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Despite the importance of Leibniz's mature philosophy, his early work has been relatively neglected. This collection begins with an overview of his formative years and includes 12 original papers by internationally-known scholars. The contributions reflect the wide range of the young Leibniz's philosophical interests and his interests in related subjects, including law, physics and theology. Some chapters explore his relationship to other philosophers, including his teachers in Leipzig and Jena and his Paris friend Tschirnhaus, as well as Hobbes and Spinoza. Others focus on particular periods or texts and deal with themes ranging from ethics and free-will to his philosophically-significant account of transubstantiation and his early monadology. Some of the topics are familiar to Leibniz students - harmony, sufficient reason and possible worlds, for instance - but others are less familiar - for instance, his attitude to historical truth, millenarianism and the relation of mathematics to the natural world. The book provides an introduction to Leibniz's early philosophy and throws light on the development of some of the doctrines with which he is particularly associated.

This book originated in a symposium on business ethics that took place in the Faculty of Commerce at the University of Canterbury in September of 1997. Professor Werhane, who was a visiting Erskine Fellow, provided the keynote address, and many of the papers in this collection were originally presented at this symposium. We are grateful to Kluwer Publishers for the opportunity to publish these essays in their series on International Business Ethics. We want to thank the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics at the Darden School, University of Virginia, and the Erskine Trust and the Department of Management at the University of Canterbury for their support of Professor Werhane's fellowship, research for this text, and funding for its production. We especially want to thank Lisa Spiro, who copy-edited and prepared the manuscript for publication. INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW This book originated in a symposium on business ethics that took place in the faculty of commerce, at the University of Canterbury, in September 1997. Professor Werhane, who was a visiting Erskine Fellow, provided the keynote address. Contributions to the proceedings were. inter-disciplinary, spanning theory and practice. Subsequent contributions were obtained from within New Zealand and from Asia. The book starts off on rather a pessimistic note: the new managerialism (the kind of thing Scott Adams jokes about in the world-famous Dilbert cartoons) is economically suspect and psychologically damaging.

The contributions to this volume grew out of papers presented at an international conference Individual, Community & Society: Bioethics in the Third Millennium, held in Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, between 25-28 May 1999. The conference was organized by the Centre for Comparative Public Management and Social Policy, and Ethics in Contemporary China Research Group, in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the City University of Hong Kong. The conference brought together scholars from east and west to investigate the challenges to caring and to traditional moral authorities that would confront bioethics in the third millennium. They explored the implications of moral loss and moral diversity in post-traditional and post-modern societies, and how these would shape the character of medical care and bioethics discourse in the new era. A proceedings volume under the same title of Individual, Community & Society: Bioethics in the Third Millennium, was published in May 1999 for the conference meeting.

G.E.M. Anscombe (1919-2001) was one of the most important, outspoken, and misunderstood philosophers of the twentieth century. More than anyone else she revived virtue ethics and the philosophy of action. She was also almost alone in publicly opposing Oxford University's decision to award an honorary degree to President Truman. She regarded his decision to authorize bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki as murderous. Some liberals admire her for this stand, but conservatives also admire her for her opposition to abortion, contraception, and same-sex marriage. Clearly her values were not those of her times. This led her to reflect on the differences, producing such works as Modern Moral Philosophy, in which she rejected all modern theories of ethics. In this paper she coins the term'consequentialism'to describe the dominant view, which she rejects, that what matters morally is the results of what one does. Put crudely, the ends can justify the means. If enough lives can be saved by targeting civilians, then civilians should be targeted. Against this, Anscombe insisted that certain actions are forbidden, which prompted her interest in the nature of action and its relation to a person's character. Whether one agrees with her or not, these are all issues that continue to be relevant and on which Anscombe's views are always strong and intelligently defended. Her presentation of these views, unfortunately, is often dense, and they are often badly misunderstood even by some very able minds. Anscombe's Moral Philosophy clarifies what Anscombe thought about ethics, showing how her different ideas connect and how she supported them. It also evaluates her reasoning, showing that it is stronger in some parts than in others. The five main chapters of the book deal in turn with her work on military ethics (including the so-called doctrine of double effect), her rejection of consequentialism, her attack on the modern, atheist notion of moral obligation, her analysis of intention and its relevance for ethics, and her controversial ideas about sex.

According to noncognitivists, when we say that stealing is wrong, what we are doing is more like venting our feelings about stealing or encouraging one another not to steal, than like stating facts about morality. These ideas challenge the core not only of much thinking about morality and metaethics, but also of much philosophical thought about language and meaning. Noncognitivism in Ethics is an outstanding introduction to these theories, ranging from their early history through the latest contemporary developments. Beginning with a general introduction to metaethics, Mark Schroeder introduces and assesses three principal kinds of noncognitivist theory: the speech-act theories of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare; the expressivist theories of Blackburn and Gibbard; and hybrid theories. He pays particular attention both to the philosophical problems about what moral facts could be about or how they could matter, which noncognitivism seeks to solve, and to the deep problems that it faces, including the task of explaining both the nature of moral thought and the complexity of moral attitudes, and the ‘Frege–Geach'problem. This second edition has been revised and updated throughout. It includes new sections on whether expressivism is a metasemantic thesis; the rise of relational expressivism; the idea that expressivism leads us to a novel understanding of the nature of propositions; and expressivism and epistemic modals, deontic modals, probability, and truth. Schroeder makes even the most difficult material accessible by offering crucial background along the way. Also included are exercises at the end of each chapter, chapter summaries, and a glossary of technical terms, making Noncognitivism in Ethics essential reading for all students of ethics and metaethics.

This book examines Spinoza's ontological argument and introduces the concept of'paradoxical singularity.'It explores the ways in which Spinoza's ontology establishes a framework in which singular things are, paradoxically, differentiated through intersecting causes. The book argues that Spinoza's ontological argument functions at once as a philosophical, religious, and political ethos in which interpretation is inseparable from cooperation. This emphasizes a connection between the productions of knowledge (interpretation) and the way of life (ethos) that those productions involve and express. Recommended for scholars interested in Spinoza's influence on post-structuralism, trans-individuality, and the history of secular religious thought.

