The word ‘God’ is typically thought to be a proper name, a name of a defined entity. From another position it appears to be a description that is fundamentally synonymous to ‘the first of all causes’, or ‘the font et origo of the structure of possibilities’, or ‘the provenience of being’, or ‘the generator of existence’. This lends credence to the view that ‘God’ is a truncated definite description. However, this article proposes that ‘God’ is a name given to whatever (...) is that which is the first of all causes, the font et origo of the structure of possibilities, the provenience of being, the generator of existence. If so, then it is a descriptive name. Yet even among descriptive names ‘God’ is unique, for it is neither convertible to a proper name, nor to a definite description. ‘God’ is an inveterate descriptive name. (shrink)

This book argues that Wittgenstein's religious thought is misunderstood by its critics, and that their misunderstandings are a result of being oblivious of ...

Supernaturalism is a philosophical position used in modernity that employs the “supernatural” to explain certain “natural” phenomena. The supernatural is defined by circumscription from the natural. But the line that is supposed to delineate the supernatural from the natural is porous and tenuous, to the point that the distinction between the two becomes a matter of no import. This renders vacuous the concept of the supernatural as well as the concept of the natural. Supernaturalism ends up naturalizing what is supposed (...) to be supernatural. But there is a conception of the supernatural that predates the modernist one. Benchmarked against this conception, the God posited by supernaturalism in the modern sense is not supernatural. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Self-Interest and Public Interest m Shaftesbury's Philosophy STANLEY GREAN THE SEV~NTEENTrt-CV.NTVRYproblem of the relationship of self-interest and public interest was carried over by the third Earl of Shaftesbury into the eighteenth century where it became a major issue for generations of British moralists. His own preoccupation with the problem began at an early date in his career, for the lnquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit (1699), the first (...) draft of which he wrote in his twenties, deals with it at length,1 and it is, according to him, the "main problem" of that work. This interest must have been deepened by his knowledge and experience of the bitter and tumultuous factional strife of the seventeenth century. There was also a family tradition of public life, the first Earl having been one of the foremost statesmen in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. The third Earl himself was briefly a figure of some importance on the political scene, serving in Parliament for two sessions? Something of Shaftesbury's character and point of view is revealed in the independent position which he took on certain issues during this time. With the emergence of the Whig and Tory parties a new emphasis was being placed on party organization. The principle of party loyalty "was indeed the only loyalty that was practised by some very important statesmen in the reigns of James, William and Anne.''s Though in general Shaftesbury supported Whig principles and policies, he refused to follow the Whig "party line" on every issue even though sometimes bitterly censured for failing to do so.4 Shaftesbury held that a legislative proposal should be judged on its own merits and not by its source? While recognizing t The first publication of the Inquiry was apparently unauthorized. A revised form appeared as Treatise IV in the 1711 edition of Characteristics. 2In the Commons, 1695-1698, and the Lords, 1700-1701. Ill health forced his retirement from politics. s George M. Trevelyan, History of England (3 vols.; New York: 1952), II, 260. 4Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen, ed. Benjamin Rand (London: 1900), p. 300. Referred to henceforth as LiIe, Letters. See the comment by the fourth Earl in Life, Letters, pp. xxi-xxii; also Thomas Fowler, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson (New York: 1883), pp. 10-12. [37] 38 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the social value of political parties, it was consistent with Shaftesbury's theory that he insisted that party loyalty must at times be superseded by loyalties to larger interests or to the larger community of which one is a member. In his writings Shaftesbury carried on a continual campaign against the type of reductionism which seeks to explain all human behavior by "that one principle and foundation of a cool and deliberate selfishness.''8 Thus, he attacks Epicurus and Lucretius among the ancients, and Hobbes, Lord Rochester, and La Rochefoucault among the moderns. For these "narrowminded philosophers," "interest, interest comes in ever and anon, and must seem a kind of key to things with which it has nothing to do."' One of Shaftesbury's lines of attack is to point out that psychological egoism, when pressed, proves to be meaningless. If everything one does is attributed to self-interest, he asks, what meaning does the tertn "self-interest" have? If there is no real alternative to egoism, and all actions are equally egoistic, then the very term "egoism" loses significance. It would apparently be impossible to be more or less self-centered. Thus, we would lose an important practical principle of differentiation. The English philosopher pictures the defenders of egoism as saying: "Act as disinterestedly or generously as you please, self still is at the bottom, and nothing else." Now if these gentlemen who delight so much in the play of words, but are cautious how they grapple closely with definitions, would tell us only what self-interest was, and determine happiness and good, there would be an end of this enigmatical wit. For in this we should all agree, that happiness was to be pursued, and in fact was always sought after; but whether found in following Nature, and giving way to... (shrink)

