This article responds to a common criticism of Aristotelian naturalism known as the Pollyanna Problem, the objection that Aristotelian naturalism, when combined with recent empirical research, generates morally unacceptable conclusions. In developing a reply to this objection, I draw upon the conception of human nature developed by the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius, and build up an account of ethical naturalism that provides a satisfying response to the Pollyanna Problem while also preserving what is most attractive about Aristotelian naturalism.

In this interview, C. P. Goodman invites British Polanyi scholar Richard T. Allen to reflect on his interest in Polanyi’s philosophical ideas and share what he believes is valuable in his thought.

The rule that a patient should give a free, fully-informed consent to any therapeutic intervention is traditionally thought to express merely a right of the patient against the physician, and a duty of the physician towards the patient. On this view, the patient may waive that right with impugnity, a fact sometimes expressed in the notion of a right not to know. This paper argues that the rule also expresses a duty of the patient towards the physician and a right (...) of the physician against the patient. The argument turns, first, on the truism that a physician has no obligation to commit a battery, or unauthorized touching, and, second, on the thesis that a patient necessarily cannot consent to something that is unknown to him. The conclusion is drawn that a patient is not free to receive treatment voluntarily without knowledgeably authorizing it. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

"This is an excellent textbook on Neoplatonism which gives the reader a very concise and lucid overview of the basic doctrines and leading thinkers of the last great philosophy to emerge before the Christianization of the Roman Empire. I’ve no doubt that my students next semester will benefit from the analyses contained in the book. The contents of the chapters are very informative and adequately place developments in their socio-cultural context." --Michael B. Simmons, Auburn University at Montgomery.

In the transition to Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity (SR), certain concepts that had previously been thought to be univocal or absolute properties of systems turn out not to be. For instance, mass bifurcates into (i) the relativistically invariant proper mass m0, and (ii) the mass relative to an inertial frame in which it is moving at a speed v = βc, its relative mass m, whose quantity is a factor γ = (1 – β2) -1/2 times the proper mass, (...) m = γm0. (shrink)

Good Morning! When I was asked to talk on the subject of Dying in America at a breakfast meeting, It occurred to me that I might get to make some wisecracks about how we eat, at a breakfast where we would be served croissants, butter, sausage and eggs, and berries served with Devonshire cream: certainly the most tasteful form of dying in America! Nor have we been disappointed: quiche and ham should do quite nicely. Then, after last Tuesday’s election, someone (...) approached me and asked if my talk was gong to be on Democratic Party politics. I suppose the title “Dying in America: might fit that subject very nicely! Another wag asked whether I was going to discuss the Buffalo Bills’ current football season . . . . All of these possible applications of the phrase “Dying in America” point to the enormous importance we attach to the idea of dying, and the ways we use that idea in our very metaphorical language. That kind of richness of language is a sure sign, as Joseph Campbell would remind us, that culturally pervasive myths are constructed around the idea of dying. Now, I don’t intend to talk about Campbell’s views at all today, and I will avoid a short course on myths. But I will make just one or two observations about myths so that you are not uncomfortable with my later use of the term. For one of our myths about myths is that, in this educated and scientifically literate society, we don’t have any myths; myths are supposed to be the glue of fictional beliefs that holds primitive societies together, and we certainly are not primitive. Well, let me explain how I intend to use the idea of myth to illuminate some of our values and practices associated with the idea of dying in America. First, by a myth I mean a culturally pervasive set of beliefs and values that tends to center on a single, simple archetypal image or scenario. And second, by calling something mythic I mean to invoke perhaps a number of myths operating as a cluster of culturally important determinants of attitudes and behaviors.. (shrink)

Philosophers have constituted business ethics as a field by providing a systematic overview that interrelates its problems and concepts and that supplies the basis for building on attained results. Is there a properly theological task in business ethics? The religious/theological literature on business ethics falls into four classes: (1) the application of religious morality to business practices; (2) the use of encyclical teachings about capitalism; (3) the interpretation of business relations in agapa-istic terms; and (4) the critique of business from (...) a liberation theological point of view. Theologians have not adequately addressed the questions of whether there are particular theological tasks in the field as they define it, and whether, if they define it, the theological definition is different from the philosophical. (shrink)

