This is a study of all the recent literature on william james written from a phenomenological perspective with the purpose of showing that william james made fundamental contributions to the phenomenological theory of the intentionality of consciousness, To the phenomenological theory of self-Identity, And to the phenomenological conception of noetic freedom as the basic concept of ethical theory.

I take it as my assignment to criticize the Gauthier enterprise. At the outset, however, I should express my general agreement with David Gauthier's normative vision of a liberal social order, including the place that individual principles of morality hold in such an order. Whether the enterprise is, ultimately, judged to have succeeded or to have failed depends on the standards applied. Considered as a coherent grounding of such a social order in the rational choice behavior of persons, the enterprise (...) fails. Considered as an extended argument implying that persons should adopt the moral stance embodied in the Gauthier structure, the enterprise is, I dunk, largely successful. Considered as a set of empirically falsifiable propositions suggesting that persons do, indeed, choose as the Gauthier precepts dictate, the enterprise offers Humean hope rather than Hobbesian despair. (shrink)

Employing the techniques of modern economic analysis, Professor Buchanan reveals the conceptual basis of an individual's social rights by examining the ...

There exists a common view that for theories related by a ‘duality’, dual models typically may be taken ab initio to represent the same physical state of affairs, i.e. to correspond to the same possible world. We question this view, by drawing a parallel with the distinction between ‘interpretational’ and ‘motivational’ approaches to symmetries.

This book defends the view that any adequate account of rational decision making must take a decision maker's beliefs about causal relations into account. The early chapters of the book introduce the non-specialist to the rudiments of expected utility theory. The major technical advance offered by the book is a 'representation theorem' that shows that both causal decision theory and its main rival, Richard Jeffrey's logic of decision, are both instances of a more general conditional decision theory. The book solves (...) a long-standing problem for Jeffrey's theory by showing for the first time how to obtain a unique utility and probability representation for preferences and judgements of comparative likelihood. The book also contains a major new discussion of what it means to suppose that some event occurs or that some proposition is true. The most complete and robust defence of causal decision theory available. (shrink)

Luthra, Peraza-Santiago, Beeson, Saltzman, Crinnion, and Magnuson (2021) present data from the lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation paradigm that they claim provides conclusive evidence in favor of top-down processing in speech perception. We argue here that this evidence does not support that conclusion. The findings are open to alternative explanations, and we give data in support of one of them (that there is an acoustic confound in the materials). Lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation thus remains elusive, while prior data from (...) the paradigm instead challenge the idea that there is top-down processing in online speech recognition. (shrink)

Swezey, C. M. Introduction.--The burden of the ethical.--Faith, unbelief, and moral life.--Education for moral responsibility.--The theologian as prophet, preserver, or participant.--Moral discernment in the Christian life.--The place of Scripture in Christian ethics.--The relation of the Gospels to the moral life.--Spiritual life and moral life.--The relevance of historical understanding.--Man--in light of social science and Christian faith.--The relationship of empirical science to moral thought.--What is the normatively human?--Basic ethical issues in the biomedical fields.--Genetic engineering and the normative view of the human.--Bibliography of (...) the writings of James M. Gustafson, 1951-1973 (p. 297-305). (shrink)

According to James M. Kauffman, too much of what is said today about educational reform is nonsense that shortchanges students, parents, and taxpayers. This deforms education rather than reforming it. The primary objective of this book is to help teachers, teacher educators, policy makers, and parents think more critically about current rhetoric about education. Reason and science in the enlightenment tradition are more helpful in reforming and improving education than political agendas. Reform should focus on instruction. Education must address (...) the full range of learners, from those who are mentally retarded to those who are intellectually gifted. Special education, multicultural education, and standardized testing are among the controversial issues explored. Extremes of both left and right ideologies are rejected in favor of careful thinking and sound judgment. (shrink)

This study examined whether undergraduate students’ perceptions regarding the acceptability of cheating were influenced by the amount of ethics instruction the students had received and/or by their personality. The results, from a sample of 230 upper-level undergraduate students, indicated that simply taking a business ethics course did not have a significant influence on students’ views regarding cheating. On the other hand, Machiavellianism was positively related to perceiving that two forms of cheating were acceptable. Moreover, in testing for moderating relationships, the (...) results indicated that the extent to which taking a business ethics course influenced attitudes varied substantially across individuals. Specifically, taking a course in business ethics did result in students who scored lower on Machiavellianism holding even more negative views regarding certain forms of cheating. In addition, individuals with higher grade point averages (GPAs) who had taken a course in business ethics were also less accepting of certain forms of cheating than individuals with similar GPAs who had not taken the business ethics course. The implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

