_ Virtue Ethics_ collects, for the first time, the main classical sources and the central contemporary expressions of virtue ethics approach to normative ethical theory. Edited and introduced by Stephen Darwall, these readings are essential for anyone interested in normative theory. Introduced by Stephen Darwall, this collection brings together classic and contemporary readings which define and advance the literature on virtue ethics. Includes six essays which respond to the classic sources. Includes a contemporary discussion on character and virtue (...) by Gary Watson. Includes classic essays by Aristotle, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, and recent reactions to this work by philosophers including Philippa Foot, John McDowell, Alasdair MacIntyre, Annette Baier, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Michael Slote. (shrink)

Imagining Dewey' features productive (re)interpretations of 21st century experience using the lens of John Dewey's 'Art as Experience', through the doubled task of putting an array of international philosophers, educators, and artists-researchers in transactional dialogue and on equal footing in an academic text. This book is a pragmatic attempt to encourage application of aesthetic learning and living, ekphrasic interpretation, critical art and agonist pluralism.0There are two foci: (a) Deweyan philosophy and educational themes with (b) analysis and examples of how educators, (...) artists, and researchers envision and enact artful meaning making. This structure meets the needs of university and high school audiences, who are accustomed to learning about challenging ideas through multimedia and aesthetic experience.00Contributors are: James M. Albrecht, Adam I. Attwood, John Baldacchino, Carolyn L. Berenato, M. Cristina Di Gregori, Holly Fairbank, Jim Garrison, Amanda Gulla, Bethany Henning, Jessica Heybach, David L. Hildebrand, Ellyn Lyle, Livio Mattarollo, Christy McConnell Moroye, Maria-Isabel Moreno-Montoro, Maria Martinez Morales, Stephen M. Noonan, Louise G. Phillips, Scott L. Pratt, Joaquin Roldan, Leopoldo Rueda, Tadd Ruetenik, Leisa Sasso, Bruce Uhrmacher, David Vessey, Ricardo Marin Viadel, Sean Wiebe, Li Xu and Martha Patricia Espiritu Zavalza. (shrink)

Nicole Hassoun’s sufficientarian theory is based on a particular conception of caring, which she calls ‘care, simpliciter’. However, ‘care, simpliciter’ is not described in any detail. This essay tries to offer a critical revision of Hassoun’s concept of care in a way that would put the MGL theory on its strongest footing. To that end, I will contrast her view with a taxonomy of care that supplements the accounts of care provided by Stephen Darwall and Lori Gruen. I then (...) put forward a form of empathy that is best suited to the MGL theory, which fits the description of ‘care, simpliciter’. **Unpublished manuscript: feel free to cite.**. (shrink)

"Both Thomistic scholars and analytic philosophers interested in theories of human action and accountability will find this book a welcome addition to their libraries. Truly a substantive addition to both Thomistic scholarship and the ongoing analytic investigation into human action and responsible agency."—American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly "A first-rate book...Brock's lucid and illuminating analysis offers much of value to both intellectual historians and theologians, as well as philosophers."—Theological Studies"Brock's treatment of Aquinas's account of action exhibits a rare combination of rigor and (...) learning. It is, no doubt, the best we have."—The Thomist. (shrink)

James Madison is the thinker most responsible for laying the groundwork of the American commercial republic. But he did not anticipate that the propertied class on which he relied would become extraordinarily politically powerful at the same time as its interests narrowed. This and other flaws, argues Stephen L. Elkin, have undermined the delicately balanced system he constructed. In Reconstructing the Commercial Republic , Elkin critiques the Madisonian system, revealing which of its aspects have withstood the test of time (...) and which have not. The deficiencies Elkin points out provide the starting point for his own constitutional theory of the republic—a theory that, unlike Madison’s, lays out a substantive conception of the public interest that emphasizes the power of institutions to shape our political, economic, and civic lives. Elkin argues that his theory should guide us toward building a commercial republic that is rooted in a politics of the public interest and the self-interest of the middle class. He then recommends specific reforms to create this kind of republic, asserting that Americans today can still have the lives a commercial republic is intended to promote: lives with real opportunities for economic prosperity, republican political self-government, and individual liberty. (shrink)

What are ethical judgments about? And what is their relation to practice? How can ethical judgment aspire to objectivity? The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in metaethics, placing questions such as these about the nature and status of ethical judgment at the very center of contemporary moral philosophy. Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches is a unique anthology which collects important recent work, much of which is not easily available elsewhere, on core metaethical issues. Reinvigorated (...) naturalist moral realism and the various versions of moral realism, as well as irrealist, expressivist, and neo-Kantian constructivist theories are all represented in this fine collection, constituting a rich array of approaches to contemporary moral philosophy's most fundamental debates. An extensive introduction by Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton is also included, making this volume the most comprehensive and up-to-date work of its kind. Moral Discourse is ideally suited for use in courses in contemporary ethics, ethical theory, and metaethics. (shrink)

Why should we avoid doing moral wrong? After showing how attempts to vindicate morality have tended to fall back on non-moral values or first-person considerations, Stephen Darwall elaborates the interpersonal nature of moral obligations: their inherent link to our responsibilities to one another as members of the moral community.