This volume contains all of the presidential addresses given before the American Society for Value Inquiry since its first meeting in 1970. Contributions are by Richard Brandt*, Virgil Aldrich*, John W. Davis*, the late Robert S. Hartman*, James B. Wilbur*, the late William H. Werkmeister, Robert E. Carter, the late William T. Blackstone, Gene James, Eva Hauel Cadwallader, Richard T. Hull, Norman Bowie*, Stephen White*, Burton Leiser+, Abraham Edel, Sidney Axinn, Robert Ginsberg, Patricia Werhane, Lisa M. Newton, Thomas (...) Magnell, Sander Lee, John M. Abbarno, Ruth Miller Lucier, and Tom Regan*. Autobiographical sketches* by all of the living contributors and one recently deceased, biographical statements of the remainder, together with photographic portraits of all the contributors*, make this volume a unique record of value inquiry during the past quarter century. __. (shrink)

This set is a carefully balanced selection of writings representing some of the most important currents in the thought of city and regional planning during the period 1870-1940 when urban planning emerged as a serious disciplinary field. The set consists of eight key books from this period, handsomely illustrated and reproduced in their entirety, and a separate volume of fifteen seminal short selections - all by major figures of the time, such as Abercrombie, Geddes, and the Olmsteds. Soria y Mata's (...) writings on the linear city also appear in translation for the first time. In addition to seminal works on city planning, the set covers themes such as neighbourhood, Utopian and visionary planning; planning for parks; housing; transportation systems, and public health. A wide variety of cities feature including Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Manchester, New York and San Francisco, showing a great diversity of cultural styles. Early Urban Planning 1870-1940 is of continued importance today, as it highlights ideals which remain strikingly relevant in development of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. (shrink)

It is well known that Leibniz advocated the actual infinite, but that he did not admit infinite collections or infinite numbers. But his assimilation of this account to the scholastic notion of the syncategorematic infinite has given rise to controversy. A common interpretation is that in mathematics Leibniz’s syncategorematic infinite is identical with the Aristotelian potential infinite, so that it applies only to ideal entities, and is therefore distinct from the actual infinite that applies to the actual world. Against this, (...) I argue in this paper that Leibniz’s actual infinite, understood syncategorematically, applies to any entities that are actually infinite in multitude, whether numbers, actual parts of matter, or monads. It signifies that there are more of them than can be assigned a number, but that there is no infinite number or collection of them, which notion involves a contradiction. Similarly, to say that a magnitude is actually infinitely small in the syncategorematic sense is to say that no matter how small a magnitude one takes, there is a smaller, but there are no actual infinitesimals. In geometry one may calculate with expressions apparently denoting such entities, on the understanding that they are fictions, standing for variable magnitudes that can be made arbitrarily small, so as to produce demonstrations that there is no error in the resulting expressions. (shrink)

In Century of Genius: European Thought 1600-1700, Richard T. Vann links selections from the writings of such thinkers as Galileo, Bacon, Hobbes, Pascal, and Newton with interpretative commentary to show how seventeenth-century discoveries in science and mathematics not only changed the way in which men viewed the sun and the fall of apples from a tree, but also influenced forever afterward men's view of themselves. In Vann's interpretation, the spirit of the age was one of confidence and quest, given (...) perhaps its most eloquent expression in Milton's serene assurance that "though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field ... let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?". In Century of Genius: European Thought 1600-1700, Richard T. Vann links selections from the writings of such thinkers as Galileo, Bacon, Hobbes, Pascal, and Newton with interpretative commentary to show how seventeenth-century discoveries in science and mathematics not only changed the way in which men viewed the sun and the fall of apples from a tree, but also influenced forever afterward men's view of themselves. In Vann's interpretation, the spirit of the age was one of confidence and quest, given perhaps its most eloquent expression in Milton's serene assurance that "though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field ... let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?". (shrink)

The model of free enterprise that has developed in the United States presupposes a value system. The central value is freedom. Next come goods and the means of acquiring them, viz., money and profit. Competition is central. But fairness of transactions is presupposed, and this implies honesty, truthfulness, and general respect for persons. Optimism and faith in the future have been ingredients from the start. Each of these values can be abused, and such abuses characterize the seamy side of capitalism. (...) The Myth of Amoral Business helps undermine the values. Yet the changes American society is demanding of business can be seen as reaffirming the values the system presupposes. The imperative is for business to live up to its own best traditions — a social demand that business can and should meet if it wishes to continue as a system of free enterprise. (shrink)