This study examines the influence of ethics instruction, religiosity, and intelligence on cheating behavior. A sample of 230 upper level, undergraduate business students had the opportunity to increase their chances of winning money in an experimental situation by falsely reporting their task performance. In general, the results indicate that students who attended worship services more frequently were less likely to cheat than those who attended worship services less frequently, but that students who had taken a course in business ethics were (...) no less likely to cheat than students who had not taken such a course. However, the results do indicate that the extent to which taking a business ethics course influenced cheating behavior was moderated by the religiosity and intelligence of the individual student. In particular, while students who were highly religious were unlikely to cheat whether or not they had taken a business ethics course, students who were not highly religious demonstrated less cheating if they had taken a business ethics course. In addition, the extent of cheating among highly intelligent students was significantly reduced if such students had taken a course in business ethics. Likewise, individuals who were highly intelligent displayed significantly less cheating if they were also highly religious. The implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Colin Howson has recently argued that accuracy arguments for probabilism fail because they assume a privileged ‘coding’ in which TRUE is assigned the value 1 and FALSE is assigned the value 0. I explain why this is wrong by first showing that Howson’s objections are based on a misconception about the way in which degrees of confidence are measured, and then reformulating the accuracy argument in a way that manifestly does not depend on the coding of truth-values. Along the way, (...) I will explain how to formulate the laws of probability and rational expectation in a scale-invariant way, and how to properly understand the values of the credence functions that we use to represent rational degrees of confidence. (shrink)

Determines the implications of Christian religious conviction for moral conduct through extensive philosophical inquiry into an incident involving an ethical ...

To commence any answer to the question “Can democracy promote the general welfare?” requires attention to the meaning of “general welfare.” If this term is drained of all significance by being defined as “whatever the political decision process determines it to be,” then there is no content to the question. The meaning of the term can be restored only by classifying possible outcomes of democratic political processes into two sets – those that are general in application over all citizens and (...) those that are discriminatory. (shrink)

Nature aesthetics is concerned with four core questions: What is a natural environment? What is relevant, psychologically speaking, to the aesthetic appreciation of natural environments? How ought we to aesthetically appreciate natural environments? What is the relationship between nature aesthetics and environmental ethics? In this essay, I first address in Section 2 whether theorizing about nature aesthetics is possible by challenging the non‐aesthetics view, according to which aesthetic appreciation of nature is not possible, and the relativity view, according to which (...) aesthetic appreciation of nature is possible, but it is an anything goes affair. In Section 3, I outline the core arguments for scientific cognitivism and provide objections to those arguments, making room for alternative views. In Section 4, I outline the distinction between cognitivism and non‐cognitivism and discuss the benefits of the engagement view. In Section 5, I outline the sympathetic imagination view of nature aesthetics. In Section 6, I discuss the emotions view. In Section 7, after summarizing the lessons learned from these debates, I argue for a new view— Enacting Nature's Value— which proposes that we need to rethink nature aesthetics in terms of an enactivist account of aesthetic agency according to which the aesthetic appreciation of nature is a skilled action. In Section 8, I close by considering four future directions for nature aesthetics in the second generation of inquiry. (shrink)

This essay is an experimental project. It proposes that the theme of participation issues in an insightful, distinctive, comprehensive, and coherent interpretation of human experience. My personal history is a test case.

Expressing doubts about death criteria can serve healthy purposes, but can also cause a number of harms, including decreased organ donation rates and distress for donor families and health care staff. This paper explores the various causes of doubts about death criteria—including religious beliefs, misinformation, mistrust, and intellectual questions—and recommends responses to each of these. Some recommended responses are relatively simple and noncontroversial, such as providing accurate information. However, other responses would require significant changes to the way we currently do (...) business. Policymakers should establish minimum national standards for determining death to foster a trustworthy system; academics and publishers have a duty to publish only materials that substantially engage and advance the debate to minimize the harm caused by divided expert opinion; and opposition to the dead donor rule should be conceptually separated from doubts about death criteria. (shrink)

This is an Introduction to the special issue of Metaphilosophy entitled Philosophy as a Way of Life, giving a brief account of the genesis of the project, an overview of the topic, and a summary of the topics covered in the issue.

This paper provides an analysis of the key term aidagara ('betweenness') in the philosophical ethics of Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960), in response to and in light of the recent movement in Japanese Buddhist studies known as 'Critical Buddhism'. The Critical Buddhist call for a turn away from 'topical' or intuitionist thinking and towards (properly Buddhist) 'critical' thinking, while problematic in its bipolarity, raises the important issue of the place of 'reason' vs 'intuition' in Japanese Buddhist ethics. In this paper, a comparison (...) of Watsuji's 'ontological quest' with that of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Watsuji's primary Western source and foil, is followed by an evaluation of a corresponding search for an 'ontology of social existence' undertaken by Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962). Ultimately, the philosophico-religious writings of Watsuji Tetsurō allow for the 'return' of aesthesis as a modality of social being that is truly dimensionalized, and thus falls prey neither to the verticality of topicalism nor the limiting objectivity of criticalism. (shrink)

