Considered a classic in the philosophy of language movement known variously as the New Theory of Reference or the Direct-Reference Theory, as well as in the metaphysics of modal essentialism that is related to this philosophy of language. This award-winning book is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation.

In recent years there has been an explosion of philosophical work on blame. Much of this work has focused on explicating the nature of blame or on examining the norms that govern it, and the primary motivation for theorizing about blame seems to derive from blame’s tight connection to responsibility. However, very little philosophical attention has been given to praise and its attendant practices. In this paper, I identify three possible explanations for this lack of attention. My goal is to (...) show that each of these lines of thought is mistaken and to argue that praise is deserving of careful, independent analysis by philosophers interested in theorizing about responsibility. (shrink)

This book argues that Hume is a radical epistemic skeptic who gives only practical reasons for retaining belief in sensory beliefs and the deliverances of reason. He advises us to take a moderate approach to the demands of philosophy, since they sometimes diverge from the demands of life.

Some philosophers think that the challenge of justifying punishment can be met by a theory that emphasizes the expressive character of punishment. A particular type of theories of this sort - call it Expressive Retributivism [ER] - combines retributivist and expressivist considerations. These theories are retributivist since they justify punishment as an intrinsically appropriate response to wrongdoing, as something wrongdoers deserve, but the expressivist element in these theories seeks to correct for the traditional obscurity of retributivism. Retributivists often rely on (...) appeals to controversial intuitions involving obscure concepts. While retributive intuitions can be compelling, some worry that the justificatory challenge cannot be met merely by appealing to them. ER tries to enhance the clarity and justificatory power of these intuitions and the concepts they invoke by appealing to an expressive conception of punishment. I argue that these theories fail to justify punishment and that there is reason to think that they cannot, in principle, justify punishment. (shrink)

Although Professor Schiffer and I have many times disagreed, I share his deep and abiding commitment to argument as a primary philosophical tool. Regretting any communication failure that has occurred, I endeavor here to make clearer my earlier reply in “Illogical Belief” to Schiffer’s alleged problem for my version of Millianism.1 I shall be skeletal, however; the interested reader is encouraged to turn to “Illogical Belief” for detail and elaboration. I have argued that to bear a propositional attitude de re (...) is to bear that attitude toward the corresponding singular proposition, no more and no less. If this is right, then according to Millianism every instance of the following modal schema is true. (shrink)

I criticize an increasingly popular set of arguments for the justifiability of punishment. Some philosophers try to justify punishment by appealing to what Peter Strawson calls the reactive attitudes – emotions like resentment, indignation, remorse and guilt. These arguments fail. The view that these emotions commit us to punishment rests on unsophisticated views of punishment and of these emotions and their associated behaviors. I offer more sophisticated accounts of punishment, of these emotions and of their associated behaviors that are consistent (...) with Abolitionism, the view that punishment is unjustified. (shrink)

I argue that contemporary liberal theory cannot give a general justification for the institution or practice of punishment, i.e., a justification that would hold across a broad range of reasonably realistic conditions. I examine the general justifications offered by three prominent contemporary liberal theorists and show how their justifications fail in light of the possibility of an alternative to punishment. I argue that, because of their common commitments regarding the nature of justification, these theorists have decisive reasons to reject punishment (...) in favor of a non-punitive alternative. I demonstrate the possibility of this alternative by means of a careful examination of the nature of punishment, isolating one essential characteristic—the aim to impose suffering—and showing how this characteristic need not guide enforcement. There is logical space for a forceful and coercive, yet non-punitive method of enforcement. This fact poses difficulties for many classical and contemporary justifications of punishment, but it poses particularly crippling problems for general liberal justifications. (shrink)

Jeffrey King's principal objection to the direct-reference theory of demonstratives is analyzed and criticized. King has responded with a modified version of his original argument aimed at establishing the weaker conclusion that the direct-reference theory of demonstratives is either incomplete or incorrect. It is argued that this fallback argument also fails.

INTERWOVEN IN THE COMPLEX TEXTURE of Solomon Maimon's system are strands of thought originating in the theories of his avowed creditors. Maimon is one of the first modern philosophers who acknowledges his debt to diverse philosophical trends and traditions. Among his major creditors, Maimon includes Maimonides and Spinoza. The present analysis, however, will be restricted to an exploration of his debt to Leibniz, Hume, and Kant.

CHAPTER ONE FREEDOM, ACTION AND DEEDS It is an established fact that Kant's theory of deeds or acts can ultimately be equaled with his ethical theory. ...

