A distinction is made between moral indoctrination and instruction in ethics. It is argued that the legitimate and important field of computer ethics should not be permitted to become mere moral indoctrination. Computer ethics is an academic field in its own right with unique ethical issues that would not have existed if computer technology had not been invented. Several example issues are presented to illustrate this point. The failure to find satisfactory non-computer analogies testifies to the uniqueness of computer ethics. (...) Lack of an effective analogy forces us to discover new moral values, formulate new moral principles, develop new policies, and find new ways to think about the issues presented to us. For all of these reasons, the kind of issues presented deserve to be addressed separately from others that might at first appear similar. At the very least, they have been so transformed by computing technology that their altered form demands special attention. (shrink)

A distinction is made between moral indoctrination and instruction in ethics. It is argued that the legitimate and important field of computer ethics should not be permitted to become mere moral indoctrination. Computer ethics is an academic field in its own right with unique ethical issues that would not have existed if computer technology had not been invented. Several example issues are presented to illustrate this point. The failure to find satisfactory non-computer analogies testifies to the uniqueness of computer ethics. (...) Lack of an effective analogy forces us to discover new moral values, formulate new moral principles, develop new policies, and find new ways to think about the issues presented to us. For all of these reasons, the kind of issues presented deserve to be addressed separately from others that might at first appear similar. At the very least, they have been so transformed by computing technology that their altered form demands special attention. (shrink)

In this book, Linda Wetzel examines the distinction between types and tokens and argues that types exist (as abstract objects, since they lack a unique ...

Peirce illustrated the type-token distinction by means of the definite article: there is only one word type “the,” but there are likely to be about twenty tokens of it on this page. Not all tokens are inscriptions; some are sounds, whispered or shouted, and some are smoke signals. The type “the” is neither written ink nor spoken sound; it is an abstract object. Or consider the Grizzly Bear, Ursus arctos horribilis. At one time its U.S. range was most of the (...) area west of the Missouri River and it numbered 10,000 in California alone. Today it numbers less than 1,000. Of course no particular bear numbers 1,000 and no particular bear ever had a range comprising most of the area west of the Missouri. It is a type of bear, a species of bear, that has both properties.We are all familiar with this way of talking about types of things. But—aside from being universals—what are types? What makes a token of one type rather than another? How do we know it is a token of that type? Do some types fail to have tokens? What, if anything, do all and only tokens of a particular type have in common other than being tokens of that type? The first half of the paper answers the last question (“Nothing beyond being a token of the type”). The second half contains sketches of answers to the other questions. (shrink)

Theodicy begins with the recognition that the world is not obviously under the care of a loving God with limitless power and wisdom. If it were, why would the world be burdened with its considerable amount and variety of evil? Theodicists are those who attempt to answer this question by suggesting a possible rationale for the appearance of evil in a theocentric universe. In the past theodicists have taken up the cause of theodicy in the service of piety, so that (...) God might be defended against libel from humans, particularly the accusation that God's reign lacks justice. Contemporary practitioners, who live in a world where the existence of God can no longer be presumed, tend to favour theodicy as an exercise in securing the rationality of religious belief. Their hope is that one crucial theoretical obstacle to responsible belief in God will have been eliminated, once the idea of God has been reconciled with the reality of evil. What has commonly united theodicists, at least since the Enlightenment, is that they must answer to a non–believing antagonist. Until relatively recently, theodicy has been a debate between apologists for theistic faith and their cultured detractors. (shrink)

The domain of “procedural ethics” is the set of reflective and deliberative methods that maximize the reliability of moral judgment. While no general algorithmic method exists that will guarantee the validity of ethical deliberation, non‐algorithmic “heuristic” methods can guide and inform the process, making it significantly more robust and dependable. This essay examines various representative heuristic procedures commonly recommended for use in applied ethics, maps them into a uniform set of twelve stages, identifies common faults, then shows how the resulting (...) stage‐by‐stage decision‐making model could be adapted for general use and for use in computer ethics. (shrink)

The rise of various unique, or uniquely transformed, ethical issues supports the claim that computer ethics deserves to be regarded as an academic field in its own right. Some of these issues are unique because they inherit the unique properties of the technology that generates or transforms them. When we are unable to resolve these issues through non-computer moral analogies, we are forced to discover new moral values, formulate new moral principles and develop new policies.