The family of a patient who is unconscious and respirator-dependent has made a decision to discontinue medical treatment. The patient had signed a donor card. The family wants to respect this decision, and agrees to non-heart-beating organ donation. Consequently, as the patient is weaned from the ventilator, he is prepped for organ explantation. Two minutes after the patient goes into cardiac arrest, he is declared dead and the transplant team arrives to begin organ procurement. At the time retrieval begins, it (...) is not certain that the patient's brain is dead or that cardiac function cannot be restored. Procurement follows uneventfully, and two transplantable kidneys are retrieved.Many people now consider such cases of non-heart-beating organ donation to be ethically permissible. However, widespread disagreement persists as to how such practices are to be justified and whether such practices are compatible with the Uniform Declaration of Death Act. In this paper, I argue that non-heart-beating organ donation can be ethically justified, that in the justified cases the patients are in fact dead, and that the early declarations of death required for such donation do comply with the UDDA. (shrink)

Four views concerning environmental disobedience are discussed in this chapter, focusing on the moral justification of lawbreaking on behalf of natural environments. The traditional view suggests that accounts of ordinary civil disobedience understood through the Rawlsian tradition can be extended to capture cases of environmental disobedience. The revisionary view argues that the concept of civil disobedience needs to be revised in order to account for environmental disobedience, ecosabotage in particular. The radical view militates against basic assumptions of civil disobedience to (...) argue that ecosabotage counts as forms of civil disobedience. The envisionary view suggests that environmental disobedience is best understood as a creative performance, a type of beautiful trouble or creative disruption that expresses environmental values that we must use the moral imagination to understand. (shrink)

In his 1994 A Sense of the Divine: The Natural Environment from a Theocentric Perspective, James M. Gustafson offered a long-awaited application of his theocentric ethics. In Intersections Gustafson continues to insist that theology and theological ethics must overlap with other, diverse fields of study -- particularly the hard sciences -- if they are to remain rich, vital, and relevant in the years ahead. With trademark clarity, he relentlessly pursues the fundamental questions of theological ethics: the nature of being (...) human, what distinguishes us from other species, how our self-interest conflicts with our sympathy and concern for others, and the role of religious faith. After contrasting two interpretations of human nature -- one from theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the other from biologist Melvin Konner -- Gustafson suggests four modes of moral discourse about medicine, then examines styles of religious reflection in medical ethics. Briefly sharpening his focus on genetic therapy, he moves to larger questions of human viability, concluding with a stirring call to scholars, clergy, and laypersons alike to engage in these intellectual intersections -- intersections that have, above all, supreme practical importance in our daily lives. (shrink)

Moral evaluations of medical research and care focus on different issues, e.g., clinical choices, public policy and cultural values. Technical ethical concepts and arguments do not suffice for all issues. Analysis of the literature suggests that, in addition to ethical discourse, prophetic, narrative, and policy discourse function morally. The article characterizes each of these forms, and suggests the insufficiency of each if it is taken to be the only mode of analysis. Keywords: ethics, narrative, policy, prophecy CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's (...) this? (shrink)

Over a whole range of challenges, the world is essentially undergoverned. New institutions are needed that recognize how much the world has changed and that mobilize those states most capable of meeting the dangers we confront.

. . . This brilliant and tightly argued book . . . will be the most important book on moral theology to appear this year."—John Coleman, National Catholic Reporter.

This is an Introduction to the special issue of Metaphilosophy entitled Philosophy as a Way of Life, giving a brief account of the genesis of the project, an overview of the topic, and a summary of the topics covered in the issue.

Isaac Levi has long criticized causal decisiontheory on the grounds that it requiresdeliberating agents to make predictions abouttheir own actions. A rational agent cannot, heclaims, see herself as free to choose an actwhile simultaneously making a prediction abouther likelihood of performing it. Levi is wrongon both points. First, nothing in causaldecision theory forces agents to makepredictions about their own acts. Second,Levi's arguments for the ``deliberation crowdsout prediction thesis'' rely on a flawed modelof the measurement of belief. Moreover, theability of agents (...) to adopt beliefs about theirown acts during deliberation is essentialto any plausible account of human agency andfreedom. Though these beliefs play no part inthe rationalization of actions, they arerequired to account for the causalgenesis of behavior. To explain the causes ofactions we must recognize that (a) an agentcannot see herself as entirely free in thematter of A unless she believes herdecision to perform A will cause A,and (b) she cannot come to a deliberatedecision about A unless she adoptsbeliefs about her decisions. FollowingElizabeth Anscombe and David Velleman, I arguethat an agent's beliefs about her own decisionsare self-fulfilling, and that this can beused to explain away the seeming paradoxicalfeatures of act probabilities. (shrink)