Most thoughtful people worry at one time or another about whether there can actually be such a thing as objective moral truth. They might wonder, for example, whether the prevalence of moral disagreement makes it reasonable to conclude that there aren't really any moral facts at all. Or they might be bothered by questions like these: What could objective moral facts possibly be like? Isn't it obvious that morality is simply relative to particular societies and particular times? If there were moral facts, how could we ever come to know anything about them? Can morality really have the motivating and rational force we normally take it to have? How can one possibly find a place for objective moral values in a scientific worldview? Some people are driven by questions like these to the conclusion that we should embrace skepticism about morality, denying the very existence of anything worthy of the name. In Answering Moral Skepticism, Shelly Kagan shows how those who accept the existence of objective moral truth can provide plausible answers to these questions. Focusing throughout on issues that trouble reflective individuals, Kagan provides an accessible defense of the belief in objective morality will be of interest to both students of metaethics as well as anyone worried about the objectivity of their own moral judgements.

This book collects Thomas Nagel's recent philosophical reflections on topics of fundamental interest: ethics, moral psychology, science and religion, death, the holocaust, and the metaphysics of mind. Among the figures discussed are Peter Singer, Alvin Plantinga, Christine Korsgaard, Tony Judt, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, T. M. Scanlon, Ronald Dworkin, Samuel Scheffler, Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene, and Daniel Dennett. Nagel consistently defends a realist interpretation of moral truth and resists reductive attempts to subsume ethics to psychology and evolutionary theory. He also defends a pluralistic conception of the content of morality as opposed to utilitarianism, one that includes deontological elements such as rights and special responsibilities. A realist outlook also informs his discussion of metaphysical and epistemological questions. The book closes with tributes to a number of people Nagel has known over the course of his career. The essays are all addressed to a general audience, and should appeal not only to philosophers but to anyone interested in current attempts to understand human life, human values, and how we fit into the world.

Updated and expanded to represent the fundamental questions at the heart of philosophical ethics today, the second edition of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Ethics covers the key topics in metaethics and normative ethical theory. This edition includes 12 fully revised chapters, and 3 newly commissioned contributions from a range of esteemed academics who provide accessible introductions to their own areas of expertise. The first part of the book covers the field of metaethics, including subjects such as moral realism, expressivism, constructivism, practical reason, moral psychology, experimental ethics, and evolutionary ethics, as well as two new chapters that respond to ethical debates concerning moral relativism and moral responsibility that enable students and scholars to better navigate this complicated ethical terrain. Moving onto normative ethical theory, the second part of the book ranges across morality and religion, consequentialism, and particularism, as well as Kantian, virtue, feminist, and Confucian ethics. This comprehensive edition provides a one-stop resource for students of ethics, which includes updated detailed overviews of the field and methodological issues, as well as an appendix of additional resources, including technical terms in ethics.

Kant held the moral law to be an objective imperative, an entity in its own right. It carries with it prescriptive force, in parallel to other principles of pure reason, like those of logic and mathematics. Objective imperatives therefore do not derive their authority from any other source, such as common consensus or the will of God. In Objective Imperatives, Ralph C. S. Walker seeks to show that this is a highly defensible view: Kant's Categorical Imperative, properly understood, is broadly right. The key to it is rationality, and not universality, which functions only as an approximate test. Often, Kant sets the matter out badly, and most of the common objections to him can be shown to be due to misunderstandings. A morality that gives us an objective imperative does appear incompatible with the determinism to which Kant commits himself, but Walker argues that this appearance is misleading.

In his contemplative works on nature, Aristotle twice appeals to the general principle that being is better than not being. Taking his cue from this claim, Christopher V. Mirus offers an extended, systematic account of how Aristotle understands being itself to be good. Mirus begins with the human, examining Aristotle's well-known claim that the end of a human life is the good of the human substance as such—which turns out to be the good of the human capacity for thought. Human thought, however, is not concerned with human affairs alone. It is also contemplative, and contemplation is oriented toward the beauty of its objects. In each of the three branches of contemplative thought—mathematics, natural science, and theology—the intelligibility of being renders it beautiful to thought. Both in nature and in human life, moreover, the being that is beautiful through its intelligibility serves also as an end of motion and of action; hence it counts not only as beautiful (kalon), but also as good (agathon). The persistent concern of thought with the beautiful reveals what is at stake for human beings in Aristotle's larger metaphysics of the good: in the connection between goodness and actuality that structures his natural science and metaphysics, in his explicit claim that being is better than not being, and in his concepts of order and determinacy, which help connect being with goodness. These in turn shed light on his concepts of the complete and the self-sufficient, on his teleological understanding of the four elements, and on the curious role of the honorable in his natural science and metaphysics.

This book is about permissive consent--the moral tool we use to give another person permission to do what would otherwise be forbidden. For instance, consent to enter my home gives you permission to do what would otherwise be trespass. This transformation is the very thing that philosophers identify as consent--which is why we call it a normative power. It is something individuals can do, by choice, to change the moral or legal world. But what human acts or attitudes render consent? When do coercive threats, offers, or lies undermine the transformative power of consent? What intentions or conventions are necessary to render consent meaningful? This book develops a novel theory that explains the moral features of consent in some of the most central domains of human life--but that also serves as a study in how to theorize normative power. It argues that consent is a moral mechanism with exactly the set of features that, when triggered, prevents another person's behavior from constituting a certain kind of wrongdoing. What kind of wrongdoing? It depends on what sort of permission is being granted. Sometimes consent permits others to enter, occupy, or act within some bounded domain wherein the consent-giver holds moral authority. In these cases, consent operates to prevent what the book calls: Invasive Wrongdoing. By identifying the moral features that underlie this special wrongdoing, we can learn what it takes to render consent.

