This anthology of essays on the work of David Kaplan, a leading contemporary philosopher of language, sprang from a conference, "Themes from Kaplan," organized by the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University.

In the past twenty years Joseph Raz has consolidated his reputation as one of the most acute, inventive, and energetic scholars currently at work in analytic moral and political theory. This new collection of essays forms a representative selection of his most significant contributions to a number of important debates, including the extent of political duty and obligation, and the issue of self-determination. He also examines aspects of the common (and ancient) theme of the relations between law and morality. (...) This volume of essays, available in one volume for the first time, will be essential to legal philosophers and political theorists. (shrink)

Summarizing this century's major debates over realism and the rationality of scientific knowledge, Joseph Rouse believes that these disputes oversimplify the ...

This is a new edition of Joseph Fletcher's 1966 work that ignited a firestorm of controversy at the time of its publication.

Over the last few decades, multiple studies have examined the understanding of participants in clinical research. They show variable and often poor understanding of key elements of disclosure, such as expected risks and the experimental nature of treatments. Did the participants in these studies give valid consent? According to the standard view of informed consent they did not. The standard view holds that the recipient of consent has a duty to disclose certain information to the profferer of consent because valid (...) consent requires that information to be understood. The contents of the understanding and disclosure requirements are therefore conceptually linked. In this paper, we argue that the standard view is mistaken. The disclosure and understanding requirements have distinct grounds tied to two different ways in which a token of consent can be rendered invalid. Analysis of these grounds allows us to derive the contents of the two requirements. It also implies that it is sometimes permissible to enroll willing participants who have not understood everything that they ought to be told about their clinical trials. (shrink)

This lucidly written book examines the social and political significance of the natural sciences through a detailed and original account of science as an interpretive social practice.

In this book, Joseph Millum explains how parental rights and responsibilities are acquired, what they consist in, and how parents should go about making decisions on behalf of their children. In doing so, he provides a set of frameworks to help solve pressing ethical dilemmas relating to parents and children.

The Social Theory of Practices effectively criticized conceptions of social practices as rule-governed or regularity-exhibiting performances. Turner’s criticisms nevertheless overlook an alternative, "normative" conception of practices as constituted by the mutual accountability of their performances. Such a conception of practices also allows a more adequate understanding of normativity in terms of accountability to what is at issue and at stake in a practice. We can thereby understand linguistic practice and normative authority without having to posit stable meanings, rules, norms, or (...) presuppositions underlying the manifest diversity of social life. Key Words: normativity • practices • rules • language. (shrink)

In this book Joseph Heath brings Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action into dialogue with the most sophisticated articulation of the instrumental conception of practical rationality-modern rational choice theory. Heath begins with an overview of Habermas's action theory and his critique of decision and game theory. He then offers an alternative to Habermas's use of speech act theory to explain social order and outlines a multidimensional theory of rational action that includes norm-governed action as a specific type.In the second (...) part of the book Heath discusses the more philosophical dimension of Habermas's conception of practical rationality. He criticizes Habermas's attempt to introduce a universalization principle governing moral discourse, as well as his criteria for distinguishing between moral and ethical problems. Heath offers an alternative account of the level of convergence exhibited by moral argumentation, drawing on game-theoretic models to specify the burden of proof that the theory of communicative action and discourse must assume. (shrink)

Few reference works in philosophy have articles on hope. Few also are systematic or large-scale philosophical studies of hope. Hope is admitted to be important in people's lives, but as a topic for study, hope has largely been left to psychologists and theologians. For the most part philosophers treat hope en passant. My aim is to outline a general theory of hope, to explore its structure, forms, goals, reasonableness, and implications, and to trace the implications of such a theory for (...) atheism or theism. What has been written is quite disparate. Some see hope in an individualistic, often existential, way, and some in a social and political way. Hope is proposed by some as essentially atheistic, and by others as incomprehensible outside of one or another kind of theism. Is it possible to think consistently and at the same time comprehensively about the phenomenon of human hoping? Or is it several phenomena? How could there be such diverse understandings of so central a human experience? On what rational basis could people differ over whether hope is linked to God? What I offer here is a systematic analysis, but one worked out in dialogue with Ernst Bloch, Immanuel Kant, and Gabriel Marcel. Ernst Bloch of course was a Marxist and officially an atheist, Gabriel Marcel a Christian theist, and Immanuel Kant was a theist, but not in a conventional way. (shrink)