The pragmatic character of the Dutch book argument makes it unsuitable as an "epistemic" justification for the fundamental probabilist dogma that rational partial beliefs must conform to the axioms of probability. To secure an appropriately epistemic justification for this conclusion, one must explain what it means for a system of partial beliefs to accurately represent the state of the world, and then show that partial beliefs that violate the laws of probability are invariably less accurate than they could be otherwise. (...) The first task can be accomplished once we realize that the accuracy of systems of partial beliefs can be measured on a gradational scale that satisfies a small set of formal constraints, each of which has a sound epistemic motivation. When accuracy is measured in this way it can be shown that any system of degrees of belief that violates the axioms of probability can be replaced by an alternative system that obeys the axioms and yet is more accurate in every possible world. Since epistemically rational agents must strive to hold accurate beliefs, this establishes conformity with the axioms of probability as a norm of epistemic rationality whatever its prudential merits or defects might be. (shrink)

Andy Egan has recently produced a set of alleged counterexamples to causal decision theory in which agents are forced to decide among causally unratifiable options, thereby making choices they know they will regret. I show that, far from being counterexamples, CDT gets Egan's cases exactly right. Egan thinks otherwise because he has misapplied CDT by requiring agents to make binding choices before they have processed all available information about the causal consequences of their acts. I elucidate CDT in a way (...) that makes it clear where Egan goes wrong, and which explains why his examples pose no threat to the theory. My approach has similarities to a modification of CDT proposed by Frank Arntzenius, but it differs in the significance that it assigns to potential regrets. I maintain, contrary to Arntzenius, that an agent facing Egan's decisions can rationally choose actions that she knows she will later regret. All rationality demands of agents it that they maximize unconditional causal expected utility from an epistemic perspective that accurately reflects all the available evidence about what their acts are likely to cause. This yields correct answers even in outlandish cases in which one is sure to regret whatever one does. (shrink)

A comparison of E.O. Wilson's On Human Nature and Abraham Heschel's Who Is Man? introduces a discussion of how descriptions and explanations of the human are related to valuations of the human. More intense comparative analysis focuses on Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing, and Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Similarities of outlook toward life in the world are noted, although the supporting information, concepts, and arguments are radically different. The article illustrates how a subject matter, here the (...) human, that is addressed by different disciplines and methods can yield fruitful interdisciplinary analysis. (shrink)

A perceptual learning experiment provides evidence that the mental lexicon cannot consist solely of detailed acoustic traces of recognition episodes. In a training lexical decision phase, listeners heard an ambiguous [f–s] fricative sound, replacing either [f] or [s] in words. In a test phase, listeners then made lexical decisions to visual targets following auditory primes. Critical materials were minimal pairs that could be a word with either [f] or [s] (cf. English knife–nice), none of which had been heard in training. (...) Listeners interpreted the minimal pair words differently in the second phase according to the training received in the first phase. Therefore, lexically mediated retuning of phoneme perception not only influences categorical decisions about fricatives (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2003), but also benefits recognition of words outside the training set. The observed generalization across words suggests that this retuning occurs prelexically. Therefore, lexical processing involves sublexical phonological abstraction, not only accumulation of acoustic episodes. (shrink)

This chapter considers and evaluates the philosophical relationship between Alexander and R.G. Collingwood, focusing particularly on metaphysics and the philosophy of history. Their relationship was founded not on their agreement but to a considerable extent on their differences and their willingness to offer and accept critical commentary on each other’s writings. Following the publication of his An Essay on Philosophical Method in 1933, Collingwood sought to develop his own positive metaphysical system, which consists of a developmental and historical view of (...) reality. It is argued that Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity played a central part in Collingwood’s construction of his system, supplemented by the work of Whitehead and other process and emergence philosophers. (shrink)

Two lines of evolution in modern philosophy, empiricism and rationalism, are illustrated with ideas from the film, The matrix. The essay concludes with Kant’s defence of the idea that we do indeed live in a “matrix,” but it’s one of our own constructions. Awareness of this fact sets us free to create a better world.

Karol Wojtyła understood that the turn to the subject had beneficially augmented traditional metaphysics by revealing the uniqueness of each person. Nevertheless, he also knew that for those investigations into personhood to resist devolving into mere relativism, the analysis had to be grounded in the metaphysical principles of Thomism. One contemporary illustration of an ungrounded subjectivism is the rise of identitarianism; that is, the idea that people can choose their own identity based on a peculiar property as distinct from our (...) common human nature. In this paper, I will examine both the Thomistic metaphysical and phenomenological personalist bases for critiquing identitarianism. I will argue that the analogy of being, distinguishing substance from dependent modes of being, is the necessary metaphysical foundation for the personalist integration of actions in a subject who, while unique, must be recognized primarily as an instance of a common human nature. (shrink)