Hans Jonas ist einer der bedeutenden Denker des 20. Jahrhunderts. Das Handbuch erklärt die philosophischen, theologischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Kontexte, die sein Denken geprägt haben. Es präsentiert neben Informationen zur Biographie und den zeitgenössischen Bezügen alle wichtigen Werke und gibt Hinweise zu deren internationaler Rezeption in vielen Disziplinen. Zentrale Begriffe und Konzepte im Gesamtwerk von Hans Jonas werden ausführlich erklärt (z.B. Gnosis, Leben, Macht, Freiheit, Verantwortung, Technologie, Gott). Das internationale Autorenteam der über 50 Expertinnen und Experten aus fast 20 Ländern zeigt nicht nur das bis heute weltweite Interesse am Werk von Jonas. Sie eröffnen mit ihren Beiträgen auch eine Vielzahl unterschiedlicher Perspektiven auf sein Denken.

I: BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF REID Thomas Reid (1710-96) was born at Strachan in Kincardineshire, Scotland, not far from Aberdeen. Reid was fortunate in his family connections. For instance his mother's brother was David Gregory, Savilian professor of Astronomy at Oxford and close friend of Sir Isaac Newton. Reid entered Marischal College, Aberdeen, at the age of twelve after the usual spell in Aberdeen Grammar School. After a short period as college librarian he married his cousin Margaret Gregory, having gained the position of (Presbyterian) minister at New Machar, in the gift of King's College, Aberdeen, which he held from 1737 till 1752. Although Reid published only one paper, An Essay on Quantity, in this period he was far from intellectually idle; for one thing he familiarised himself with the works of Bishop Butler, especially The Analogy of Religion, which, together with those of Samuel Clarke and Isaac Newton, were to have a profound influence on his mature philosophy. In 1752 Reid was appointed a regent at King's College, Aberdeen. During his regency he not only founded a crucially important discussion group,'The Wise Club', and familiarised himself with David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature both through his own reading and by exhaustive discussion of it within the group; he also wrote extensively. He composed and delivered his seminal Latin Philosophical Orations.

This book addresses the limits of metaphysics and the question of the possibility of ethics in this context. It is divided into six chapters, the first of which broadens readers'understanding of difference as difference with specific reference to the works of Hegel. The second chapter discusses the works of Emmanuel Lévinas and the question of the ethical. In turn, the concepts of sovereignty and the eternal return are discussed in chapters three and four, while chapter five poses the question of literature in a new way. The book concludes with chapter six. The book represents an important contribution to the field of contemporary philosophical debates on the possibility of ethics beyond all possible metaphysical and political closures. As such, it will be of interest to scholars and researchers in both the humanities and social sciences. Beyond the academic world, the book will also appeal to readers (journalists, intellectuals, social activists, etc.) for whom the question of the ethical is the decisive question of our time.

In this collection of essays, Franklin I. Gamwell offers a defense of transcendental metaphysics, especially in its neoclassical form, and builds a case for its importance as a tool for addressing abiding problems in philosophical theology and morality—including talk about God, human fault, moral decision, and the relationship of politics and religious freedom.In Part I, Gamwell argues against Kant and a wide range of contemporary philosophers, for the validity of transcendental metaphysics designated in the strict sense. He engages with Aquinas, Schleiermacher, Augustine, and Reinhold Niebuhr to argue that neoclassical metaphysics, for which the divine whole is itself temporal or forever self-surpassing, provides a more coherent account of God than does classical metaphysics, for which the divine whole is completely eternal. In Part II, Gamwell looks at transcendental metaphysics designated in the broad sense. In particular, he takes up the moral opportunity with which humans are presented, and argues that the moral law depends on a comprehensive good, that is, a good defined metaphysically in the strict sense. He then offers an extended discussion of the relation between transcendental metaphysics and morality, and explores Ronald Dworkin's view of the relationship between democracy and religion, the question of whether religious activities are properly exempted from generally applicable laws, and the constitutional debate about national and states'rights.

Our economic system is over-stimulated by the information age. Interconnection aids and abets companies earning trillions and their swift rise to global dominance. The 24-hour wired world has led to increased volatility; negative information, and even an accidental computer glitch can crash the market and create panic. Health, the environment, the welfare of society are pushed to the far edge of national interests. Instead, GDP and short-term monetary profit is prioritised over long-term impact on society and the environment. The world as we know it is set for collapse. Simultaneously, the science of evolution has itself evolved. In as much as “survival of the fittest” has been used to justify harsh, competition behaviour on the part of individuals and corporations, an updated understanding of evolution now tends to tell us a different story. What if written into the code of our DNA and RNA is a guide for telling us how to evolve morally and as a result improve our world and progress our epistemology? From such an understanding emerge new Spheres of Perception.

This handbook presents the conceptions and principles central to every aspect of Hegel's systematic philosophy. In twenty-eight thematically linked chapters by leading international experts, The Palgrave Hegel Handbook provides reliable, scholarly overviews of each subject, illuminates the main issues and debates, and details concisely the considered views of each contributor. Recent scholarship challenges traditional, largely anti-Kantian, readings of Hegel, focusing instead on Hegel's appropriation of Kantian epistemology to reconcile idealism with the rejection of foundationalism, coherentism and skepticism. Focused like Kant on showing how fundamental unities underlie the profusion of apparently independent events, Hegel argued that reality is rationally structured, so that its systematic structure is manifest to our properly informed thought. Accordingly, this handbook re-assesses Hegel's philosophical aims, methods and achievements, and re-evaluates many aspects of Hegel's enduring philosophical contributions, ranging from metaphysics, epistemology, and dialectic, to moral and political philosophy and philosophy of history. Each chapter, and The Palgrave Hegel Handbook as a whole, provides an informed, authoritative understanding of each aspect of Hegel's philosophy.

