Referred to as “a foundational concept” of bioethics, personhood has long figured prominently in discussions of entities’ moral status and attendant rights and duties (Farah and Heberlein 2007, 39)...

This paper attempts to demonstrate Max Scheler’s anticipation of and continued relevance to a burgeoning trend of essence-based accounts of modality, chief among them being Kit Fine’s landmark 1994 “Essence and Modality.” I argue that Scheler’s account of the material a priori not only anticipates the picture of essence-based modality suggested by Fine, but moreover offers resources with the potential to resolve key challenges for the Finean program. In particular, Fine’s account runs into problems in explaining how formal logical necessities (...) are to be grounded in essences, challenges that put pressure on the essentialist to adopt a non-propositional account of the nature of logical principles. I argue that one such account can be found in Scheler’s notion of the material a priori, according to which all necessary propositional truth is grounded in a realm of experientially given yet a priori "phenomenological facts." After showing the general rapprochement between Scheler’s and Fine’s accounts of regional modality, I then turn to address Scheler’s attempt to ground formal logical principles in essences. On Scheler’s picture, propositions expressing formal logical truths are true in virtue of the domain of essences in two senses: In terms of what Scheler calls objective necessity, they are true insofar as they coincide with the essential facts and interconnections shared by all possible regions of being; In terms of what he calls subjective necessity, they are true in virtue of these same essential facts and interconnections insofar as they have become “functionalized” into law-like patterns of cognition. (shrink)

Recent work on Mary Shepherd has largely focused on her metaphysics, especially as a response to Berkeley and Hume. However, relatively little attention has thus far been paid to the epistemological aspects of Shepherd’s program. What little attention Shepherd’s epistemology has received has tended to cast her as providing an unsatisfactory response to the skeptical challenge issued by Hume. For example, Walter Ott and Jeremy Fantl have each suggested that Shepherd cannot avoid Hume’s inductive skepticism even if she is granted (...) her metaphysics. In this paper, I examine Shepherd’s epistemology and argue that her response to Hume is more successful than the current literature suggests. In particular, I argue that, if Shepherd is granted her metaphysics, she can answer Hume’s demand for a rational justification of ordinary inductive inferences via a deductively justified uniformity principle and an appeal to parsimony. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Some philosophers (such as Kant and Rawls) think it is only wrong to be cruel to cats because it will make one behave cruelly to humans. This explanation is unsatisfactory. Why? Because being cruel to your cat is a direct wrong to your cat regardless of the effects it has on other humans. Ascribing the wrongness of cruelty to the fact it will make one callous to other humans is to assess the character of the cruel person not the act (...) they are performing. Cruelty to your cat is wrong because it wrongs your cat directly. (shrink)

Michael Tanner; IX*—Sentimentality, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 77, Issue 1, 1 June 1977, Pages 127–148, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelia.

Pendant la guerre indo-pakistanaise, les États-Unis ont lié le sort de leur allié à la crédibilité de la puissance américaine. Le président Richard Nixon et son conseiller en matière de sécurité nationale, Henry Kissinger, utilisent le langage du genre pour exprimer leur conception de la crédibilité américaine, une crédibilité construite par et à travers ce langage. En suivant une approche sensible au genre inspirée des approches féministes poststructuralistes, cet article analyse les conversations enregistrées dans lesquelles Nixon et Kissinger ont formulé (...) des mesures politiques risquées afin de paraître « durs » ou de « se comporter comme des mecs » à l’apogée du conflit de 1971. La conception de la crédibilité de Nixon et Kissinger a produit une base extrêmement instable et dangereuse pour la conduite d’une politique étrangère qui aspirait à maintenir l’équilibre des forces entre les États-Unis et l’Union soviétique. (shrink)

Although Nietzsche's greatness is recognized more universally now than ever before, the nature of that greatness is still widely misunderstood, and that unfortunately means that before I discuss any of Beyond Good and Evil (henceforth BGE) in any detail, I must make some general remarks about his work, his development and the kind of way in which I think that it is best to read him. Unlike any of the other philosophers that this series includes, except Marx and Engels, Nietzsche (...) is very much concerned to address his contemporaries, because he was aware of a specific historical predicament, one which he would only see as having worsened in ways which he predicted with astonishing precision in the century since he wrote his great series of works. For he was above all a philosopher of culture, which is to say that his primary concern was always with the forces that determine the nature of a particular civilization, and with the possibilities of achievement which that civilization consequently had open to it. One of the reasons that The Birth of Tragedy, his first book, published when he was twenty-eight, created such a surge of hostility in the world of classical scholarship was that in it, whilst undertaking an investigation of what made possible the achievements of fifth century BC Greece in tragic drama, he felt it necessary to elicit the whole set of fundamental beliefs which the Greeks shared, and also to draw metaphysical conclusions from the fact that they were able to experience life in such a way that they needed great tragedies in order to endure it. (shrink)

