Is the God of Calvin a fountain of blessing, or a forceful tyrant? Is Calvin's view of God coercive, leaving no place for the human qua human in redemption? These are perennial questions about Calvin's theology which have been given new life by Gift theologians such as John Milbank, Graham Ward, and Stephen Webb.J. Todd Billings addresses these questions by exploring Calvin's theology of `participation in Christ'. He argues that Calvin's theology of `participation' gives a positive place to (...) the human, such that grace fulfils rather than destroys nature, affirming a differentiated union of God and humanity in creation and redemption. Calvin's trinitarian theology of participation extends to his view of prayer, sacraments, the law, and the ecclesial and civil orders. In light of Calvin's doctrine of participation, Billings reframes the critiques of Calvin in the Gift discussion and opens up new possibilities for contemporary theology, ecumenical theology, and Calvin scholarship as well. (shrink)

This article mounts a defense of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) from various criticisms made in Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek’s co-edited anthology Subject Lessons. Along with Sbriglia and Žižek’s own Introduction to the volume, the article responds to the chapters by Todd McGowan, Adrian Johnston, and Molly Anne Rothenberg, the three in which my own version of OOO is most frequently discussed.

Recently, philosophers have turned their attention to the question, not when a given agent is blameworthy for what she does, but when a further agent has the moral standing to blame her for what she does. Philosophers have proposed at least four conditions on having “moral standing”: -/- 1. One’s blame would not be “hypocritical”. 2. One is not oneself “involved in” the target agent’s wrongdoing. 3. One must be warranted in believing that the target is indeed blameworthy for the (...) wrongdoing. 4. The target’s wrongdoing must some of “one’s business”. -/- These conditions are often proposed as both conditions on one and the same thing, and as marking fundamentally different ways of “losing standing.” Here I call these claims into question. First, I claim that conditions (3) and (4) are simply conditions on different things than are conditions (1) and (2). Second, I argue that condition (2) reduces to condition (1): when “involvement” removes someone’s standing to blame, it does so only by indicating something further about that agent, viz., that he or she lacks commitment to the values that condemn the wrongdoer’s action. The result: after we clarify the nature of the non-hypocrisy condition, we will have a unified account of moral standing to blame. Issues also discussed: whether standing can ever be regained, the relationship between standing and our "moral fragility", the difference between mere inconsistency and hypocrisy, and whether a condition of standing might be derived from deeper facts about the "equality of persons". (shrink)

At least since Aristotle’s famous 'sea-battle' passages in On Interpretation 9, some substantial minority of philosophers has been attracted to the doctrine of the open future--the doctrine that future contingent statements are not true. But, prima facie, such views seem inconsistent with the following intuition: if something has happened, then (looking back) it was the case that it would happen. How can it be that, looking forwards, it isn’t true that there will be a sea battle, while also being true (...) that, looking backwards, it was the case that there would be a sea battle? This tension forms, in large part, what might be called the problem of future contingents. A dominant trend in temporal logic and semantic theorizing about future contingents seeks to validate both intuitions. Theorists in this tradition--including some interpretations of Aristotle, but paradigmatically, Thomason (1970), as well as more recent developments in Belnap, et. al (2001) and MacFarlane (2003, 2014)--have argued that the apparent tension between the intuitions is in fact merely apparent. In short, such theorists seek to maintain both of the following two theses: (i) the open future: Future contingents are not true, and (ii) retro-closure: From the fact that something is true, it follows that it was the case that it would be true. It is well-known that reflection on the problem of future contingents has in many ways been inspired by importantly parallel issues regarding divine foreknowledge and indeterminism. In this paper, we take up this perspective, and ask what accepting both the open future and retro-closure predicts about omniscience. When we theorize about a perfect knower, we are theorizing about what an ideal agent ought to believe. Our contention is that there isn’t an acceptable view of ideally rational belief given the assumptions of the open future and retro-closure, and thus this casts doubt on the conjunction of those assumptions. (shrink)