Various measures related to individual values, ethical attitudes and moral reasoning exist and are being increasingly applied for research in business and professional ethics. The England Personal Values Questionnaire, the Rokeach Value Survey, and Rest's Defining Issues Test have received stronger support and application for management and organizational behavior research than other instruments, such as Gordon's Survey of Personal Values and Hogan's Survey of Ethical Attitudes. Beyond research usage, many of these measures offer potential for instructional purposes. Knowledge of the (...) characteristics and limitations of values and ethics-related measures allows business educators to make better selections of possible supplements to traditional instructional methods. (shrink)

The formulation is persuasive. Yet clearly it does assert a necessary connection between any occurrence and its antecedents. In order for a different result to occur, there has to be a corresponding difference in the antecedents. This means that from any determinate set of antecedents, a single determinate result must follow. It is a formula for determinism. Anscombe wants to caution us not to take what it says for granted.

have come in for increasing attention and controversy. A good example would be recent debates about moral realism where question of the relation between ethics (or ethical judgment) and the will has come to loom large.' Unfortunately, however, the range of positions labelled internalist in ethical writing is bewilderingly large, and only infrequently are important distinctions kept clear.2 Sometimes writers have in mind the view that sincere assent to a moral (or, more generally, an ethical) judgment concerning what one should (...) do is necessarily connected to motivation (actual or dispositional).s This necessity may be conceptual, or perhaps metaphysical, the thought being.. (shrink)

Certain critical accounts of conventional research practices in business and the social sciences are explored in this essay. These accounts derive from alternative social paradigms and their underlying assumptions about appropriate social inquiry and knowledge construction. Among these alternative social paradigms, metatheories, mindscapes, or worldviews are social constructionist, critical, feminist, and postmodern or poststructural thinking. Individuals with these assumptions and values for knowledge construction are increasingly challenging conventional scholarship in what has been referred to as paradigm debates or wars. Issues (...) of incommensurability or cross-paradigmatic communication potentials, as well as reflexivity, are raised in terms of moral education and development potentials for applied social science fields. Barriers and suggestions for increased moral development in academic and professional communities are discussed. In particular, moral forums in which participants have enhanced intrapersonal and interpersonal communication skills appear to be needed to surface and share often taken-for-granted assumptions concerning moral knowledge construction. (shrink)

The result is nothing less than a fundamental reorientation of moral theory that enables it at last to account for morality's supreme authority--an account that ...

The art of interpretation has traditionally been an integral part of medical practice, but little attention has been devoted to its theory. Hermeneutics or the study of interpretation has grown as a methodological interest primarily within the humanities. Borrowing from the medieval fourfold sense of scripture, which organizes interpretive activity both logically and comprehensively, I propose a hermeneutical model of clinical decision-making. According to the model, a patient is analogous to a literary text which may be interpreted on four levels: (...) (1) the literal facts of the patient's body and the literal story told by the patient, (2) the diagnostic meaning of the literal data, (3) the praxis (prognosis and therapeutic decisions) emanating from the diagnosis, and (4) the change effected by the clinical encounter in both the patient's and clinician's life-worlds. The model is illustrated through application to a medical case. (shrink)

This is reflected, but not always made transparent, Stephen Gardner asserts, in the myths of freedom that govern modern culture and the basic framework of ...

Evidence from molecular genetics bolsters the claim that color is not a perceptuolinguistic and behavioral universal. Neurobiology continues to fill in many details about the flow of color information from photon reception to central processing in the brain. Humans have the most acute color vision in the biosphere because of natural selection and adaptation, not coincidence.

There are two ways in which philosophical controversialists can approach a classical opponent of their views. They can attempt to refute him, or they can try to show that, while generally assumed to be an opponent, the philosopher really was not, at least when he was thinking clearly. Of these two strategies, the latter, if it can be pulled off, is dialectically..

An abstract logic A, C consists of a finitary algebraA and a closure systemC onA. C induces two other closure systems onA, C P andC I, by projective and inductive generation respectively. The various relations amongC, C P andC I are determined. The special case thatC is the standard equational closure system on monadic terms is studied in detail. The behavior of Boolean logics with respect to projective and inductive generation is determined.