This essay sets forth a philosophical reformulation and defense of the doctrine of original sin. The sticking point of the traditional doctrine is its apparent commitment to the proposition that moral guilt is heritable. While I make no claim to defend the justice of vicarious punishment (the idea of having one person suffer for the sins of another), I credit nevertheless the idea of vicarious guilt. As responsible beings, we have to answer for evil that we cannot conceivably have willed (...) ourselves. The reformulation of original sin and guilt takes its inspiration from Kant's conception of radical evil, which is refined in light of some contemporary reflection on the nature of responsible freedom. (shrink)

The distinction between a type and its tokens is a useful metaphysical distinction. In §1 it is explained what it is, and what it is not. Its importance and wide applicability in linguistics, philosophy, science and everyday life are briefly surveyed in §2. Whether types are universals is discussed in §3. §4 discusses some other suggestions for what types are, both generally and specifically. Is a type the sets of its tokens? What exactly is a word, a symphony, a species? (...) §5 asks what a token is. §6 considers the relation between types and their tokens. Do the type and all its tokens share the same properties? Must all the tokens be alike in some or all respects? §7 explains some problems for the view that types exist, and some problems for the view that they don't. §8 elucidates a distinction often confused with the type-token distinction, that between a type (or token) and an occurrence of it. It also discusses some problems that occurrences might be thought to give rise to, and one way to resolve them. (shrink)

Augustine's moral psychology was one of the richest in late antiquity, and in this book James Wetzel evaluates its development, indicating that the insights offered by Augustine on free-will have been prevented from receiving full appreciation as the result of an anachronistic distinction between theology and philosophy. He shows that it has been commonplace to divide Augustine's thought into earlier and later phases, the former being more philosophically informed than the latter. Wetzel's contention is that this division is (...) less pronounced than it has been made out to be. The author shows that, while Augustine clearly acknowledges his differences with philosophy, he never loses his fascination with the Stoic concepts of happiness and virtue, and of the possibility of their attainment by human beings. This fascination is seen by Wetzel to extend to Augustine's writings on grace, where freedom and happiness are viewed as a recovery of virtue. The notorious dismissal of pagan virtue in 'The City of God' is part of Augustine's family quarrel with philosophers, not a rejection of philosophy per se. Augustine the theologian is thus seen to be a Platonist philosopher with a keen sense of the psychology of moral struggle. (shrink)

Augustine's City of God has profoundly influenced the course of Western political philosophy, but there are few guides to its labyrinthine argumentation that hold together the delicate interplay of religion and philosophy in Augustine's thought. The essays in this volume offer a rich examination of those themes, using the central, contested distinction between a heavenly city on earthly pilgrimage and an earthly city bound for perdition to elaborate aspects of Augustine's political and moral vision. Topics discussed include Augustine's notion of (...) the secular, his critique of pagan virtue, his departure from classical eudaimonism, his mythology of sin, his dystopian politics, his surprising attention to female bodies, his moral psychology, his valorisation of love, his critique of empire and his conception of a Christian philosophy. Together the essays advance our understanding of Augustine's most influential work and provide a rich overview of Augustinian political theology and its philosophical implications. (shrink)

The negative aim of this paper is to identify shortcomings in received theories. First, we criticize approaching audiences, and large gatherings more general, in categories revolving around the notion of the crowd. Second, we show how leading paradigms in emotion research restrict research on the social-relational dynamics of emotions by reducing them to physiological processes like emotional contagion or to cognitive processes like social appraisal. Our positive aim is to offer an alternative proposal for conceptualizing emotional dynamics in audiences. First, (...) we offer a notion of emotional sharing for studying the social-relational dynamics of emotions. Second, we propose a working concept of audience as a dynamic and dispersed social collective. Finally, we bring these elements together in the description of two scenes of jubilation. (shrink)

The importance of teaching critical thinking skills at the college level cannot be overemphasized. Teaching a subcategory of these skills—argument analysis—we believe is especially important for first-year students with their college careers, as well as their lives, ahead of them. The struggle, however, is how to effectively teach argument analysis skills that will serve students in a broad range of disciplines.

If one attempts to examine the role of a concept in the writings of a man of letters, it seems appropriate to begin with some linguistic observations pertinent to the discussion: aesthetics. To what extent and in what particular way does the metaphorical field associated with the concept of organism determine or at least reach into descriptions of the creative process as such? Such an initial step of modest pragmatics suggests itself especially in view of the fact that Goethe never (...) developed a system of aesthetics, classical or otherwise, in which a theoretical analysis would be possible. In fact, we will see that he had a fundamental distrust of theoretical systems for art or nature. In what terms, then, does Goethe describe the process of artistic creation? As might be expected, there are indeed expressions of "conceiving," of "nurturing" a theme, of "bearing" a poem for years until its final "birth." Many of those poems that strike the reader with their convincing immediacy, which seem to have been nothing but impulse and instantaneous expression of feeling, came into the world after a considerable period of incubation. And Goethe emphasizes that the length of pregnancy poetic was not determined by the poet, but by an internal process of maturing and usually by an external, catalytic occasion. (shrink)

Die thematisch breit gefächerte Reihe umfasst Schriften zur Kunst- und Bildwissenschaft, Kulturgeschichte und Philosophie.