How can anyone be rational in a world where knowledge is limited, time is pressing, and deep thought is often an unattainable luxury? Traditional models of unbounded rationality and optimization in cognitive science, economics, and animal behavior have tended to view decision-makers as possessing supernatural powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and endless time. But understanding decisions in the real world requires a more psychologically plausible notion of bounded rationality. In Simple heuristics that make us smart (Gigerenzer et al. 1999), we (...) explore fast and frugal heuristics – simple rules in the mind's adaptive toolbox for making decisions with realistic mental resources. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices quickly and with a minimum of information by exploiting the way that information is structured in particular environments. In this précis, we show how simple building blocks that control information search, stop search, and make decisions can be put together to form classes of heuristics, including: ignorance-based and one-reason decision making for choice, elimination models for categorization, and satisficing heuristics for sequential search. These simple heuristics perform comparably to more complex algorithms, particularly when generalizing to new data – that is, simplicity leads to robustness. We present evidence regarding when people use simple heuristics and describe the challenges to be addressed by this research program. Key Words: adaptive toolbox; bounded rationality; decision making; elimination models; environment structure; heuristics; ignorance-based reasoning; limited information search; robustness; satisficing; simplicity. (shrink)

In this paper we critically evaluate Trenton Merricks’s recent attempt to provide a “new” way of defending compatibilism about divine foreknowledge and human freedom. We take issue with Merricks’s claim that his approach is fundamentally different from Ockhamism. We also seek to highlight the implausibility of Merricks’s rejection of the assumption of the fixity of the past, and we also develop a critique of the Merricks’s crucial notion of “dependence.”.

The nature of the general connection between emotion and value, and of the various connections between specific emotions and values, lies at the heart of philosophical discussion of the emotions. It is also central to some accounts of the nature of value itself, of value in general but also of the specific values studied within particular philosophical domains. These issues all form the subject matter of this article, and they in turn are all connected by two main questions: (i) How (...) do emotions disclose or create values? (ii) What are the epistemic credentials of emotion in justifying evaluative thought and discourse? This second question obviously presupposes some answer to the first question concerning the way in which emotions reveal, constitute, or create value. (shrink)

The problem of `conscious inessentialism' is examined in the literature, and an argument is presented that the presence of consciousness is indeed marked by a behavioural difference, but that this should be looked for at the cultural level of speech communities.

This paper argues that even the most virtuous people living in affluent Western countries share responsibility for injustices suffered by poor people living in developing countries. The argument of the paper draws on a moral principle that underlies the law of restitution: the principle of unjust enrichment. The paper argues that denizens of affluent Western countries have benefited unjustly from injustices suffered by poor people living in developing countries and that they have a moral responsibility to pay back their unjust (...) gains. (shrink)

Theological fatalists contend that if God knows everything, then no human action is free, and that since God does know everything, no human action is free. One reply to such arguments that has become popular recently— a way favored by William Hasker and Peter van Inwagen—agrees that if God knows everything, no human action is free. The distinctive response of these philosophers is simply to say that therefore God does not know everything. On this view, what the fatalist arguments in (...) fact bring out is that it was logically impossible for God to have known the truths about what we would freely do in the future. And this is no defect in God’s knowledge, for infallible foreknowledge of such truths is a logical impossibility. It has commonly been assumed that this position constitutes an explanation of where the fatalist argument goes wrong. My first goal is to argue that any such assumption has in fact been a mistake; Hasker and van Inwagen have in effect said only that something does go wrong with the argument, but they have not explained what goes wrong with it. Once we see this result, we’ll see, I think, that they need such an account—and that no such account has in fact been provided. The second goal of this paper is therefore to develop— and to criticize— what seems to be the most promising such account they might offer. As I see it, this account will in fact highlight in an intuitively compelling new way what many regard to be the view’s chief liability, namely, that the truths about the future which God is said not to know will now appear even more clearly (and problematically)‘ungrounded’. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper explores the role of aesthetic judgements in mathematics by focussing on the relationship between the epistemic and aesthetic criteria employed in such judgements, and on the nature of the psychological experiences underpinning them. I claim that aesthetic judgements in mathematics are plausibly understood as expressions of what I will call ‘aesthetic-epistemic feelings’ that serve a genuine cognitive and epistemic function. I will then propose a naturalistic account of these feelings in terms of sub-personal processes of representing and (...) assessing the relation between cognitive processes and certain properties of the stimuli at which they are directed. (shrink)