From Pulitzer Prize-finalist Steven Nadler, an engaging guide to what Spinoza can teach us about life's big questionsIn 1656, after being excommunicated from Amsterdam's Portuguese-Jewish community for “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds,” the young Baruch Spinoza abandoned his family's import business to dedicate his life to philosophy. He quickly became notorious across Europe for his views on God, the Bible, and miracles, as well as for his uncompromising defense of free thought. Yet the radicalism of Spinoza's views has long obscured that his primary reason for turning to philosophy was to answer one of humanity's most urgent questions: How can we lead a good life and enjoy happiness in a world without a providential God? In Think Least of Death, Pulitzer Prize–finalist Steven Nadler connects Spinoza's ideas with his life and times to offer a compelling account of how the philosopher can provide a guide to living one's best life.In the Ethics, Spinoza presents his vision of the ideal human being, the “free person” who, motivated by reason, lives a life of joy devoted to what is most important—improving oneself and others. Untroubled by passions such as hate, greed, and envy, free people treat others with benevolence, justice, and charity. Focusing on the rewards of goodness, they enjoy the pleasures of this world, but in moderation. “The free person thinks least of all of death,” Spinoza writes, “and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.'An unmatched introduction to Spinoza's moral philosophy, Think Least of Death shows how his ideas still provide valuable insights about how to live today.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive single-volume treatment of Fichte's philosophy. In addition to offering new researchers an authoritative introduction and orientation to Fichtean thought, the volume also surveys the main scholarly and philosophical controversies regarding Fichtean interpretation, and defends a range of philosophical theses in a way that advances the scholarly discussion. Fichte is the first major philosopher in the post-Kantian tradition and the first of the great German Idealists, but he was no mere epigone of Kant or precursor to Hegel. His work speaks powerfully and originally to a wide range of issues of enduring concern, and his many innovations importantly anticipate major developments, including absolute idealism, phenomenology, and existentialism. He is therefore not only a path-breaking thinker but also a pivotal figure in Western intellectual history. Wide-ranging, well-organised and timely, this key volume makes Fichte's work both accessible and relevant. It is essential reading for scholars, graduate researchers and advanced students interested in Fichte, German Idealism, and the history of nineteenth-century philosophy in the West.

Many have been attracted to the idea that for something to be good there just have to be reasons to favour it. This view has come to be known as the buck-passing account of value. According to this account, for pleasure to be good there need to be reasons for us to desire and pursue it. Likewise for liberty and equality to be values there have to be reasons for us to promote and preserve them. Extensive discussion has focussed on some of the problems that the buck-passing account faces, such as the'wrong kind of reason'problem. Less attention, however, has been paid as to why we should accept the buck-passing account or what the theoretical pay-offs and other implications of accepting it are. The Normative and the Evaluative provides the first comprehensive motivation and defence of the buck-passing account of value. Rach Cosker-Rowland argues that the buck-passing account explains several important features of the relationship between reasons and value, as well as the relationship between the different varieties of value, in a way that its competitors do not. She shows that alternatives to the buck-passing account are inconsistent with important views in normative ethics, uninformative, and at odds with the way in which we should see practical and epistemic normativity as related. In addition, she extends the buck-passing account to provide an account of moral properties as well as all other normative and deontic properties and concepts, such as fittingness and'ought', in terms of reasons.

To what extent are we responsible for our actions? Philosophical theorizing about this question has recently taken a social turn, marking a shift in focus from traditional metaphysical concerns about free will and determinism. Recent theories have attended to the interpersonal dynamics at the heart of moral responsibility practices and the role of the moral environment in scaffolding agency. Yet, the implications of social inequality and the role of social power for our moral responsibility practices remains a surprisingly neglected topic. The conception of agency involved in current approaches to moral responsibility is overly idealized, assuming that our practices involve interactions between equally empowered and situated agents. In twelve new essays and a substantial introduction, this volume systematically challenges this assumption, exploring the impact of social factors such as power relationships and hierarchies, paternalism, socially constructed identities, race, gender and class on moral responsibility. Social factors have bearing on the circumstances in which agents act as well as on the person or people in the position to hold that agent accountable for his or her action. Additionally, social factors bear on the parties who pass judgment on the agent. Leading theorists of moral responsibility, including Michael McKenna, Marina Oshana, and Manuel Vargas, consider the implications of oppression and structural inequality for their respective theories. Neil Levy urges the need to refocus our analyses of the epistemic and control conditions for moral responsibility from individual to socially extended agents. Leading theorists of relational autonomy, including Catriona Mackenzie, Natalie Stoljar and Andrea Westlund develop new insights into the topic of moral responsibility. Other contributors bring debates about moral responsibility into dialogue with recent work in feminist philosophy, social epistemology and social psychology on topics such as epistemic injustice and implicit bias. Collectively, the essays in this volume reorient philosophical debates about moral responsibility in important new directions.

This book reconstructs Spinoza's theory of the human mind against the backdrop of the twofold notion that subjective experience is explainable and that its successful explanation is of ethical relevance, because it makes us wiser, freer, and happier. Doing so, the book defends a realist rationalist interpretation of Spinoza's approach which does not entail commitment to an ontological reduction of subjective experience to mere intelligibility. In contrast to a long-standing tradition of Hegelian reading of Spinoza's Ethics, it thus defends the notion that the experience of finite subjects is fully real.

Hud Hudson presents an innovative view of the metaphysics of human persons according to which human persons are material objects but not human organisms. In developing his account, he formulates and defends a unique collection of positions on parthood, persistence, vagueness, composition, identity, and various puzzles of material constitution.The author also applies his materialist metaphysics to issues in ethics and in the philosophy of religion. He examines the implications for ethics of his metaphysical views for standard arguments addressing the moral permissibility of our treatment of human persons and their parts, fetuses and infants, the irreversibly comatose, and corpses. He argues that his metaphysics provides the best foundation in the philosophy of religion for the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body.Hudson addresses a broad range of metaphysical issues, but among his most strikingly original contributions are his defense of the'Partist'view (according to which a material object can exactly occupy multiple, overlapping regions of spacetime) and his argument for the compatibility of Christianity with a materialistic theory of human persons.

This collection of essays by leading international philosophers considers central themes in the ethics of Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup (1905–1981). Løgstrup was a Lutheran theologian much influenced by phenomenology and by strong currents in Danish culture, to which he himself made important contributions. The essays in What Is Ethically Demanded? K. E. Løgstrup's Philosophy of Moral Life are divided into four sections. The first section deals predominantly with Løgstrup's relation to Kant and, through Kant, the system of morality in general. The second section focuses on how Løgstrup stands in connection with Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Levinas. The third section considers issues in the development of Løgstrup's ethics and how it relates to other aspects of his thought. The final section covers certain central themes in Løgstrup's position, particularly his claims about trust and the unfulfillability of the ethical demand. The volume includes a previously untranslated early essay by Løgstrup,'The Anthropology of Kant's Ethics,'which defines some of his basic ethical ideas in opposition to Kant's. The book will appeal to philosophers and theologians with an interest in ethics and the history of philosophy.Contributors: K. E. Løgstrup, Svend Andersen, David Bugge, Svein Aage Christoffersen, Stephen Darwall, Peter Dews, Paul Faulkner, Hans Fink, Arne Grøn, Alasdair MacIntyre, Wayne Martin, Kees van Kooten Niekerk, George Pattison, Robert Stern, and Patrick Stokes.