In our papers on the rationality of magic, we distinghuished, for purposes of analysis, three levels of rationality. First and lowest (rationalitYl) the goal directed action of an agent with given aims and circumstances, where among his circumstances we included his knowledge and opinions. On this level the magician's treatment of illness by incantation is as rational as any traditional doctor's blood-letting or any modern one's use of anti-biotics. At the second level (rationalitY2) we add the element of rational thinking (...) or thinking which obeys some set of explicit rules, a level which is not found in magic in general, though it is sometimes given to specific details of magical thinking within the magical thought-system. It was the late Sir Edward E. Evans-Pritchard who observed that when considering magic in detail the magician may be as consistent or critical as anyone else; but when considering magic in general, or any system of thought in general, the magician could not be critical or even comprehend the criticism. Evans-Pritchard went even further: he was sceptical as to whether it could be done in a truly consistent manner: one cannot be critical of one's own system, he thought. On this level (rationalitY2) of discussion we have explained (earlier) why we prefer to wed Evans Pritchard's view of the magician's capacity for piece-meal rationality to Sir James Frazer's view that magic in general is pseudo-rational because it lacks standards of rational thinking. (shrink)

JOSEPH AGASSI 1. Sir Karl Popper has offered two different theories of scientific progress, his theory of conjectures and refutations and corroboration, as well as his theory of verisimilitude increase. The former was attacked by some old-fashioned inductivists, yet is triumphant; the latter has been refuted by Tichy and by Miller to Popper’s own satisfaction. Oddly, however, the theory of verisimilitude was developed because of some deficiency in the theory of corroboration, and though in its present precise formulation it (...) was refuted, Popper still holds it in general terms, and I think he still hopes to find a better precise formulation of it. My aims in the present note are to pin-point the deficiency of Popper’s theory of corroboration and to use this for a precise formulation of verisimilitude increase acceptable to him. For my part, however, I see the situation in a different way, as will be indicated at the end of this note. (shrink)

Life Without Principles d adds a fourth volume to the trilogy published under the general title The Persistence of Reality d. I demonstrates why theoretical and practical questions cannot be disjoined.

Ronald Dworkin’s argument for resource egalitarianism has as its centerpiece a thought experiment involving a group of shipwreck survivors washed ashore on an uninhabited island, who decide to divide up all of the resources on the island equally using a competitive auction. Unfortunately, Dworkin misunderstands how the auction mechanism works, and so misinterprets its significance for egalitarian political philosophy. First, he makes it seem as though there is a conceptual connection between the ‘envy-freeness’ standard and the auction, when in fact (...) there is none. Second, he fails to appreciate how idealized the conditions are that must be satisfied in order for his results to obtain. This leads him to draw practical conclusions from the thought experiment that do not follow, such as his claim that the principle of equality generates a presumption in favor of the market as a mechanism for the distribution of resources. The result is that Dworkin saddles resource egalitarianism with a set of commitments that are, in fact, inessential to that view. (shrink)

Basic research or fundamental research is distinct from both pure and applied research, in that it is pure research with expected useful results. The existence of basic or fundamental research is problematic, at least for both inductivists and instrumentalists, but also for Popper. Assuming scientific research to be the search for explanatory conjectures and for refutations, and assuming technology to be the search of conjectures and some corroborations, we can easily place basic or fundamental research between science and technology as (...) a part of their overlap. As a bonus, the present view of basic or fundamental research as an overlap explains the specific hardship basic research workers encounter. (shrink)