The moral status of some particularly horrendous actions cannot be adequately captured by the concept of wrongdoing.See Daniel Haybron, “Moral Monsters and Saints,” Monist, Vol. 85 : p. 260; Paul Formosa, “Evil, Wrongs and Dignity: How to Test a Theory of Evil,” Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 47 : pp. 235–253; Eve Garrard, “The Nature of Evil,” Philosophical Explorations: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Mind and Action, Vol. 1 : pp. 43–45; Hillel Steiner, “Calibrating Evil,” The Monist, Vol. (...) 85 : pp. 183–185. For instance, sadistic torture and genocidal mass murder are not just wrong, or very wrong, or very very wrong. We need the concept of evil to make sense of the moral status of these actions. But what is evil? And how is it distinct from mere wrongdoing?In recent years, several theorists writing about the concept of evil have argued that the best way to proceed is to think reflectively about evil’s opposite. Call this the mirror methodology. .. (shrink)

There is a problem about the compatibility of Reid's commitment to both a sign theory of sensations and also direct realism. I show that Reid is committed to three different senses of the claim that mind independent bodies and their qualities are among the immediate objects of perception, and I then argue that Reid's sign theory conflicts with one of these. I conclude by advocating one proposal for reconciling Reid's claims, deferring a thorough development and defence of the proposal to (...) another paper. (shrink)

Can original philosophy be done while simultaneously engaging in the history of philosophy? Such a possibility is questioned by analytic philosophers who contend that history contaminates good philosophy, and by historians of philosophy who insist that theoretical predecessors cannot be ignored. Believing that both camps are misguided, the contributors to this book present a case for historical philosophy as a valuable enterprise. The contributors include: Todd L. Adams, Lilli Alanen, Jos? Bernardete, Jonathan Bennett, John I. Biro, Phillip Cummins, Georges (...) Dicker, Daniel A. Dombrowski, Daniel Garber, Josiah Gould, Jorge J.E. Gracie, Daniel Graham, Charles Griswold, James Lawler, Rudolf Luthe, Edward H. Madden, George Mavrodes, Gerald E. Myers, Jonathan R?e, Frithjof Rodi, Kenneth L. Schmitz, Vladimir Shtinov, David G. Stern, Robert Turnbull, James Van Cleve, Frederick Van De Pitte, Henry Beatch, and Richard Watson. (shrink)

Rather than focusing on political and legal debates surrounding attempts to determine if and when genocidal rape has taken place in a particular setting, this essay turns instead to a crucial, yet neglected area of inquiry: the moral significance of genocidal rape, and more specifically, the nature of the harms that constitute the culpable wrongdoing that genocidal rape represents. In contrast to standard philosophical accounts, which tend to employ an individualistic framework, this essay offers a situated understanding of harm that (...) features the importance of interdependence and relationality and that conceptualizes harms as embodied and contextual. The paper ultimately reveals what is distinctive about this particular crime of sexual violence by exploring the logic of genocidal rape: genocidal rape involves the harm of forced self-betrayal unleashed relationally, causing victims as representatives of their group to participate inadvertently in the destruction of that group. (shrink)

One of the key debates about applying virtue ethics to business is whether or not the aims and values of a business actually prevent the exercise of virtues. Some of the more interesting disagreement in this debate has arisen amongst proponents of virtue ethics. This article analyzes the central issues of this debate in order to advance an alternative way of thinking about how a business can be a form of virtuous practice. Instead of relying on the paired concepts of (...) internal and external goods that define what counts as virtuous, I offer a version of speech act theory taken from Paul Ricoeur to show how a business can satisfy several aims without compromising the exercise of the virtues. I refer to this as a polyvalent approach where a single task within a business can have instrumental, conventional, and imaginative effects. These effects correspond to the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary dimensions of meaning. I argue that perlocution provides a way in which the moral imagination can discover the moral significance of others that might have not been noticed before, and furthermore, that for such effects to be practiced, they require appropriate virtues. I look at two cases taken from consultation work to thresh out the theoretical and practical detail. (shrink)

Abstract.We investigate the existence of strong colorings on successors of singular cardinals. This work continues Section 2 of [1], but now our emphasis is on finding colorings of pairs of ordinals, rather than colorings of finite sets of ordinals.