Ethical Studies is one of the most enlightening works of moral philosophy in English. This article surveys the principal structural theme running throughout it, but will concentrate on its more explicit development at the beginning and end of the book, Essays II and VI, and the “Concluding Remarks.” Essay II formulates the formal requirements of morality in terms of self-realization, and the remaining Essays survey possible contents, the valuable elements of which are brought together, with further materials, in Essays VI (...) and VII. But Bradley finds that morality involves a contradiction, and so, in order to resolve that contradiction, it issues into something more than morality, namely, religion. However, this article will show that Bradley’s resolution of this contradiction is not satisfactory and that, once morality is conceived as an ἐνέργεια and not a γένεσις, an activity and not a process, this contradiction vanishes. Yet morality does, nevertheless, on Bradley’s own principles, find its completion in religion when so conceived; and such an argument was developed in detail in the great work of one of Bradley’s pupils, A. E. Taylor’s Faith of a Moralist, Vol. I. (shrink)

Normal narcissistic functioning has to do with the regulation of a coherent set of metarepresentations of the acting agent. That set of meta-representations has its own interior architecture and dynamics. Normal narcissistic functioning is an adaptive form of interpsychic processing which can be given a general account by integrating views of it drawn from the clinical traditions of psychoanalysis, empirical psychology, and contemporary cognitive and neurosciences. This is not to be confused with any form of organized psychopathology, though pathological forms (...) of narcissism are relevant to understanding normal narcissism. Neural correlates of normal narcissism, as also the characteristic emotions and pleasures/displeasures that accompany its operations, are also explored. It is proposed that this allostatic regulatory system plays a prominent role in a wide range of human behaviors. It also closes the gap between social norms governing such behaviors and the minds of the agents performing them. This integrative interpretation of the scientific material is offered as an exercise in “philosophy in cognitive science” and belongs to the tradition of naturalistic philosophical accounts of the human mind. (shrink)

Debates over postmodernism, analyses of knowledge and power, and the recurring issue of Heidegger's Nazism have all deepened questions about the relation between philosophy and the social roles of intellectuals. Against such postmodernist rejections of philosophical theory as mounted by Rorty and Lyotard, Richard Peterson argues that precisely reflection on rationality, in appropriate social terms, is needed to confront urgent political issues about intellectuals. After presenting a conception of intellectual mediation set within the modern division of labor, he offers (...) an account of postmodern politics within which postmodern arguments against critical reflection are themselves treated socially and politically. Engaging thinkers as diverse as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Habermas, Foucault, and Bahktin, Peterson argues that a democratic conception and practice of philosophy is inseparable from democracy generally. His arguments about modern philosophy are tied to claims about the relation between liberalism and epistemology, and these in turn inform an account of impasses confronting contemporary politics. Historical arguments about the connections between postmodernist thought and practice are illustrated by discussions of the postmodernist dimensions of recent politics. (shrink)

In preparation for his lectures on Leibniz delivered in Cambridge in Lent Term 1899, Russell started in the summer of 1898 to keep notes on writings by and about Leibniz in a large notebook of the type he commonly used for notetaking at this time. This article prints, with annotation, all the material on Leibniz in that notebook.

Evaluation of the influence of Hayden White on the theory of history is made difficult by his preference for the essay form, valued for its experimental character, and by the need to find comparable data. A quantitative study of citations of his work in English and foreign-language journals, 1973–1993, reveals that although historians were prominent among early readers of Metahistory, few historical journals reviewed White's two subsequent collections of essays and few historians-except in Germany-cited them. Those historians who did tended (...) still to cite Metahistory and often the parts of it devoted specifically to nineteenth-century historians.Literary critics, on the other hand, were relatively late to discover White, but during the "narrative turn" of the 1970s and 1980s his work was important for students of the novel and the theater. Recognition of it was especially marked in Spanish-speaking countries and in Germany.As a result, salient themes of White's later work-the ideological and political import of narrativization, the "historical sublime," and writing in the "middle voice"-have largely gone unremarked by historians and philosophers. Both these groups have tended to be irritated by White's bracketing of questions of historical epistemology; some have accused him of effacing the line between fiction and history, while White's numerous literary readers have generally applauded his tendencies in this direction. White however has consistently maintained that there is a difference, although not the one conventionally postulated. His exploration of writing in the "middle voice" brings his work full circle, in that it promises a "modernist" realism appropriate for representing the "sublime" events of our century. (shrink)