My aim in what follows is to sketch with a broad brush fundamental changes involving the concept of obligation in British ethics of the early modern period, as it developed in the direction of the view that obligatory force is a species of motivational force – an idea that deeply informs present thought. I shall also suggest, although I can hardly demonstrate it conclusively here, that one important source for this view was a doctrine which we associate with Kant, and (...) which it may seem surprising to find in British ethics, especially of the early modern period, viz., that rational agents are obligated by motives available through a form of practical thinking necessary for rational autonomy. (shrink)

In _The New Constitutionalism_, seven distinguished scholars develop an innovative perspective on the power of institutions to shape politics and political life. Believing that constitutionalism needs to go beyond the classical goal of limiting the arbitrary exercise of political power, the contributors argue that it should—and can—be designed to achieve economic efficiency, informed democratic control, and other valued political ends. More broadly, they believe that political and social theory needs to turn away from the negativism of critical theory to consider (...) how a good society should be "constituted" and to direct the work of designing institutions that can constitute a "good polity," in both the economic and civic senses. Stephen L. Elkin and Karol Edward Soltan begin with an overview of constitutionalist theory and a discussion of the new constitutionalism within the broader intellectual and historical context of political and social thought. Charles Anderson, James Ceaser, and the editors then offer different interpretations of the central issues regarding institutional design in a constitutionalist social science, consider various ways of performing the task, and discuss the inadequacy of recent political science to the job it ought to be doing. The book concludes with essays by Ted Lowi, Cass Sunstein and Edwin Haefele which apply these themes to the American regime. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe famously argued that "modern moral philosophy" centrally involved unsupported notions of obligation and culpability. Modern Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to Kant exhibits, for the first time, resources that modern moral philosophers had to respond to Anscombe's challenge, also enhancing our own philosophical grasp of morality and its foundations.

This chapter defends the property dualism argument. The term “semantic premise” mentioned is used to refers to an assumption identified by Brian Loar that antiphysicalist arguments, such as the property dualism argument, tacitly assume that a statement of property identity that links conceptually independent concepts is true only if at least one concept picks out the property it refers to by connoting a contingent property of that property. It is argued that, the property that does the work in explaining the (...) possibility of a posteriori identities need not be a first-order property of the referent in question. On his view, the property dualism argument requires only a weaker semantic premise, which allows that the property in question be a higher order property. A refined version of the property dualism argument is formulated, which uses the weaker premise, and defends the argument against various objections. (shrink)

A host of metabolic enzymes reversibly self‐assemble to form membrane‐less, intracellular filaments under normal physiological conditions and in response to stress. Often, these enzymes reside at metabolic control points, suggesting that filament formation affords an additional regulatory mechanism. Examples include cytidine‐5′‐triphosphate (CTP) synthase (CTPS), which catalyzes the rate‐limiting step for the de novo biosynthesis of CTP; inosine‐5′‐monophosphate dehydrogenase (IMPDH), which controls biosynthetic access to guanosine‐5′‐triphosphate (GTP); and ∆1‐pyrroline‐5‐carboxylate (P5C) synthase (P5CS) that catalyzes the formation of P5C, which links the Krebs (...) cycle, urea cycle, and proline metabolism. Intriguingly, CTPS can exist in co‐assemblies with IMPDH or P5CS. Since GTP is an allosteric activator of CTPS, the association of CTPS and IMPDH filaments accords with the need to coordinate pyrimidine and purine biosynthesis. Herein, a hypothesis is presented furnishing a biochemical connection underlying co‐assembly of CTPS and P5CS filaments – potent inhibition of CTPS by glutamate γ‐semialdehyde, the open‐chain form of P5C. (shrink)

There is a well-known line of thought, associated with Donald Davidson, that connects the notion of a perceptual given—of non-linguistic or non-conceptual experience of the world—with skepticism. Against this, I argue that the notion of what is given in perception leads to skepticism only on certain interpretations. I argue, in fact, that there must be perceptual experience such that there is “something it is like” to have it, or that would provide the subject of a phenomenological analysis, if we are (...) to block skepticism in its most radical forms. In particular, I claim that there is a distinctive phenomenology of the experience of agency. These phenomenological claims are conclusions of a transcendental argument according to which our having such experience is a condition of our having a meaningful language. Moreover, the same transcendental argument is sufficient to show the incoherence of radical skepticism about the external world. And I argue that the proper understanding of perceptual experience—as object involving—renders the standard objections to transcendental arguments ineffective. (shrink)

Between the later views of Wittgenstein and those of connectionism 1 on the subject of the mastery of language there is an impressively large number of similarities. The task of establishing this claim is carried out in the second section of this paper.

Essays by Thomasma and ten Have recommend hermeneutical clinical ethics. The use Thomasma makes of hermeneutics is not radical enough because it leaves out basic interpretation of clinical practice and focuses narrowly on ethical principles and rules. Ten Have, while failing to notice that the hyperreality of clinical ethics is a feature of all language, rightly distinguishes four characteristic parameters of a thoroughgoing interpretive clinical ethics: experience, attitudes and emotions, community, and ambiguity. Suggestions are made for implementing hermeneutical ethics in (...) clinical teaching. (shrink)

Two characterizations are given of those structural consequence operations on a propositional language which can be defined via proofs from a finite number of polynomial rules.