteristic of the virtuous person's distinctive way of acting, as well as a thesis about the interrelationships among the different cardinal virtues considered as discrete normative ideals. So understood, Aquinas's claim that the virtues are connected is seen to be a necessary implication of his metaphysically grounded theory of human action. At the same time, it enables him to offer an interpretation of the complexities of moral discourse that is illuminating and at least prima facie plausible, taken on its own merits. (shrink)

Aquinas, says Jean Porter, gets justice right. In this book she shows that Aquinas offers us a cogent and illuminating account of justice as a personal virtue rather than a virtue of social institutions. For Aquinas, justice is more about interpersonal morality than civic or social obligations, and Porter masterfully draws out the contemporary significance of Aquinas's perspective. - back of book.

The Real Food Challenge is a national student movement in the United States that aims to shift $1 billion—roughly 20%—of college and university food budgets across the country towards local, ecologically sound, fair, and humane food sources—what they call “real” food—by 2020. The University of Vermont was the fifth university in the U.S. to sign the Real Food Campus Commitment, pledging to shift at least 20% of its own food budget towards “real” food by 2020. In order to examine student (...) preference for “real” food on the UVM campus, we analyzed a survey of 904 undergraduate students that used contingent valuation to evaluate students’ willingness-to-pay for the “real” attribute. We found that a majority of students are willing to pay a positive premium for “real” food. Furthermore, we found that student characteristics and attitudes significantly influence WTP. Specifically, gender, residency, college, and attitudes about price and origin of food are significant predictors of WTP. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines an oddity that has gone unnoticed since Nietzsche first pointed it out to his friend and confidant Erwin Rohde in 1872—namely, that Wilamowitz, in his attack on The Birth of Tragedy, systematically misquotes Nietzsche. A large number of the quotations from The Birth of Tragedy by Wilamowitz in both installments of Zukunftsphilologie! are pseudo-quotations—whether they are off by a word or more or whether they are a collage of phrases drawn freely from Nietzsche's vocabulary. This essay (...) revisits the debate from the angle of nineteenth-century philology in its relation to textual authority. A complete appendix of Wilamowitz's misquotations from The Birth of Tragedy and from Rohde's Afterphilologie lays out, for the first time, this evidence of the practices of the first Nietzschean philologist in history, Wilamowitz himself. (shrink)

There is a standard story told about the rise and fall of ordinary language philosophy: it was a widespread, if not dominant, approach to philosophy in Great Britain in the aftermath of World War II up until the early 1960s, but with the development of systematic approaches to the study of language—formal semantic theories on one hand and Gricean pragmatics on the other—ordinary language philosophy more or less disappeared. In this paper we present quantitative evidence to evaluate the standard story (...) of the rise and fall of ordinary language philosophy, building on the topic model of over 30,000 philosophy articles in Weatherson (2022). Using a combination of qualitative judgment and a topic-model-based measurement of similarity between individual articles, we find evidence that supports the first part of the standard story, according to which ordinary language philosophy arises in the 1940s, peaks between the early 1950s and the late 1960s, and then rapidly declines. But we argue that there is also evidence of a "new wave" of ordinary language philosophy in the early 21st century that defies the second part of the standard story. (shrink)

Roman Stoicism is typically read as a therapeutic philosophy that is centered around the care of the self and presented in the form of a self-help manual. Closer examination reveals a less reassuring and more challenging side to the school’s teachings, one that provokes ethical reflection at the limits of the self’s intactness and coherence. The self is less an object of inquiry than the by-product of a complex set of experiences in the face of nature and society and across (...) any number of flashpoints, from one’s own or others’ beliefs, actions, values, and relationships to the difficulty of sizing up one’s place in the universe. The pressures of natural and ethical reflection put intuitive conceptions of the self at considerable risk. The Roman Stoic self proves to be vulnerable, contingent, unbounded, relational, and opaque—in short, a rich matrix of problems that point beyond the individual self and anticipate contemporary critiques of the self. (shrink)

This paper argues that Aquinas and other scholastic theologians offer unexpected resources for a moral theology that is fully engaged with today’s pluralistic societies. In order to do so, it is necessary to bring Aquinas into a conversation with these diverse perspectives, rather than treating his thought as a closed system, and to extend his insights through original, constructive analysis.