For Reid, sensations do not enter into the analysis of perception proper. Instead they “intervene” between the effects of bodily qualities on our sense organs and our perception of those qualities (Inq VI xxi, 174).1 The question addressed in this essay is: What sort of thing does Reid take this interloper to be?2 The answer defended is that sensations are reflexive mental acts, i.e., acts which take themselves as objects.

ABSTRACT This paper responds to Vanessa Andreotti’s keynote address. In it, I draw out some educational implications of facing the everyday denials of the climate emergency. In particular, I mobilise Bruno Latour’s phrase ‘landing on Earth’ to indicate that the very terms through which we understand education, particularly as it relates to the future, require a profound shift.

Themistius ran his philosophical school in Constantinople in the middle of the fourth century A.D. His paraphrases of Aristotle's writings are unlike the elaborate commentaries produced by Alexander of Aphrodisias, or the later Neoplatonists Simplicius and Philoponus. His aim was to provide a clear and independent restatement of Aristotle's text which would be accessible as an elementary exegesis. But he also discusses important philosophical problems, reports and disagrees with other commentaries including the lost commentary of Porphyry, and offers interpretations of (...) Plato. Themistius' paraphrase of Aristotle's On the Soul is his most important and influential work. It is also the first extant commentary on this work of Aristotle to survive from antiquity. A rival to that of Alexander of Aphrodisias, it represents one of the main interpretations of Aristotle's theory of the intellect, which was debated throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It continues to be an important text for the reconstruction of Aristotle's philosophical psychology today. (shrink)

This paper explores the connections between Kant’s theory of hierarchical racial difference, on the one hand, and his cosmopolitanism and conceptions of moral and political progress, on the other. I argue that Kant’s racial biology plays an essential role in maintaining national-cultural differences, which he views as essential for the establishment of the cosmopolitan union. Unfortunately, not only are these views racist, they also complicate Kant’s ability to consistently think through the prospect of the human species’ moral progress. Thus, while (...) in the abstract, Kant’s attempts to understand the prospects for moral and political progress as rooted in historical reality, and his insistence that such progress is necessarily connected to the persistence of cultural difference, is appealing, his own way of carrying this out is decidedly not, being so intimately connected to racial hierarchy as a basic source of difference. (shrink)

This groundbreaking volume casts light on the long shadow of naturalistic monism in modern thought and culture. When monism's philosophical proposition - the unity of all matter and thought in a single, universal substance - fused with scientific empiricism and Darwinism in the mid-nineteenth century, it led to the formation of a powerful worldview articulated in the work of figures such as Ernst Haeckel. The compelling essays collected here, written by leading international scholars, investigate the articulation of monism in science, (...) philosophy, and religion and its impact on a range of social movements, from socialism and early feminism to imperialism and eugenics. The result is a broad and comprehensive chronological, disciplinary, and geographic map of a century of monism, as well as a bellwether for innovative new directions in the interdisciplinary study of science, religion, philosophy, and culture. (shrink)

The critical theory tradition has, since its inception, sought to distinguish its perspective on society from more purely descriptive or normative approaches by maintaining that persons have a deep-seated interest in the free development of their personality—an interest that can only be realized in and through the rational organization of society, but which is systematically stymied by existing society. Yet it has struggled to specify this emancipatory interest in a way that avoids being either excessively utopian or overly accommodating to (...) existing society. Despite the fact that Hegel’s concept of reconciliation is normally thought to run aground on the latter horn of this dilemma, this book argues that reconciliation is the best available conceptualization of this emancipatory interest. It presents Hegel’s idea of freedom as something actualized in individuals’ lives through their becoming reconciled to how society shapes their roles, prospects, and sense of self; it presents reconciliation as being less a matter of philosophical cognition, and more of inclusion in a responsive, transparent political process. It then introduces the concept of reification, which—through its development in Marx and Lukács, through Horkheimer and Adorno—substantiates an increasingly cogent critique of reconciliation as something unachievable within the framework of modern society. Giving equal attention to psychoanalysis and legal theory, the second half critically appraises the writings of Rawls, Honneth, and Habermas as efforts to spell out what a concept of reconciliation more democratic and inclusive than Hegel, yet sensitive to the reifying effects of legal systems, might mean. (shrink)