Niels H. Gregersen seeks to illuminate the nature of continuing divine action in the world and to show that the classical theistic doctrine of continuous creation is consonant with some recent scientific theories of self‐productive (“autopoietic”) systems. Central to these theories is the concept of co‐operation; central to Gregersen's theological appropriation of these theories is also the notion of structuring causality developed by philosopher Fred Dretske. While supportive of Gregersen's overall aims and emphases, we find significant disanalogies between co‐operation as (...) a theological construct and as an evolutionary strategy. We also doubt the utility of Dretske's notion for his project. (shrink)

The reappearance of the question of moral judgments by historians makes a reappraisal of the issues timely. Almost all that has been written on the subject addresses only the propriety of moral judgments in the written texts historians produce. However, historians have to make moral choices when selecting a subject upon which to write; and they make a tacit moral commitment to write and teach honestly. Historians usually dislike making explicit moral evaluations, and have little or no training in how (...) to do so. They can argue it’s not their job; they are only finders of fact. Historians holding a determinist view of actions do not think it appropriate to blame people for doing what they couldn’t help doing; for those believing there is an overall pattern to history, individual morality is beside the point. Finally, since earlier cultures had values different from ours, it seems unjust to hold them to contemporary standards. This essay modifies or rejects these arguments. Some historians have manifested ambivalence, acknowledging it is difficult or impossible to avoid making moral evaluations . Ordinary-language philosophers, noting that historiography has no specialized vocabulary, see it as saturated by the values inherent in everyday speech and thought. I argue that the historicist argument about the inevitably time-bound limitation of all values is exaggerated. Historians who believe in the religious grounding of values obviously disagree with it; but even on a secular level, morals are often confused with mores. If historians inevitably make moral evaluations, they should examine what philosophical ethicists—virtue ethicists, deontologists, and consequentialists—have said about how to make them; and even if they find no satisfactory grounding for their own moral attitudes, it is a brute fact that they have them. I end with an argument for “strong evaluations”—neither treating them as a troublesome residue in historiography nor, having despaired of finding a solid philosophical ground for moral evaluations, concluding that they are merely matters of taste. I believe historians should embrace the role of moral commentators, but that they should be aware that their evaluations are, like all historical judgments, subject to the criticisms of their colleagues and readers. Historians run little risk of being censorious and self-righteous; the far greater danger is acquiescing in or contributing to moral confusion and timidity. (shrink)

The Defining Issues Test 2 (DIT-2) and Engineering Ethical Reasoning Instrument (EERI) are designed to measure ethical reasoning of general (DIT-2) and engineering-student (EERI) populations. These tools—and the DIT-2 especially—have gained wide usage for assessing the ethical reasoning of undergraduate students. This paper reports on a research study in which the ethical reasoning of first-year undergraduate engineering students at multiple universities was assessed with both of these tools. In addition to these two instruments, students were also asked to create personal (...) concept maps of the phrase “ethical decision-making.” It was hypothesized that students whose instrument scores reflected more postconventional levels of moral development and more sophisticated ethical reasoning skills would likewise have richer, more detailed concept maps of ethical decision-making, reflecting their deeper levels of understanding of this topic and the complex of related concepts. In fact, there was no significant correlation between the instrument scores and concept map scoring, suggesting that the way first-year students _conceptualize_ ethical decision making does not predict the way they behave when _performing_ scenario-based ethical reasoning (perhaps more situated). This disparity indicates a need to more precisely quantify engineering ethical reasoning and decision making, if we wish to inform assessment outcomes using the results of such quantitative analyses. (shrink)

Russell’s most important source for his book on Leibniz was C. I. Gerhardt’s seven-volume Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Russell heavily annotated his copy of this important edition of Leibniz’s works. The present paper records all Russell’s marginalia, with the exception of passages marked merely by vertical lines in the margin, and provides explanatory commentary.