All parts of Heraclitus’ cosmos are simultaneously living and dying. Its constituent stuffs (“biomasses”) cycle endlessly through physical changes in sweeping patterns (“biorhythms”) that are reflected in the dynamic rhythms of Heraclitus’ own thought and language. These natural processes are best examined at a more-than-human level that exceeds individuation, stable identity, rational comprehension, and linguistic capture. B62 (“mortals immortals”), one of Heraclitus’ most perplexing fragments, models these processes in a spectacular fashion: it describes the imbrication not only of humans and (...) gods but of cosmic masses more generally, and its language mimics the natural relations that it names, or rather intimates through its grammatical and syntactical indeterminacy. The remaining fragments amplify the uncertainties and the exhilarations of Heraclitus’ worldview along the same lines. His approach to nature raises urgent questions about how human beings fit into the cosmos, not least by challenging our intuitive conceptions of life and death, our material makeup, and our entanglements with our natural surroundings. In doing so, he provides vital lessons for contemporary ecological awareness, and proves to be an unexpected ally. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:DE ORDINE CARITATIS: CHARITY, FRIENDSHIP, AND JUSTICE IN THOMAS AQUINAS' SUMMA THEOLOGIAE JEAN PORTER Vanderbilt Divinity School Nashville, Tennessee IS IT POSSIBLE to identify the :lioundational or characteristic content of Christian love? According to Gene Outka, the normative content most often ascribed to Christian neighbor-love, or agape, is equal rega.rd.1 On this aiooount, agape commits us to aot at all times out of a regard for the neighbor that (...) is stable and independent of a particular response from the other. Each individual is to he valued simply as a human person, and not on the basis of his or her particular merits, attractiveness, or functional value to others. In short, the qualities of the other that are of primary significance in determining how that person should be treated are those that he or she has in common with everybody else, and not those that set him or her apart. This view is well expressed by Kierkegaard: The category neighbor is just like the category human being. Every one of us is a human being and at the same time the heterogeneous individual which he is by particularity; but being a human being is the fundamental qualification... No one should be preoccupied with the differences so that he cowardly or presumptuously forgets that he is a human being; no man is an exception to being a human being by virtue of his particularising differences, He is rather a human being and then a particular human being.2 An Outka describes it, the claim that Christian ethics is grounded in a commitment to equal regard is a substantive 1 Gene Outka, Agape:.4.n Ethical Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 260. 2 Quoted by Outka, p. 15. 197 198 JEAN PORTER claim, in that it is meant to identify the core content of a particular ethical tradition. But this substantive claim raises an historical question: Has Christian neighbor love actually been understood in this way, at least by some major Christian thinkers? Obviously, the substantive aµd historical questions raised by Outka's normative analysis of agape are interrelated. At least, it would be difficult to defend the claim that Christian neighbor love enjoins equal regard in the face of evidence that great numbers of Christians ha.ve not actually understood their fundamental commitments in this way. By the same token, the ca:se for interpreting the second great love commandment as enjoining equal regard would be strengthened if it could be shown that some segments of the Christian tradition, or some of its leading expositors, have held substantially the same view. Nonetheless, I do not know of any attempt to examine in detajl the ethical thought of an important classical figure in light of Outka's searching normative analysis of the different interpretations that have been given to agape. This essay is a modest attempt to begin to fill that gap through an examination of Thomas Aquinas' account of charity in the Summa Theologia.e. But my purpose in this essay is not limited to answering the question," Did Thomas understand charity as equal regard?" As we will see, that question can be answered all too quickly. Once it has.been answered, however, it provides an unexpected entree into Thomas' remarkable concept of charity. And by spelling out some of the implications of this concept, we learn something, not only about Thomas, but about the nature of Christian neighborlove as well. I. De ordine caritatis At the outset, it will be helpful to summarize the main points in Thomas' acoount of charity. Along with faith and hope, charity is one of three theological virtues that directs the human person to God as the supernatural fulfillment of human life (ST la2ae 62.l, 3; 110.3. All further references to Aquinas THE ORDER OF CHARITY IN AQUINAS 199 are to the Summa Theologiae). It is the greatest of the theological virtues because it directs the human person to friendship with God (2a2ae 23.1), That is, it directs him or her to union with God as he is in himself, and not simply as the source of a.II created good, or even as the author... (shrink)