Vulnerability reins our time. People know that their world is changing in ways that they cannot foresee. Communities disintegrate and boundaries lose their relevance. Drawing on the concept of vulnerability as an affective relation individuals hold with their world and with their lives, this book analyzes vulnerability as it is immanently connected to temporality. It provides an account of political temporality – connections between past, present, and future that engage with the contemporary social reality – and enables and sustains transformative dynamics through which individuals can mobilize their vulnerability. This technique allows them to gradually transform their reality and its influence on their own subjectivity and agency. This book portrays the kinds of relations through time and social space that people can create by working with their vulnerability as an affect that has the power to yield new sensibilities, skills, and values. These connections with the past are called transformative lineages.

There is abundant evidence that most people, often in spite of their conscious beliefs, values and attitudes, have implicit biases.'Implicit bias'is a term of art referring to evaluations of social groups that are largely outside conscious awareness or control. These evaluations are typically thought to involve associations between social groups and concepts or roles like'violent,''lazy,''nurturing,''assertive,''scientist,'and so on. Such associations result at least in part from common stereotypes found in contemporary liberal societies about members of these groups. Implicit Bias and Philosophy brings the work of leading philosophers and psychologists together to explore core areas of psychological research on implicit (or unconscious) bias, as well as the ramifications of implicit bias for core areas of philosophy. Volume 2: Moral Responsibility, Structural Injustice, and Ethics is comprised of three sections.'Moral Responsibility for Implicit Bias'contains chapters examining the relationship of implicit biases to concepts that are central to moral responsibility, including control, awareness, reasons-responsiveness, and alienation. The chapters in the second section--'Structural Injustice'--explore the connections between the implicit biases held by individuals and the structural injustices of the societies in which they are situated. And finally, the third section--'The Ethics of Implicit Bias: Theory and Practice'--contains chapters examining strategies for implicit attitude change, the ramifications of research on implicit bias for philosophers working in ethics, and suggestions for combatting implicit biases in the fields of philosophy and law. This volume can be read independently of, or in conjunction with, Volume I: Metaphysics and Epistemology, which addresses key metaphysical and epistemological questions on implicit bias, including the effect of implicit bias on scientific research, gender stereotypes in philosophy, and the role of heuristics in biased reasoning.

This interdisciplinary analysis presents an innovative examination of the nature of pride and humility, including all their slippery nuances and points of connection. By combining insights from visual art, literature, philosophy, religious studies, and psychology, this volume adapts a complementary rather than an oppositional approach to examine how pride and humility reinforce and inform one another. This method produces a robust, substantial, and meaningful description of these important concepts. The analysis takes into account key elements of pride and humility, including self-esteem and self-confidence, human interconnectedness, power's function and limitations, and the role of fear. Shawn R. Tucker explores the many inflections of these terms, inflections that cast them by turns as positive or negative, emboldening or discouraging, and salubrious or vicious depending upon the context and manner in which they are used.

For a long time, commentators viewed Sartre as one of Kant's significant twentieth-century critics. Recent research of their philosophies has discovered that Sartre's relation to Kant's work manifests an'anxiety of influence', which masks more profound similarities. This volume of newly written comparative essays is the first edited collection on the philosophies of Kant and Sartre. The volume focuses on issues in metaphysics, metaethics and metaphilosophy, and explores the similarities and differences between the two authors, as well as the complementarity of some of their views, particularly on autonomy, happiness, self-consciousness, evil, temporality, imagination and the nature of philosophy.

This book claims that any one who cares more and better, exists more and better. Much has been written about how character affects action, but this book describes how actions and passions affect character ontologically. There is an independent, not culturally relative source for the ethics of care in an ontology of the self. Ethical and aesthetic flourishing is at once ontological flourishing of the largest, truest self. The book includes many illustrations of how behavior and attitudes have consequences not only for who, but for how much we are. It refines the concept of flourishing originating with Aristotle, showing how values that encourage flourishing of the world as it relates to any person, reflexively enhance the flourishing of that person, hence offering a bridge across the fact/value chasm and a cure for ethical relativism.Classical and modern philosophers writing about the nature of a self are engaged to provide a platform from which further advances can be made on several problems in general philosophy that relate to the ontology of a self. These include the use of the term “existence,” a bundle theory showing a way substance can be made up of attributes, an exploration of unity in a self, an evaluation of necessary constituents of selfhood, a theory of how persons are constituted in space and time, a portrayal of how existential intensity relates to the exercise of power, and a proposal about how free acts and stances can be connected to character. Applications of an ontology of care to problems of partiality, specialization, limitation, age and death are outlined in the final chapters. All these issues are engaged to explicate the connection between ontological and ethical flourishing of the self/world combination.

Understand the concepts that shaped twentieth-century philosophy, theology, psychology, and art, with works by Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism was born in the nineteenth century and came of age in mid-twentieth-century France. Here, three major texts offer an introduction to the philosophy, which emphasizes individual existence, freedom, and personal responsibility while acknowledging the suffering and dread that can accompany our striving for such values.Essays in Metaphysics: Identity and Difference by Martin Heidegger In the two lectures translated here, Heidegger provides illuminating insights and touches upon many a vital issue, including our technological age, religion, language, history, and more. His receptiveness, sensitivity, and ability to be at the heart of the problem are represented here, offering a deeper appreciation of the teacher and man who gave the world works such as Being and Time.The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir The second major essay by the groundbreaking author of The Second Sex and a classic introduction to Existentialist thought, The Ethics of Ambiguity simultaneously pays homage to and grapples with de Beauvoir's French contemporaries, philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, by arguing that the freedoms of existentialism carry certain ethical responsibilities. While contemplating nihilism, surrealism, existentialism, objectivity, and human values, de Beauvoir outlines a series of “ways of being” (the adventurer, the passionate person, the lover, the artist, and the intellectual) that allows us to live up to the responsibilities of freedom.The Emotions: Outline of a Theory by Jean-Paul Sartre French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre attempts to understand the role emotions play in the human psyche. Sartre analyzes fear, lust, anguish, and melancholy while asserting that human beings begin to develop emotional capabilities from a very early age, which helps them identify and understand the emotions'names and qualities later in life. Helping to complete the circle of Sartre's many theories on existentialism, this vital piece of literature is a must-have for the philosopher-in-training's collection.

