Specially food marketing boom signalizes end of America's “culinary wasteland”.

ABSTRACT:This article deploys Alasdair MacIntyre’s Aristotelian virtue ethics, in which meaningfulness is understood to supervene on human functioning, to bring empirical and ethical accounts of meaningful work into dialogue. Whereas empirical accounts have presented the experience of meaningful work either in terms of agents’ orientation to work or as intrinsic to certain types of work, ethical accounts have largely assumed the latter formulation and subjected it to considerations of distributive justice. This article critiques both the empirical and ethical literatures from (...) the standpoint of MacIntyre’s account of the relationship between the development of virtuous dispositions and participation in work that is productive of goods internal to practices. This reframing suggests new directions for empirical and ethical enquiries. (shrink)

A philosopher argues that state-sponsored cyberattacks against central military or civilian targets are always acts of war. What is this philosopher doing? According to conceptual analysts, the philosopher is making a claim about our concept of war. According to philosophical realists, the philosopher is making a claim about war per se. In a quickly developing literature, a third option is being explored: the philosopher is engineering the concept of war. On this view, the philosopher is making a proposal about which (...) concept we should have – even if it deviates from the extant concept, and even if it does not capture ‘what war really is’. The activity or method of proposing such revisionary definitions, as well as the metaphilosophical reflection on it, has become known as conceptual engineering. (shrink)

In this edition, two recent addresses in the CAPPE public lecture program are presented in full. Dr Barry Jones asks how complex issues are tackled in public life, and what role the pursuit of truth and objectivity plays in these important debates; his assessment is not positive. Professor Peter Newman argues that, amidst the public debate on climate change and resource degradation, there has been little discussion of peak oil and the grave threats it poses. In his article, Professor Newman (...) explains what peak oil is, the dangers involved and what we can do to avert them. Also in this edition, Professor Tony Coady offers a new analysis of terrorism and why it is wrong, as well as the moral dangers posed by recent counter-terrorist activity. (shrink)

There is currently an explosion of interest in grounding. In this article we provide an overview of the debate so far. We begin by introducing the concept of grounding, before discussing several kinds of scepticism about the topic. We then identify a range of central questions in the theory of grounding and discuss competing answers to them that have emerged in the debate. We close by raising some questions that have been relatively neglected but which warrant further attention.

A critical overview of mainly Anglo-American philosophical literature addressing the meaning of life up to 2002.

Recent discussion in epistemology has seen a huge growth in interest in the topic of epistemic value. In this paper I describe the background to this new movement in epistemology and critically survey the contemporary literature on this topic.