Roughly half the essays in this collection engage directly with Augustine's theological animus and follow his thinking into self-division, perversity of will, grief, conversion, and the aspiration for transcendence.

When Religious Experience went into production with the University of California Press, I was still in residence as a graduate student at Columbia, where I was working with Wayne Proudfoot on issues in the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. Although this is now more than thirty years ago, I distinctively remember having a conversation with him about whether Religious Experience should have a subtitle and, if so, what. Proudfoot’s disposition as a writer is hardly baroque, and so he decided, (...) heedless of his student’s youthful love of circumlocution, to do without the ornament of an explanatory or at least cautionary subtitle. Naked Religious Experience it would be.The Press, no doubt... (shrink)

Pascal's wager has fascinated philosophers far in excess of its reputation as effective apologetics. Very few of the wager's defenders, in fact, have retained more than an academic interest in its power to persuade. Partly this is a matter of good manners. Pascal is supposed to have pitched his wager at folks who understand only self-interested motivations, and today it is no longer fashionable for defenders of theism to disparage the character of their opponents. But partly the low-key concern with (...) apologetics expresses a philosophical judgement. Pascal's defenders have found the question of the wager's audience to be less philosophically engaging than the logic of its argument. I believe that this assessment is mistaken. The most puzzling feature of Pascal's wager is its invocation of infinite utility. What are finite human beings, theists or otherwise, supposed to make of the idea of an infinitely desirable happiness? There are, I will argue, two sorts of response to this question, and depending on which sort Pascal had in mind, the logic of his wager comes out very differently. (shrink)

John Milbank's case against secular reason draws much of its authority and force from Augustine's critique of pagan virtue. "Theology and Social Theory" could be characterized, without too much insult to either Augustine or Milbank, as a postmodern "City of God". Modern preoccupations with secular virtues, marketplace values, and sociological bottom-lines are likened there to classically pagan preoccupations with the virtues of self-conquest and conquest over others. Against both modern and antique "ontological violence" (where 'to be' is 'to be antagonistic'), (...) Milbank advances an Augustinian hope for the peace that is both beyond and prior to the peace of (temporarily) repressed antagonism. One aim of this essay is to consider whether virtues conceived out of such a hope are really all that different from the virtues they are taken to replace. I take a critical look at Augustine's critique of pagan virtue, Milbank's appropriation of that critique, the applicability of that critique to Plato, and the polemical value of Augustine's notion of original sin. I end up being skeptical of the notion of a peculiarly Christian way to turn antagonistically conceived virtues into love, but I am not unsympathetic to Milbank's concerns about a loveless and self-complacent secularity. (shrink)

The dissertation explores the philosophical, literary, and stylistic similarities between the twentieth century American writer Sherwood Anderson and the nineteenth century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. These similarities suggest that the Ohio writer's work and aesthetic were deeply influenced by the Danish thinker, and the connection between them lies in the immigrant rural religious communities of the American Middle West. Ultimately, these interrelations reveal a "religious-aesthetic" unique to the entire range of Midwestern literature of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and they (...) also reveal a politics and an aesthetic of Midwestern art available yet today. (shrink)

Dietmar Wetzel unternimmt eine diskurskritisch-vergleichenden Lektüre zweier Theorielinien der neueren Sozialphilosophie: identitäts- versus alteritätsorientierte Konzepte. Das Denken des Ethischen und des Politischen wird dabei anhand einer Beschäftigung mit Schlüsselbegriffen, Konstellationen und Figuren der Gegenwartsgesellschaft thematisch an Gerechtigkeit, Geschlecht, Dritte(m) und Gemeinschaft ausgerichtet. Soziologische Essays, dem Intellektuellen, der Hausfrau, dem Grenzpolizisten und dem Flüchtling gewidmet sind, komplementieren die Analysen. So kann gezeigt werden, daß differenztheoretische Positionen (Lévinas/Derrida) den Begriff der Gerechtigkeit um Aspekte der Fürsorge und der moralischen Gefühle erweitern müssen (...) (Benhabib, Cornell). Da im Übergang der Ich-Anderer-Beziehung zu "ordentlichen Bezügen" das Dritte eine grundlegende Rolle spielt, läßt sich Gemeinschaftsbildung nicht mehr im Sinne natural bzw. religiös begründeter Nachbarschaft (Kommunitarismus), sondern nur als stets neu zu legitimierende und variierende Kultivierung von Andersheit begreifen. (shrink)