This carefully crafted ebook: “The Ethics of Immanuel Kant: Metaphysics of Morals - Philosophy of Law & The Doctrine of Virtue + The Critique of Practical Reason: Theory of Moral Reasoning + Perpetual Peace (Unabridged)” is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, also known as the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, is the first of Kant's mature works on moral philosophy and remains one of the most influential in the field. Kant conceives his investigation as a work of foundational ethics—one that clears the ground for future research by explaining the core concepts and principles of moral theory and showing that they are normative for rational agents. Kant aspires to nothing less than this: to lay bare the fundamental principle of morality and show that it applies to us. The Metaphysics of Morals is a work of political and moral philosophy by Kant. The work is divided into two main parts,'The Science of Right, which deals with the rights that people have or can acquire, and the Doctrine of Virtue, which deals with the virtues they ought to acquire.'The Critique of Practical Reason is the second of Immanuel Kant's three critiques and deals with his moral philosophy. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a German philosopher, who, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is'the central figure of modern philosophy.'Kant argued that fundamental concepts of the human mind structure human experience, that reason is the source of morality, that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment, that space and time are forms of our understanding, and that the world as it is'in-itself'is unknowable. Contents: Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals The Metaphysics of Morals Philosophy of Law (The Science of Right) The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics The Critique of Practical Reason: Theory of Moral Reasoning Perpetual Peace (A Philosophical Essay)

Anthropocentrism in philosophy is deeply paradoxical. Ethics investigates the human good, epistemology investigates human knowledge, and antirealist metaphysics holds that the world depends on our cognitive capacities. But humans'good and knowledge, including their language and concepts, are empirical matters, whereas philosophers do not engage in empirical research. And humans are inhabitants, not'makers', of the world. Nevertheless, all three (ethics, epistemology, and antirealist metaphysics) can be drastically reinterpreted as making no reference to humans.

In the past few decades a remarkable change occurred in Kant scholarship: the'other'Kant has been discovered, i.e. the one of the doctrine of virtue and the anthropology. Through the rediscovery of Kant's investigations into the empirical and sensuous aspects of knowledge, our understanding of Kant's philosophy has been enriched by an important element that has allowed researchers to correct supposed deficiencies in Kant's work. In addition, further questions concerning the nature of Kant's philosophy itself have been formulated: the more the'other'Kant comes to the fore, the stronger the question concerning the connection between pure philosophy and empirical investigation becomes.The aim of this study is to show that the psychological and anthropological interpretations of Kant's pure philosophy are not convincing and at the same time to illustrate some connections between his critical and anthropological investigations by means of an analysis of the theory of the faculties.Against both a'transcendental psychological'and an'anthropological'reading, the book presents Kant's theory of the faculties as a constitutive part of his critical philosophy and shows that there is a close connection between Kant's pure philosophy and his moral aesthetic.

Pragmatist philosopher William James has long been deemed a dubious guide to ethical reasoning. This book overturns such thinking, demonstrating the coherence of James's efforts to develop a flexible but rigorous framework for individuals and societies seeking freedom, meaning, and justice in a world of interdependence, uncertainty, and change.

lt is with great pleasure that I write this preface for Or Li's book, wh ich addresses the venerable and vexing issues surrounding the problem of whether death can be a harm to the person who dies. This problem is an ancient one which was raised long ago by the early Greek philosopher Epicurus, who notoriously argued that death is at no time a harm to its'victim'because before death there is no harrn and after death there is no victim. Epicurus's conclusion is conspicuously at odds with our prereflective­ and in most cases our post-reflective-intuitions, and numerous strategies have therefore been proposed to refute or avoid the Epicurean conclusion that death cannot be an evil after all. How then are we to account for our intuition that death is not just an evil, but perhaps the worst evil: that may befall us? This is the key issue that Or Li addresses. Or Li's book explores various alternative approaches to the complex and difficult issues surrounding Epicurus's notorious argument and provides a defence ofthe intuitively plausible conclusion that death can indeed be a harm to the person who dies. This challenge to Epicurus's claim that death is never a harm to the person who dies is developed by way of a detailed exploration of the issues raised not only by Epicurus, but also by his many successors, who have responded variously to the challenging issues which Epicurus raised.

This book provides an analytical interpretation of Leibniz's'Essais de Théodicée'with wide-ranging references to all his works. It shows and upholds many thesis: Leibniz's rational conception of faith, his rational notion of mystery, the reformation of classical ontology, and the importance of Leibniz's thought in the tradition of the critical idealism. In his endeavor to formulate a theodicy, Leibniz emerges as a classic exponent of a non-immanentist modern rationalism, capable of engaging in a close dialogue with religion and faith. This relation implies that God and reason are directly involved in posing the challenge and that the defence of one is the defence of the other. Theodicy and logodicy are two key aspects of a philosophy which is open to faith and of a faith which is able to intervene in culture and history.