Proponents of the argument from regress maintain that the existence of Instrumental Value is sufficient to establish the existence of Intrinsic Value. It is argued that the chain of instrumentally valuable things has to end somewhere. Namely with intrinsic value. In this paper, I shall argue something a little more modest than this. I do not want to argue that the regress argument proves that there is intrinsic value but rather that it proves that the idea of intrinsic value is (...) a necessary part of our thinking about moral value. (shrink)

Comedy and philosophy have too often been thought immiscible, a tradition supported by a solemn reading of philosophers such as Plato. A closer look at Plato – and specifically at what may be his most familiar dialogue – the Republic, suggests just the contrary. Far from immiscible, comedy and philosophy are entwined in ways that are mutually illuminating. I argue that a joke in Book V reveals the self-forgetting involved in founding the city in speech, and so illustrates the vitality (...) of self-knowledge to political ventures. Glaucon criticizes the first city in speech as akin to one “of sows”, prompting a new city altogether, and yet the city that he helps to create not only eradicates distinctions between animals and humans but is founded on principles of animal husbandry and described overwhelmingly in animalistic terms. Justice in this city is defined as a minding of one’s own business, but what exactly “one’s own” is expands to accommodate Glaucon’s pleonexia and accompanying tyrannical allowances. Glaucon has forgotten himself. Without a limit – without a restriction on what one’s own is – the city degenerates into a tyranny. Glaucon’s self-forgetting may be a minor, comical incident, but it has significant philosophical consequences, including a radical undercutting of the city in question as well as the distinction between humans and animals. The comical mode employed here suggests that it may be a comical understanding of the self that best supersedes the forgotten self. (shrink)

Descartes’s causal theory is often taken to announce modernity by radically breaking with the Aristotelian past. Specifically, Descartes is often taken to reject the full Aristotelian causal theory in favor of the efficient causes characteristic of mechanistic physics and the activity of minds. In this chapter, I argue against this view by showing that Descartes endorses an avowedly Aristotelian notion of formal causation. First, I articulate Cartesian formal causation in light of its Aristotelian background, and I show that Descartes endorses (...) what Francisco Suárez termed metaphysical formal causal explanation. Then, I argue against taking formal causation to be a peripheral explanatory notion for Descartes by showing it to be both well-attested textually and part and parcel of his Platonic intellectualism. I conclude by suggesting some further contexts in which this Cartesian notion of formal causation could be profitably wielded. (shrink)

Originally published in 1979. Adultery is a dominant feature in chivalric literature; it becomes a major concern in Shakespeare's last plays; and it forms the central plot of novels from Anna Karenina to Couples. Tony Tanner proposes that transgressions of the marriage contract take on a special significance in the "bourgeois novels" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His interpretation begins with the general topic of adultery in literature and then zeroes in on three works—Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse, Goethe's (...) Die Wahlverwandtschaften, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. His interpretation encompasses the role of women, the structure of the family, social mores, and the history of sexuality. (shrink)

This book examines the role Plato accords to imagination in the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Claiming that the function of imagination evokes a realm of praxis within Plato's dialogues heretofore largely unrecognized, this book offers an interpretation of Plato that challenges the more orthodox view in which poetry and the arts are denigrated, and indeed, seen as eradicable from the dialogues altogether.

All else being equal, can granting the objective purport of moral experience support a presumption in favor of some form of moral objectivism? Don Loeb (2007) has argued that even if we grant that moral experience appears to present us with a realm of objective moral fact—something he denies we have reason to do in the first place—the objective purport of moral experience cannot by itself provide even prima facie support for moral objectivism. In this paper, I contend against Loeb (...) that granting the objective purport of ordinary moral experience is sufficient to support a defeasible presumption in favor of moral objectivism, and this by constituting non-explanatory, comparative confirmation that incrementally raises the prima facie likelihood that moral facts exist. More specifically, I appeal to a modest confirmation principle shared by Likelihoodists and Bayesieans - namely, the Weak Law of Likelihood - in an effort to show that (i) at a minimum, moral experience establishes a middling scrutable probability for a sufficient but not necessary condition of moral objectivism being true, and that (ii) this moderate probability in turn constitutes evidence that makes it prima facie more probable than not that some form of moral objectivism is true. (shrink)

Michael Tanner's readable introduction to Nietzsche's life and work examines the numerous ambiguities inherent in his writings. It also explodes the many misconceptions fostered in the hundred years since Nietzsche wrote, prophetically: 'Do not, above all, confound me with what I amnot!'.

An easy, jargon-free introduction to Stoic philosophy and its relevance to modern life. Topics include: the three pillars of Stoic philosophy (logic, physics, and ethics), the Stoic ideal of living in accordance with nature, and the question of whether belief in God is necessary for practicing Stoicism.