My purpose in this paper is to argue that we are not vulnerableto inescapable wrongdoing occasioned by tragic dilemmas. I directmy argument to those who are most inclined to accept tragicdilemmas: those of broadly Nietzschean inclination who reject``modern moral philosophy'''' in favor of the ethical ideas of theclassical Greeks. Two important features of their project are todeny the usefulness of the ``moral/nonmoral distinction,'''' and todeny that what are usually classified as moral reasons always oreven characteristically ``trump'''' nonmoral reasons in anadmirable (...) agent''s deliberations.I show critics of modern moral philosophy such as BernardWilliams that their acceptance of tragic dilemmas underminestheir project of denying the moral/nonmoral distinction and thepriority of moral reasons. The possibility of tragic dilemmasrequires an account of practical deliberation in which moralreasons appear as already in-force obligations, with blame andguilt ready to be invoked, while nonmoral reasons appear as merereasons. This makes moral reasons importantly different fromnonmoral reasons in how they achieve their deliberative weight,and also makes them characteristically weightier. Thus,accommodating tragic dilemmas reinforces the moral/nonmoraldistinction and the priority of moral reasons, the very thingsthese critics want to deny. By accepting the possibility oftragic dilemmas, these critics are undermining their own project.The standard normative theories are dead set against tragicdilemmas, and the critics of modern moral philosophy shouldreject tragic dilemmas for the good of their project. Thus we allshould reject tragic dilemmas. (shrink)

While indeterminacy is a recurrent theme in philosophy, less progress has been made in clarifying its significance for various philosophical and interdisciplinary contexts. This collection brings together early-career and well-known philosophers--including Graham Priest, Trish Glazebrook, Steven Crowell, Robert Neville, Todd May, and William Desmond--to explore indeterminacy in greater detail. The volume is unique in that its essays demonstrate the positive significance of indeterminacy, insofar as indeterminacy opens up new fields of discourse and illuminates neglected aspects of various concepts (...) and phenomena. The essays are organized thematically around indeterminacy's impact on various areas of philosophy, including post-Kantian idealism, phenomenology, ethics, hermeneutics, aesthetics, and East Asian philosophy. They also take an interdisciplinary approach by elaborating the conceptual connections between indeterminacy and literature, music, religion, and science. (shrink)

Moreover, he examines the reception of Ottoa (TM)s ideas after World War One. The volume contains name and subject indexes.

Luke Russell's book, Evil: A Philosophical Investigation, is a marvelously clear and rigorous addition to the philosophical literature on the secular moral concept of evil. The term “evil,” in this...

In this article we analyze the social memories of the Vietnam War afforded by tourism at the Cu Chi battlefield. Specifically, we explore the experiences of tourists at the site in order to address the under-theorized relationship between carnivalesque and dialogical discourses. Drawing on field interviews and ethnographic engagement with young adult Western tourists who took tours led by Vietnamese guides, we document how the tourists’ playful engagement with the past at Cu Chi facilitates the development of new dialogical memories (...) of the war. Our interviews reveal a strong concern with the suffering of both occupying forces and the Vietnamese communist forces, a finding that points to the need for scholars to better appreciate the multiplicity of ways that social performances function in shaping social memory. Ultimately, we challenge social performance theories whose explanations reduce shifts in social memory to audience interpretations of authenticity. (shrink)

The question Adorno and Horkheimer leave the reader of the Dialectic of Enlightenment with is: How, finally, are we to supplement the project of the Enlightenment, so that it may attain its libratory potential? As I find Adorno's answers to the question of the proletariat's political failure troubling, in leaving little possibility of reform or hope in concrete terms for continuing successfully in the project of liberation, I intend to provide an alternative narrative of human liberation based on a critical (...) rereading of Adorno and Horkheimer in light of Ren Girard. Specifically, I argue that Girard can provide a model of human liberation that enables the transcendence of the Odyssean disposition to self-sacrifice that Adorno and Horkheimer see as a key to the failures of the proletariat. In Girard's terms, I argue that the strategy of Penelope rather than Odysseus can provide a model for a psychology and praxis of liberation. (shrink)

The data of Henrich et al., when combined with other research, suggest that sharing behavior probably varies systematically across cultures, situations, and individuals. Economic policies founded on recognition of this “radical contingency” would, I argue, nurture economic pluralism rather than attempting to bring the world under one system.