Arguments are nowadays often presented as soundbites: as slogans, tweets, memes and even gifs. Arguments developed in detail often meet the response TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read). This is unfortunate—especially when tackling the topic of abortion. Soundbites make many pro-life arguments seem stronger than they really are, while the complexities of pro-choice arguments can’t be readily reduced to soundbites.

This paper aims to further examine the relationship between self-awareness and agency by focusing on the role that emotional awareness plays in prominent conceptions of responsibility. One promising way of approaching this task is by focusing on individuals who display impairments in emotional awareness and then examining the effects that these impairments have on their apparent responsibility for the actions that they perform. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder as well as other clinical groups who evince high degrees of the personality (...) construct known as alexithymia, I will argue, do, in fact, display impairments in emotional self-awareness, and, so, may provide some insight into the relationship between this awareness and the capacity for responsible agency. More specifically, individuals with ASD may provide us with evidence that robust emotional self-awareness is not a necessary condition for responsible agency or that lacking such a capacity could undermine some otherwise plausible sufficient conditions for responsibility. The aim of the paper, then, is twofold. First, it will aim to show that ASD ought to be understood, in part, as a disorder of emotional self-awareness. Section 2 presents evidence relating to the emotional profile characteristic of individuals with ASD and argues that the most striking feature of this profile is the way in which the individual seems to be separated from his or her emotions in an important sense. Second, the paper aims to show that this distinctive feature of the emotions in ASD casts serious doubt on some prominent accounts of moral responsibility. To this end, section 3.1 presents a challenge to some widely accepted “subjective conditions” for responsibility, namely those articulated by John Martin Fischer and Ravizza and makes a case, based on the empirical data regarding autism, that these conditions actually are not necessary for one’s being a responsible agent. Section 3.2 then presents a challenge for theories of responsible agency which assign primary importance to the connection between an agent’s actions and her judgment-sensitive attitudes. I argue there that the evidence from autism suggests that these theories fail in their efforts to provide sufficient conditions for responsibility. (shrink)

According to our intuitions, certain generalizations are better confirmed by positive instances than others. In order to characterize the difference between these generalizations, I have proposed in [3] to investigate the generalizing behavior of living beings. Such an investigation makes it possible to classify into different categories the generalizations that are intuitively confirmed by their positive instances and those that are not intuitively confirmed by such instances. One important aspect of my treatment, however, has been shown to be unsatisfactory: sentences (...) that are logically equivalent may belong to different categories. In this paper, I shall first give a short summary of the relevant parts of my previous paper, and then I shall try to improve it in order to avoid the undesirable result. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that contemporary truth pluralists have undersold the connection between their views and the semantic realism/anti-realism debate. I argue that pluralist theories of truth are essentially a combination of accepting both realist and anti-realist intuitions, and that we should take this lesson to heart. I show how we can categorize pluralist views by how realist or anti-realist they are, and introduce two notions to do so: methodological fundamentality and theoretical fundamentality. I show how viewing the pluralist (...) literature in this way reveals the core principles behind rival pluralist accounts and cuts across another influential way to divide up the truth pluralist literature. I conclude by introducing a new version of truth pluralism: methodological pluralism about truth. Methodological pluralism about truth stays methodologically neutral between its realist and anti-realist poles, and thus better accounts for both of its key theoretical motivations. (shrink)

This paper is designed to help people rationally engage moral issues regarding the treatment of animals, specifically uses of animals in medical and psychological experimentation, basic research, drug development, education and training, consumer product testing and other areas.

This article interrogates a key feature of anarchist education; focusing on a problem with implications not only for anarchist conceptions of education, but for anarchist philosophy and pra...

Expanding the Critical Animal Studies Imagination: Essays in Solidarity and Total Liberation pushes critical animal studies forward and outward by making new connections to movements and ideas that have been little engaged with in publication to the present. This book challenges critical animal studies adherents to expand their efforts of solidarity, mutual aid, and activism. Contributors to this volume extend invitations to those not familiar with critical animal studies to welcome them in with gestures of solidarity towards total liberation. Expanding (...) the Critical Animal Studies Imagination does not shy away from controversial topics but critically engages with them using care and tact. This is not controversy for the sake of being provocative, but not being afraid to target root causes of oppression. This book works toward coalition building to resist the current violence and build peaceful communities. (shrink)