From the older handbooks to the more recent scholarly literature, Gorgias's professions about his art are taken literally at their word: conjured up in all of these accounts is the image of a hearer irresistibly overwhelmed by Gorgias's apagogic and psychagogic persuasions. Gorgias's own description of his art, in effect, replaces our description of it. "His proofs... give the impression of ineluctability" . "Thus logos is almost an independent external power which forces the hearer to do its will" . "Incurably (...) deceptive," logos has an "enormous power" that acts upon opinion, which is "easy to change" . Surprisingly, the urge to describe or paraphrase Gorgias's art has caused commentators to overlook the very best witness of it that we have: its enactment, which is to say the performative value of Gorgias's writings, especially the speeches. For if Gorgias's literary remains do nothing else, they demonstrate how one can do things with words without being explicit about what is being done, even if this means contradicting, performatively, what is being said-as for instance in his statements, so unconvincingly made, about the ostensible aims of rhetoric. Was Gorgias persuasive in practice? Was persuasion even the goal? Is logos the solitary arbiter of reality that it is so often made out to be? Through close examination of Gorgias's Helen and parts of On Not-Being, I attempt to show that persuasion is manifestly not the goal of his arguments, which in the first instance are aporetic paradoxes that expose the difficulties of defining the nature of either language or reality, and which in the last instance are instruments of cultural demystification. The only deception at work in Gorgias's writings is that of the self-deception of their audience. It is this that gives these curiously revealing documents of fifth-century Greek culture their "dissuasive," not persuasive, character. (shrink)

Has moral relativism run its course? The threat of 9/11, terrorism, reproductive technology, and globalization has forced us to ask anew whether there are universal moral truths upon which to base ethical and political judgments. In this timely edited collection, distinguished scholars present and test the best answers to this question. These insightful responses temper the strong antithesis between universalism and relativism and retain sensitivity to how language and history shape the context of our moral decisions. This important and relevant (...) work of contemporary political and social thought is ideal for use in the classroom across many disciplines, including political science, philosophy, ethics, law, and theology. (shrink)

The traditional distinction between the agent’s intention and the effects which she merely permits would seem to allow for a re-description of the act in terms of the agent’s overall good aims. This paper argues that Aquinas understands the relation between the agent’s choice and her overall intention in a different and more persuasive way. His analysis of the object and the end of the act is complicated, but once the relevant distinctions have been sorted out, it is apparent that (...) he does not hold that a particular action can be described, or much less morally evaluated, in terms of the agent’s overall good intentions. On the contrary, he insists that the object of the agent’s immediate choice is always morally relevant, and can be morally decisive for assessing the overall value of the act. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 44 Heft: 1 Seiten: 67-77.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BASIC GOODS AND THE HUMAN GOOD IN RECENT CATHOLIC MORAL THEOLOGY }EAN PORTER University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 0 NE OF THE MOST striking features of Catholic moral theology since Vatican II has been the reluctance of so many moral theologians, on all sides of the controversies which have characterized that discipline, to offer a substantive account of goodness and the human good as a basis for (...) understanding the moral life. There has been an extensive discussion of human goods (plural) and their relation to moral obligation, but no one, to my knowledge, has attempted to ground that discussion systematically in a substantive account of what it means to live a good human life which would precede and justify the identification of some goods as true or basic human goods. To the contrary, a number of the most influential moral theologians, led by Germain Grisez and John Finnis, insist that our knowledge of moral obligation cannot be based on any such general metaphysical or anthropological theory. Instead, they hold that morality is grounded in our recognition of certain basic goods, which are self-evident to us. My purpose in this essay is to examine the claim that some basic goods are self-evidently such to us. I will argue that Grisez and Finnis have not made a convincing case that there are selfevident basic goods. Moreover, I will argue that, to the extent that defenders of proportionalism do not challenge the GrisezFinnis account of basic goods, their alternative theories of morality are vitiated as well. I will conclude that the current debate in Catholic moral theology concerning the foundations of moral obligation might more fruitfully be cast as a debate over rival ac27 28 JEAN PORTER counts of the human good, than as a debate over the moral significance of particular goods. The Grisez/Finnis account of basic goods In order to understand the point of the account of self-evident basic goods developed by Grisez and Finnis, it will be necessary to see how this account functions in the context of their overall theory of morality.• This theory of morality begins with a general account of practical reason, which is then narrowed down into a theory of moral action, interpreted as action that is rational in the fullest possible sense. That is, this theory begins with the observation that all rational agents act in order to obtain or to preserve something that seems to be good, at least to that agent. But even the most rational agent can be mistaken as to whether this concrete desideratum is truly good, and in such a case the action is likely to be self-frustrating or even harmful to the agent (to say nothing of its consequences for others). Hence, the exigencies of practical reason itself, prior to the introduction of any properly moral consideration, force us to ask whether the seeming goods for which we act are true goods. And how are we to distinguish between true and seeming goods? Grisez and Finnis reply that the (true) good in its most general sense must be understood as that which is desirable, not only for this or that individual or in these special circumstances, but desirable per se, for every individual and in all situations. So far, this line of analysis will be familiar to anyone acquainted with scholastic philosophy. But at the next stage of the argu1 In my summary of the theory of morality put forth by Grisez and Finnis, I have relied primarily on the following works: John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, Volume One: Christian Moral Principles (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983); and Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle, and John Finnis, "Practical Principles, Moral Truth, and Ultimate Ends," The American Journal of Jurisprudence, 32 (1987), 99-151. The latter essay presents a summary of their theory including a detailed commentary on the earlier works through which it was developed, as well as responses to critics, and may be said to be the definitive statement of the Grisez/Finnis theory of morality up to now. BASIC GOODS AND THE HUMAN GOOD 29 ment, the originality... (shrink)