Jason Stanley presents a startling and provocative claim about knowledge: that whether or not someone knows a proposition at a given time is in part determined by his or her practical interests, i.e. by how much is at stake for that person at that time. In defending this thesis, Stanley introduces readers to a number of strategies for resolving philosophical paradox, making the book essential not just for specialists in epistemology but for all philosophers interested in philosophical methodology. (...) Since a number of his strategies appeal to linguistic evidence, it will be of great interest to linguists as well. (shrink)

Bertrand’s elder brother, John Francis Stanley (Frank) Russell, who was the second Earl Russell for over 50 years, led a fascinating life as a politician, electrical engineer, author, traveller, businessman, barrister, law reformer, polemicist and pioneer motorist. Notorious in his lifetime for his sensational marital history, his prominence has waned since his death to the extent that he is remembered mainly as “the wicked earl” who was twice divorced and once imprisoned for bigamy. His achievements do not (...) match those of his brother, grandfather, third wife and other relatives, but his life merits examination in its own right as well for its familial links with leading figures in Britain’s political, cultural and intellectual history. (shrink)

The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics presents a comprehensive and systematic exposition of Christian ethics, seen through the lens of Christian worship.

The prefrontal cortex has long been suspected to play an important role in cognitive control, in the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals. Its neural basis, however, has remained a mystery. Here, we propose that cognitive control stems from the active maintenance of patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex that represent goals and the means to achieve them. They provide bias signals to other brain structures whose net effect is to guide the flow of (...) activity along neural pathways that establish the proper mappings between inputs, internal states, and outputs needed to perform a given task. We review neurophysiological, neurobiological, neuroimaging, and computational studies that support this theory and discuss its implications as well as further issues to be addressed. (shrink)

How do you tell what’s right from what’s wrong? Can you always? What’s the difference between deduction, induction, and abduction? What are the best techniques for making an argument logically sound? In this fascinating little book, the smallest on its subject ever produced, philosopher Earl Fontainelle explores the ancient art of discursive Logic and demonstrates some of the techniques that have long been used to triumph over the debates and deceptions that assail us every day. Filled with helpful examples (...) of good and bad reasoning, Logic is an invaluable introduction to a defining human characteristic. (shrink)

What is film? Why are movies important? Why do we care about them in the way we do? How do we think of the connections between the projected image and what it is actually an image of? Most movie-goers assume that they are entitled to make jugments and come to conclusions about the movies they see--to evaluate how "good" they are, or what they "mean." But what do they base, or what should they base, their judgments on? In this thought-provoking (...) new book, Stanley Cavell, a professor of philosophy and aesthetics at Harvard who has long taken a lively interest in movies, looks closely at these and other questions concerning America's most popular art and the perceptions we make of, by, and through it. His answers are surprising and important--not only to our understanding of film and of ourselves, but to our expectations of life and art. Mr. Cavell's explorations of some of Hollywood's stars, directors, and most famous films--as well as his fresh look at Godard, Bergman, and other great European directors--will be of lasting interest to movie-viewers and intelligent people of all ages. (shrink)

In 2018 Academic Placement Data and Analysis ran a survey of doctoral students and recent graduates on the topics of diversity and inclusivity in collaboration with the Graduate Student Council and Data Task Force of the American Philosophical Association. We submitted a preliminary report in Fall 2018 that describes the origins and procedure of the survey [1]. This is our final report on the survey. We first discuss the demographic profile of our survey participants and compare it to the United (...) States general population, its doctoral students, and APA membership, finding several areas of underrepresentation (i.e. gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic, and veteran status). We then discuss the results of questions regarding diversity and inclusivity. We find, for instance, that participant comfort in philosophy depends on gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, disability, and language status and that participants most often mentioned the theme of diversity when asked how philosophy could be more inclusive. Finally, we discuss the results of questions related to graduate program and placement. We find, for example, that underrepresented graduates are both less likely to recommend their graduate program to others and less likely to prefer an academic job. We close by making some recommendations for the APA and for the discipline based on our findings. (shrink)