Relativism is a hotly contested doctrine among philosophers, some of whom regard it as neither true nor false but simply incoherent. As Carol Rovane demonstrates in this analytical tour-de-force, the way to defend relativism is not initially by establishing its truth but by clarifying its content. The Metaphysics and Ethics of Relativism elaborates a doctrine of relativism that has a consistent logical, metaphysical, and practical significance. Relativism is worth debating, Rovane contends, because it bears directly on the moral choices we make in our lives.Three intuitive conceptions of relativism have been influential in philosophical discourse. These include the idea that certain unavoidable disagreements are irresolvable, leading to the conclusion that'both sides are right,'and the idea that truth is always relative to context. But the most compelling, Rovane maintains, is the'alternatives intuition.'Alternatives are truths that cannot be embraced together because they are not universal. Something other than logical contradiction excludes them. When this is so, logical relations no longer hold among all truth-value-bearers. Some truths will be irreconcilable between individuals even though they are valid in themselves.The practical consequence is that some forms of interpersonal engagement are confined within definite boundaries, and one has no choice but to view what lies beyond those boundaries with what Rovane calls'epistemic indifference.'In a very real sense, some people inhabit different worlds--true in themselves, but closed off to belief from those who hold irreducibly incompatible truths.

A focus on reasons for action and practical reason is the perspective chosen by many contemporary legal philosophers for the analysis of some central questions of their discipline. This book offers a critical evaluation of that approach, by carefully examining the empirical, logical and normative problems hidden behind the concepts of `reason for action'and `practical reasoning'. Unlike most other works in this field, it is a meta-theoretical study which analyses and compares how different theories use the notion of reason in their reconstruction of problems concerning issues such as normativity, the acceptance of norms, or the justification of judicial decisions. This book is directed primarily to scholars specializing in legal theory and concerned with the contribution practical philosophy can make to it, but it also contains important arguments and insights for all those interested in the controversy between legal positivists and their critics, in the theory of human action or in reason-based practical theories in general.

The act of thought-thought as an act-would precede the thought thinking or becoming conscious of an act. The notion of act involves a violence essentially: the violence of transitivity, lacking in the transcendence of thought... Totality and Infinity The work of Emmanuel Levinas revolves around two preoccupations. First, his philosophical project can be described as the construction of a formal ethics, grounded upon the transcendence of the other human being and a subject's spontaneous responsibility toward that other. Second, Levinas has written extensively on, and as a member of, the cultural and textual life of Judaism. These two concerns are intertwined. Their relation, however, is one of considerable complexity. Levinas'philosophical project stems directly from his situation as a Jewish thinker in the twentieth century and takes its particular form from his study of the Torah and the Talmud. It is, indeed, a hermeneutics of biblical experience. If inspired by Judaism, Levinas'ethics are not eo ipso confessional. What his ethics takes from Judaism, rather, is a particular way of conceiving transcendence and the other human being. It owes to the philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber a logos of the world and of the holy, which acknowledges their incom­ mensurability without positing one as fallen and the other as supernal.

THE PART OF THE SUBJECT At the origin of these essays, an increasing weariness produced by all those attempts to oppose what came to be known as Foucault's'post­ structuralism'to phenomenology - as if the two were incompatible and as if one could only proceed with thought after having chosen sides. And an equal reluctance to join those who pretended they could carryon as they had before since, quite obviously, there were no sides to choose,'Foucault'being but the latest example of a relativism that one could easily ignore since it had, like all relativism, already refuted itself by daring to speak. And, finally, behind that weariness and that reluctance, a suspicion that what these two reactions to'Foucault'had in common was a refusal to go'toward the things themselves'and thus a refusal to approach the texts that we refer to by that proper name as we would approach other phenomena: not as the body-object of a thought that we would have to locate as coming either'before'or'after'phenomenology, but as a series of statements that appear to us in a certain way and whose appearing reveals to us something about our own, finite being.

Many academic authors incur debts in the production of their work, many of which are intellectual. I am no exception. One of my intellectual debts is to three remarkable books, which formed the starting point for my thinking about norms. The first of these books is well known among philosophers: David Lewis'Convention. In vintage Lewisian prose, the book gives a lucid and convincing conventionalist analysis of semantic norms. The second 1985 dissertation Wederkerige book is Govert den Hartogh's Verwachtingen (Mutual Expectations). Partly because it was written in Dutch - my native tongue -partly because of the occasionally impenetrable style, it never got the attention it deserves. In that book, Den Hartogh extends Lewis'analysis of semantic norms to moral norms. Den Hartogh introduced the notion of cooperative virtues that is the focus of much of this book. The third book is a book on economics, largely ignored by economists, which only lately has started to receive some recognition among philosophers: Robert Sugden's The Economics of Rights, Co­ operation and Welfare. Sugden's book explains the emergence and stability of norms in terms of social evolution. Though all three books develop a of norms, their arguments and constructions are conventionalist account very different. Lewis and Den Hartogh take the picture of rational man deliberating about his course of action very serious; Sugden rejects this picture as unrealistic and unnecessary.

The contents of this book represent over a decade of my work in studying and assessing critically the philosophical work in the areas related to responsibility and punishment theories. Certain chapters or sections of chapters of this book contain some of what I have contributed in various philosophy journals or other sources. For example, the contents of Chapter 4 consists of a revised version of an essay by the same title published in The Southern Journal 0/ Philosophy to which thanks are expressed for the use of it herein. Substantial sections of Chapter 5 consist of an essay,'Making Sense of Retributivism,'which is forthcoming in Philosophy, and gratitude is expressed to the Royal Institute of Philosophy, London, for use of it here. The contents of Chapter 7 is a revised version of an article forthcoming as'Collective Moral Responsibility,'in A. Jokic, Editor, From History to Justice (New York: Peter Lang). The contents of Chapter 8 is essentially a revised form of an article by the same title from the Journal 0/ Social Philosophy, and gratitude is expressed to Blackwell Publishers for use of it in this book. Chapter 9 contains substantial material from'Reparations to Native Americans?'in A. Jokic, Editor, War Crimes and Collective Wrongdoing (London: Blackwell, 2(01). I am thankful to Blackwell Publishers for use of that material in this work.

The theory of practical rationality does not belong to one academic discipline alone. There are quite divergent philosophical, economical, sociological, psychological and politological contributions. Sometimes the disciplinary boundaries impede theoretical progress. On the other hand it is an indication for the high complexity of the subject that so many divergent paradigms compete with one another, or - what is worse - live separately in a kind of splendid isolation. Decision theory in the broader sense, embracing the theory of games and collective choice theory, can help to understand practical reason in philosophical analysis. But there are interesting aspects which cannot be dealt with adequately within a decision-theoretic conceptual framework. To have both of these convictions justifies to neglect dis­ ciplinary boundaries and poses a problem for the orthodoxies of either sides. All the essays of this volume focus on the relation between economic rationality and practical reason and discuss different aspects of the same problem, i. e. a basic deficiency in the standard economic theory of practical rationality. But philosophical analysis would not be of much help if it just rejected the economic paradigm. It must rather help to integrate economic aspects into a broader view on practical reason.