ABSTRACTNo comprehensive research of Erasmus’ ethnological mind has been published, so far. Erasmus’ attitudes toward Turks and Jews were discussed analytically but not synthetically or comparatively. An attempt to widen the ethnological scope and to define and classify Erasmus’ attitudes toward different non-Christian groups is presented here. Christian Europeans were at the top of Erasmus’ echelon. Second to them were ‘half-Christians’, i.e. Turks, or Muslims in general. Below them were Jews, and lower in the hierarchy were black Africans. Yet, no (...) one was unworthy of conversion to Christianity, even barbarians of the third kind – according to Bartolomé Las Casas’ sort – the most inferior barbarians, slaves by nature, as defined by Aristotle. According to Las Casas, these barbarians were too low to ask for God and were not candidates for conversion to Christianity. Erasmus’ believed that Barbarians of any kind deserved Christianity without being brutally forced to accept it. Yet, in practice, converts from Judaism to Christianity were rated, even by Erasmus, as lower than Christians. This, in addition to the principle that Christian peace excludes war against the Turks, is the very essence of Erasmus’ pax et concordia. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Patrician Tribune: P. Clodius PulcherNathan RosensteinW. Jeffrey Tatum. The Patrician Tribune: P. Clodius Pulcher. Studies in the History of Greece and Rome. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xii + 365 pp. Cloth, $49.95.Ancient historians rarely tackle political narrative anymore; institutions and culture and structures social, economic, and political are the staples of academic endeavor these days. Thus the biography of a major political figure (...) of the late Republic comes as a refreshing change and evokes a certain nostalgia, for this reviewer at least. One encounters many of the old topics that so preoccupied scholars a generation ago--the Bona Dea scandal, the exile and recall of Cicero, the conference at Luca--and, to judge by the paucity of recent works on them and their like in Tatum's bibliography, excite little interest now. A pity, really, for Tatum shows how much is still to be learned from their study, even if solutions to puzzles like the Vettius affair seem as elusive as ever. The outlines of the story Tatum has to tell will be familiar to its readers; as one would expect, the interest lies in the changes of emphasis and tone and the new insights he brings to these events.Tatum admits that Clodius' personality is largely beyond recovery but [End Page 592] suggests that "One will probably not err by much in picturing Clodius as a handsome, urbane, and proud (at times, indeed, obnoxious) noble, of violent temper and of somewhat dubious moral fiber--possessed of a fascination with adventure yet capable nonetheless of very traditional pretensions" (43). Tatum describes an early career that was largely conventional: like other young nobles Clodius sought military experience abroad and political involvement at home, prosecuting Catiline (Tatum dismisses contemporary claims of collusion with the defense), and serving as Murena's go-between to the divisores in the consular elections for 62 b.c.e. (something neither "novel or in any way indicative of the direction of his later mastery of the plebs urbana" [58]). With regard to the events of late 63, Tatum accepts Plutarch's statement that Clodius supported Cicero against Catiline, despite Cicero's later claims to the contrary. The sole anomaly here is Clodius' instigation of a mutiny among Lucullus' troops at Nisibis in the winter of 68-67 because the latter failed to accord Clodius the honor he thought his due. Tatum downplays the importance of this episode, however, arguing that it did not compromise Lucullus' position, which had already collapsed at Rome, nor did it reveal an incipient demagogic bent, only arrogance.However, the "dangerous combination of arrogance and immaturity" (86), coupled with curiosity and perhaps the hope of an affair with Caesar's wife led Clodius to profane the rites of the Bona Dea. Tatum has no doubt of Clodius' guilt or that the prosecution for incestum was trumped up by Clodius' enemies, since the patres traditionally left the punishment of religious delicts to the gods themselves. But more than factional politics was involved. The most attractive feature of Tatum's study is that it draws on recent studies of aristocratic culture to explore dimensions of the events he describes that prior treatments overlooked. Linderski, North, and other students of Republican religion have made it impossible any longer to doubt that senators and plebs alike took the civic cult seriously. Hence for Tatum, genuine religious outrage enabled the factio out to get Clodius to press home its attack. Likewise, Tatum follows Brunt and others in recognizing the importance of ideas as well as personal alignments in shaping the political struggles of the era; guided by Millar, he sees sovereignty of the people as no mere slogan and stresses that a principled popularis stance was well within the bounds of aristocratic ideology. Tatum therefore argues that, by attacking the senate's proposal that the praetor should hand-pick the jurors who would hear the case against Clodius, his supporters cast the struggle as one over the limits of senatorial auctoritas in the face of libertas and the iurapopuli. The claim revived the central conflict in Cicero's suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy and once again roused the... (shrink)