In this important essay, Joseph Mali argues that Vico's New Science must be interpreted according to Vico's own clues and rules of interpretation, principally his claim that the 'master-key' of his New Science is the discovery of myth. Following this lead Mali shows how Vico came to forge his new scientific theories about the mythopoeic constitution of consciousness, society, and history by reappraising, or 'rehabilitating' the ancient and primitive mythical traditions which still persist in modern times. He further relates (...) Vico's radical redefinition of these traditions as the 'true narrations' of all religious, social, and political practices in the 'civil world' to his unique historical depiction of Western civilisation as evolving in a-rational and cyclical motions. On this account, Mali elaborates the wider, distinctly 'revisionist', implications of Vico's New Science for the modern human sciences. He argues that inasmuch as the New Science exposed the linguistic and other cultural systems of the modern world as being essentially mythopoeic, it challenges not only the Christian and Enlightenment ideologies of progress in his time, but also the main cultural ideologies of our time. (shrink)

Traditional theorists about free will and moral responsibility endorse the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP): an agent is morally responsible for an action that she performs only if she can do or could have done otherwise. According to source theorists, PAP is false and an agent is morally responsible for her action only if she is the source of that action. Source incompatibilists accept the source theory but also endorse INC: if determinism is true, then no one is morally responsible (...) for any action. This paper is a critique of a kind of source incompatibilism, namely, direct source incompatibilism. Direct source incompatibilists reject PAP on the basis of Frankfurt-style examples. Since PAP is one of two premises in the traditional argument for INC, direct source incompatibilists opt for a version of the direct argument, which argues for INC with the aid of some non-responsibility transfer principle. I demonstrate that this option is not available, for there is a tension between the following two claims. (shrink)

Does the Second Amendment protect those who threaten others by negligently or recklessly wielding firearms? What line separates constitutionally legitimate gun displays from threatening activities that can be legally proscribed? This article finds guidance in the First Amendment doctrine of true threats, which permits punishment of “statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individual.” The Second Amendment, like the First, should (...) not be read to protect those who threaten unlawful violence. And to the degree that the constitution requires a culpable mental state in such circumstances, the appropriate standard should be recklessness. (shrink)

Rats and mice are very much more likely to be experimented on today in biomedical research than dogs, cats, or primates. Rats and mice, however, are explicitly excluded from the federal Animal Welfare Act's protections against animal pain and suffering in a research setting. This paper is a response to an invitation to reflect on how medical and scientific researchers should think about the rats and mice they use, in light of ongoing legal developments in the human-animal relationship. The invitation (...) was extended by the Michigan Society for Biomedical Research, an organization for the promotion of biomedical research and defense of the use of animals in research. It was extended to a teacher of Animal Law at the University of Michigan Law School who was serving as the non-scientist member from the University on the University's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. Considerations to which attention is directed include developments in experimentation on humans paralleling and connected with developments in experimentation on animals, developments in the science of animals beyond the biomedical field, general movements in the legal treatment of animals that are not the outcome of conflicts between animal activists and research institutions, and the importance of attitude as a focus in any regulation of experimentation, animal or human. (shrink)

Authorship is a complicated subject in Kierkegaard's work, which he surely recognized, given his late attempts to explain himself in On My Work as an Author. From the use of multiple pseudonyms and antonyms, to contributions across a spectrum of media and genres, issues of authorship abound. Why did Kierkegaard write in the ways he did? Before we assess Kierkegaard's famous thoughts on faith or love, or the relationship between 'the aesthetic,' 'the ethical,' and 'the religious,' we must approach how (...) he expressed them. Given the multi-authored nature of his works, can we find a view or voice that is definitively Kierkegaard's own? Can entries in his unpublished journals and notebooks tell us what Kierkegaard himself thought? How should contemporary readers understand inconsistencies or contradictions between differently named authors? We cannot make definitive claims about Kierkegaard's work as a thinker without understanding Kierkegaard's work as an author. This collection, by leading contemporary Kierkegaard scholars, is the first to systematically examine the divisive question and practice of authorship in Kierkegaard from philosophical, literary and theological perspectives. (shrink)