I know of nothing that has caused me to dream more on Plato’s secrecy and his sphinx nature than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his deathbed there was found no “Bible,” nothing Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic—but a volume of Aristophanes. How could even a Plato have endured life—a Greek life to which he said No—without an Aristophanes? Diogenes Laertius reports that Plato was reputed to have been so “well regulated”(kosmiois) as never once to have been (...) seen to “laugh excessively” (gelôn huperagan . . . kômikôn).1 Nietzsche describes Plato as so humorless as to be positively “boring” (1968, 117). John Sallis not only ascribes to this notoriously solemn philosopher a sense of .. (shrink)

A central question in the Japanese high vowel devoicing literature concerns whether vowels are devoiced through a categorical process or via gradient reduction. Examining how vowel height and consonantal voicing condition phrase-internal CV duration in a corpus of spontaneous Tokyo Japanese, it was found that CVs containing high vowels are substantially shorter before voiceless consonants, whilst non-high vowels do not exhibit comparable shortening. This quantitative difference between CV durations suggests a controlled temporal compression of the CV, consistent with views that (...) Japanese vowel devoicing is produced through a categorical process targeting high vowels preceding voiceless consonants, and supports previous observations made of elicited productions. (shrink)

In spite of having published more than hundred articles and three monographs, the chemist and statistician Alfred James Lotka (1880–1949) is not very well known. Because he had not experienced a conventional academic curriculum, he remained ‚at the margins’ of the scientific community. In 1925 he aimed for a breakthrough with his first monograph Elements of Physical Biology. The basic idea of this study was to understand nature in terms of energy. Lotka’s mathematical approach was highly innovative, although he had (...) borrowed certain notions from his former teacher, the physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald. This article focuses on the very process of how a new idea developed and spread through the scientific community, and tries to determine to what extent the author—with his personality, his intentions and feelings—was part of this process. This includes looking at the emotional strain that followed the publication of Lotka’s masterpiece. Considering his anxieties, worries and distress during the period of reception, and his efforts to make sure his book was acknowledged by its audience, the article sheds light on often neglected aspects of scientific work such as identification, intention, mimicry, originality, and rivalry. The case study deals with a systematic blindness in the history of science: it takes into account the actors of science, their personality and their strategic moves, in order to come to a better understanding of the close connection between their work and their actions. In addition, the history of Lotka’s worries about the reception of his book might help us challenge the postulate of „publish or perish“ in today’s science. (shrink)

The topic of cruelty features regularly in discussions concerning animals’ moral status. Further, condemnation of cruelty to animals is virtually unanimous. As Regan points out, ‘[i]t would be difficult to find anyone who is in favour of cruelty.’ What is to count as cruelty is therefore important. My aim here is to gain a clearer understanding of one aspect of our moral landscape: cruelty to animals. I will start by analyzing the concept of cruelty in section II. In section III (...) I will examine some implications of this analysis. I will present two arguments for why we should reassess whether modern farming practices are cruel. First, farming practices have changed and our understanding of the concept of cruelty needs to change with them. Second, our application of the concept of cruelty is inconsistent: we would consider many routine practices involving farm animals to be cruel if they involved pets. This inconsistency presents a dilemma: either extending farming practices to pets would not be cruel, or continuing our current farming practices is cruel. In section IV I consider some objections. (shrink)

If we are going to treat other species so very differently from our own — killing, eating and experimenting on pigs and sheep, for example, but never human beings — then it seems we need to come up with some morally relevant difference between us and them that justifies this difference in treatment. Otherwise it appears we are guilty of bigotry (in just the same way that someone who discriminates on the basis of race or sex is guilty of bigotry). (...) But what is this morally relevant difference? Julia Tanner's article examines, and rejects, some of the most popular answers to this question. -/- . (shrink)

Durch genomweite Analysen werden vielfältige gesundheitsrelevante Informationen über eine Person gewonnen. Solche Informationen können die Behandlung von Krankheiten verbessern. Sie ermöglichen aber auch Vorhersagen, ob eine Person und deren Verwandte in Zukunft möglicherweise erkranken werden. Der neuartige Charakter des Informationseingriffs und sein prädiktive Potential bedürfen der ethischen, juristischen und ökonomischen Reflexion, damit diese Technologie zum Wohl der Patienten, der Familienangehörigen und der Solidargemeinschaft eingesetzt werden kann. Die vorliegende Schrift leistet mit ihren interdisziplinären, vom BMBF finanzierten Analysen dazu einen Beitrag. Grundlagen (...) für einen ethisch und juristisch verantwortbaren Einsatz der Genomsequenzierung zu medizinischen Zwecken werden erörtert und Eckpunkte für Kostenanalysen sowie Elemente einer “Guten klinischen Praxis” präsentiert. (shrink)

Rationality (or something similar) is usually given as the relevant difference between all humans and animals; the reason humans do but animals do not deserve moral consideration. But according to the Argument from Marginal Cases not all humans are rational, yet if such (marginal) humans are morally considerable despite lacking rationality it would be arbitrary to deny animals with similar capacities a similar level of moral consideration. The slippery slope objection has it that although marginal humans are not strictly speaking (...) morally considerable, we should give them moral consideration because if we do not we will slide down a slippery slope where we end up by not giving normal humans due consideration. I argue that this objection fails to show that marginal humans have the kind of direct moral status proponents of the slippery slope argument have in mind. (shrink)