This series will include monographs and collections of studies devoted to the investigation and exploration of knowledge, infonnation, and data-processing systems of all kinds, no matter whether human, (other) animal, or machine. Its scope is intended to span the full range of interests from classical problems in the philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology through issues in cognitive psychology and sociobiology (concerning the mental capabilities of other species) to ideas related to artificial intelligence and computer science. While primary emphasis will be placed upon theoretical, conceptual, and epistemological aspects of these problems and domains, empirical, experi­ mental, and methodological studies will also appear from time to time. In the present volume, Bruce Thyer has brought together an impressive collection of original studies concerning philosophical aspects of behaviorism, which continues to exert considerable influence even in the era of the Cognitive Revolution. From its early origins and basic principles to its analysis of verbal behavior, consciousness, and free-will, determinism, and self-control, this work offers something of value for everyone with a serious interest in understanding scientific method in application to human behavior. Indeed, as the editor remarks, behaviorism is as much a philosophy as it is an approach to the study of behavior. The breadth and depth of this approach receives proper representation in this work devoted to its rich and varied philosophical legacy. J.H.F. v BA. Thyer (ed.). The Philosophical Legacy of Behaviorism, v.

This essay is the product of years of distaste for, and dissatisfaction with, the efforts of moral philosophers. It can be tiresome to attend to details, to spell out the obvious, but moral philosophy is such an abysmally difficult subject that faster than a creeping slug is breakneck reckless speed. One simply must content oneself with a slow slimy trail painfully drawn and cautiously constrained. Generally speaking, philosophy, and, in particular, moral philosophy, is too hard fot philosophers. Even though publishing is spitting in the ocean, and even though my sour sweet spittle will not alter the ocean's salinity, I am somehow inclined to publish this essay. Acknowledgments: I began this essay in 1956. During the years, I have discussed many of the topics in this volume with a great many philosophers. I am indebted to all of them, especially those with whom I disagreed and those who disagreed with me. One learns nothing from agreement, whereas disagreement provokes one to look more closely and more carefully at what is at issue: if a philosopher is to profit from discussion, someone must be disagreeable.

Some time ago I wrote a book (Moral Language, 1982) in which I argued that moral judgments are capable of being true ('truth-apt,'to use a current phrase, or descriptive and having truth-value, to use a more traditional term), that the methods of discovering moral facts are fundamentally similar to those of discovering non-moral facts, and that moral judgments may be true. What I did not do at that time was to develop a moral theory which would demonstrate how the method of discovering moral truths would work and what the criteria of truth actually are. In a later work (Persons, Animals, and Fetuses, 1996) I did propose a moral theory as to what the criteria for moral truth are; however, I presented it primarily as an introduction to the discussion of several practical ethical issues and did not argue fully for that theory. It is high time that I did so, because without showing that such a theory can be developed my defense of moral realism is incomplete. It is all very well to say that we can discover what moral beliefs are true, but unless we can demonstrate just which beliefs are true, the thesis that we can discover this truth cannot be fully defended. For this reason the biggest (although not the only) challenge to showing that ethical objectivity is possible is the presence of moral disagreement - and the contention of many that such disagreement cannot be definitively resolved.

Ethics seeks answers to questions about the moral status of human actions and human lives. Actions and lives are temporal things. Thus, one would think that answers to ethical questions should take some account of their temporal features. And yet, while a number of authors have drawn attention to the relation between time and ethics (Derek Parfit and Thomas Nagel in particular), there has never been a systematic study of the impact of temporal considerations on ethical issues. There is a pressing need for an investigation into how time and ethics impact on each other. This book leads the way in addressing that need. The essays in this collection raise and investigate some of the key issues that arise at the intersection between these two areas of philosophy. Anyone with an interest in ethics, (undergraduates, postgraduates and professional philosophers alike), will have a reason to read this book, as will anyone with an interest in the metaphysics of time, and how it connects with issues in other areas of philosophy.

How, if at all, can we do moral philosophy in the light of the radical critique made by Elizabeth Anscombe in'Modem Moral Philosophy'? Among the principal theses of this essay is that ethical thinking (that of philosophers and others) suffers from a widespread appeal to incoherent uses of terms such as'obligation,''ought,''right'and'wrong.'In this book I first explain and evaluate her thesis and the argument for it, and I then confront the challenge it poses: what ways are there of doing moral philosophy that avoid the kind of incoherence to which she has drawn our attention? The best way to show how it is possible for us to think about ethics is to demonstrate how to do so, using actual cases. This book therefore combines the critical study of central theoretical issues about ethics, in the first half, with concrete examination of serious practical issues, in the second. Following Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov, it is often said that if God does not exist then everything is permitted. This is not literally the case, since God cannot permit anything if He does not exist, and those of us who do exist do not permit everything, or at least our parents, employers, and governments do not. It is true, though, that if God does not exist then nothing is forbidden in the traditional sense of'forbidden'.

The aim of this book is to defend the Emotive Theory of Ethics, and, in particular, the versions of that theory proposed by A. J. Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic (1936) and by C. L. Stevenson in Ethics and Language (1944). For those readers who are familiar with the conventional history of Twentieth Century moral philosophy and the infamous place which the Emotive Theory occupies in that history, the question which may well spring to mind at this point is'Why bother?'In order to answer this question, however, I will need to provide a rough sketch of the very unconventional history of Twentieth Century moral philosophy which inspired me to'resurrect'a theory which most modem moral philosophers have long assumed to be safely dead and buried. From the very outset, the Emotive Theory (ET) was a misunderstood, misrepresented and unjustly ridiculed theory, but, contrary to what one might expect, it has, with the passing of time, become an even more misunderstood, misrepresented and unjustly ridiculed theory.