Does thinking have a history? If there are no necessarily changeless structures to be found in things and in our inquiry into them, then what knowledge of the world and ourselves is possible? In this boldly original and elegantly written study, Joseph Margolis argues for a radically historicized view of history that treats it as both a real process and a narrative account, each a product of continual change. Developing his argument through discussions of such influential philosophers of history (...) and the natural sciences as Vico, Danto, Collingwood, Habermas, Hempel, Popper, Putnam, and Gadamer, he provides a coherent theory of flux and invariance that resolves several deep puzzles regarding human nature and understanding. While maintaining a thorough command of Anglo-American philosophy, Margolis challenges many of its most cherished assumptions and demonstrates the sense in which history and interpretation are one and the same. Exploring one of the master themes of this century, his book offers a novel theory of the human condition whose conclusions and concerns seem certain to inform philosophy in the next century as well. (shrink)

The paper returns to the question whether equality in distribution is valuable in itself, or, if you like, whether it is intrinsically valuable. Its bulk is an examination of two familiar arguments against the intrinsic value of distributional equality: the levelling down objection and the objection that equality violates some person-affecting condition, in that its realisation does not improve the lot of people.

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 19, Issue 6, Page 1216-1220, December 2011.

This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic, timeless works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.

This article seeks to develop the Marxist conception of social structure by incorporating developments within critical realist philosophy. It rejects forms of economic determinism such as the base-superstructure model and those reconstructions—like Cohen’s—that attribute primacy to productive forces in explaining history and society. It argues instead that society is the product of complex, often contradictory combinations of many different structures and mechanisms. They form a structural ensemble, hierarchically arranged, but where each element has its own dynamics and emergent powers. It (...) concludes that society is best understood through critical realist conceptions of stratification, emergence, transformation, and overdetermination. (shrink)

This article examines the interpretive dimensions of human action. Although it takes the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu as its starting point, the article attempts to develop a more robust hermeneutical account of the reflexivity of social actors and those who study them than Bourdieu himself has considered. It is argued that interpretation is best understood not as the homologous expression of inculcated structures but rather as context-sensitive and reflexively context-transforming action—or what the author wishes to characterize, respectively, as first- (...) and second-order thematizations of embeddedness. The article concludes by contrasting the author's position with the thick description of Clifford Geertz. (shrink)

Shaftesbury is widely regarded as an early champion of sentimentalism in ethics, yet no one appears to have succeeded at stating, in terms congenial to modern moral philosophy, a theory of ethics which can appropriately be ascribed to him. Two themes of his doctrine of fellow feeling, I argue, contain implicitly the two basic principles of his ethical system and the proper key to his sentimentalism. Shaftesbury is a sentimentalist in virtue of his attempt to discover a foundation for morality (...) through a study of human emotion, sentiment and desire, rather than by appeal to "reason's" demand for consistency and impartiality in practical choice. Without "natural affection"--sympathy, compassion and fellow concern--not only would humans lack sufficient motivational resources for the practice of altruism in their lives, but any attempt by moralists to rationally justify other-regarding and benevolent moral principles would necessarily be futile. I further clarify the nature of sentimentalism as it speaks to questions both of explanation and of justification by means of a comparison with parts of Thomas Nagel's argument in The Possibility of Altruism . Nagel's rationalist arguments against the feasibility of ethical sentimentalism are by no means conclusive; the sentimentalist account can shed light on important philosophical problems of morality which Nagel's view is ill-equipped to discuss. I then render my own modernized versions of various traditional objections to Shaftesbury's view, and, while acknowledging the presence of several serious problems for contemporary sentimentalism, I argue that the same type of approach which distinguished Shaftesbury from his predecessors and peers is still quite defensible within current moral theory and psychology of ethics. I believe I have achieved my two most significant objectives: to do something to loosen the grip of a certain widely accepted picture of ethics and morality which I take to be misguided--the view that moral principle must be seen to have "rational force" independent of the actual desires, emotions and attachments of human beings--and to get some contemporary handle on the ethical thought of this puzzling and neglected, though very influential, early British Moralist. (shrink)