This article offers two arguments for the centrality of historical studies to constructive theological ethics. The first is pedagogical: it is argued that precisely because historical texts call for reflective interpretation, the close study of these texts can provide insights that are not readily available in other ways. The second is more foundational: the Christian moral tradition is the proper subject matter of Christian theological ethics, and because that tradition evolves over time and cannot be understood apart from some account (...) of that evolution, historical studies are a constitutive part of Christian theological ethics. This claim is defended through an ex- amination of the historical dimension of the interpretation of Scripture as a moral document. The essay closes with some reflections on the institutional implications of these arguments. (shrink)

According to the spontaneity view of the role of the passions in moral deliberation, Aquinas holds that virtuous passions play an active role in moral deliberation, prior to the formation of moral judgement and choice. This article offers a qualified defense of this view. Qualified, because critics of this view are right to point out that Aquinas is generally suspicious of the passions, and he is careful to delimit the role that they can plan in processes of moral deliberation and (...) choice. A defense, nonetheless, because Aquinas does give a positive role to virtuous passions in the early stages of moral discernment and deliberation, prior to judgement. Furthermore, Aquinas has strong reasons to defend something like the spontaneity view, given his overall view of the virtues as perfections of the powers they inform. That in itself does not necessarily mean that he does defend the spontaneity view, but it does suggest that we can develop such a defense out of what he does say, in such a way as to extend and clarify central elements of his moral theory. (shrink)

Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society.

Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society.

This chapter contains sections titled: “Claims to Power” The Rhetoric of the Will to Power “The world viewed from inside”: Nietzsche's Later Atomism “The Logic of Feeling”.

According to Aquinas (1888–1906), the virtue of justice is a habit, that is to say, a stable disposition of the will. Many commentators have found this claim to be puzzling, since it is difficult to see what this might entail, beyond a simple tendency to choose and act in accordance with precepts of justice. However, this objection does not take account of the fact that for Aquinas, the will is the principle of human freedom, and as such, it is expressed (...) through, but not limited to a capacity for particular choices and actions. It therefore needs stable dispositions, towards characteristic aims, in order to function effectively. This paper sets out a case for the cogency of Aquinas’s overall account of the will and its dispositions, by way of an examination of familiar expressions of human freedom which cannot be reduced to a series of individual choices and acts. It then turns to a closer examination of Aquinas’ analysis of the will, arguing that Aquinas’ claims about the orientation of the will towards some overarching and comprehensive good can fruitfully be understood in terms of this expansive conception of human freedom. (shrink)

We regard cooperation as generally good, and yet this does not imply that it is morally good. The scholastic conception of nature offers the kind of distinction between levels of normative appraisal that we need, and suggests a fruitful way of thinking about the moral significance of our naturally sociable nature.