Fictionalist approaches to ontology have been an accepted part of philosophical methodology for some time now. On a fictionalist view, engaging in discourse that involves apparent reference to a realm of problematic entities is best viewed as engaging in a pretense. Although in reality, the problematic entities do not exist, according to the pretense we engage in when using the discourse, they do exist. In the vocabulary of Burgess and Rosen (1997, p. 6), a nominalist construal of a given discourse (...) is revolutionary just in case it involves a “reconstruction or revision” of the original discourse. Revolutionary approaches are therefore prescriptive. In contrast, a nominalist construal of a given discourse is hermeneutic just in case it is a nominalist construal of a discourse that is put forth as a hypothesis about how the discourse is in fact used; that is, hermeneutic approaches are descriptive. I will adopt Burgess and Rosen’s terminology to describe the two different spirits in which a fictionalist hypothesis in ontology might be advanced. Revolutionary fictionalism would involve admitting that while the problematic discourse does in fact involve literal reference to nonexistent entities, we ought to use the discourse in such a way that the reference is simply within the pretense. The hermeneutic fictionalist, in contrast, reads fictionalism into our actual use of the problematic discourse. According to her, normal use of the problematic discourse involves a pretense. According to the pretense, and only according to the pretense, there exist the objects to which the discourse would commit its users, were no pretense involved. My purpose in this paper is to argue that hermeneutic fictionalism is not a viable strategy in ontology. My argument proceeds in two steps. First, I discuss in detail several problematic consequences of any interesting application of hermeneutic fictionalism. Of course, if there is good evidence that hermeneutic fictionalism is correct in some cases, then some of these drastic consequences would have to be accepted.. (shrink)

The past 30 years has seen a theoretical and clinical renaissance in psychoanalysis, as well as a flourishing of Christian engagement in the fields of psychology and anthropology. This volume of essays stages a new conversation between Christianity and psychoanalysis that opens up new ways of thinking about the rich mosaic of human experience.

Evidentialism holds that the justified attitudes are determined entirely by the person's evidence. This book is a collection of essays, mostly jointly authored, that support and apply evidentialism.

_Philosophy and Animal Life_ offers a new way of thinking about animal rights, our obligation to animals, and the nature of philosophy itself. Cora Diamond begins with "The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy," in which she accuses analytical philosophy of evading, or deflecting, the responsibility of human beings toward nonhuman animals. Diamond then explores the animal question as it is bound up with the more general problem of philosophical skepticism. Focusing specifically on J. M. Coetzee's _The Lives (...) of Animals_, she considers the failure of language to capture the vulnerability of humans and animals. Stanley Cavell responds to Diamond's argument with his own close reading of Coetzee's work, connecting the human-animal relation to further themes of morality and philosophy. John McDowell follows with a critique of both Diamond and Cavell, and Ian Hacking explains why Cora Diamond's essay is so deeply perturbing and, paradoxically for a philosopher, he favors poetry over philosophy as a way of overcoming some of her difficulties. Cary Wolfe's introduction situates these arguments within the broader context of contemporary continental philosophy and theory, particularly Jacques Derrida's work on deconstruction and the question of the animal. _Philosophy and Animal Life_ is a crucial collection for those interested in animal rights, ethics, and the development of philosophical inquiry. It also offers a unique exploration of the role of ethics in Coetzee's fiction. (shrink)

This article focuses on Barth's explication of Anselm's Proslogion 2-4 in his book on Anselm and attempts to show how Anselm helped clarify for Barth the ontological nature of his own early theology, in particular what he meant by the “is” in his affirmation “God is God.” My contention is that Barth's continual pointing to Anselm's Fides Quaerens Intellectum as a vital key to his own theology should not be overlooked. In fact, I argue that only by returning Barth to (...) Anselm in this way is it possible to understand more thoroughly Barth's relevance to contemporary onto-theological debates. (shrink)

This chapter formulates a rational uniqueness principle holding that those who are epistemic peers on a proposition, in that they know that they share all rational considerations concerning the truth of the proposition, cannot be justified in having different attitudes toward it. It then argues against the principle, primarily on the grounds that such peers may rationally regard themselves as differing in their basis for rational belief, or their evidence, on the topic. The rationality of their differing perspectives can justify (...) having different attitudes toward the disputed proposition. (shrink)

Evidentialism is a view about the conditions under which a person is epistemically justified in having a particular doxastic attitude toward a proposition. Evidentialism holds that the justified attitudes are determined entirely by the person's evidence. This is the traditional view of justification. It is now widely opposed. The essays included in this volume develop and defend the tradition. Evidentialism has many assets. In addition to providing an intuitively plausible account of epistemic justification, it helps to resolve the problem of (...) the criterion, helps to disentangle epistemic and ethical evaluations, and illuminates the relationship between epistemic evaluations of beliefs and the evaluation of the methods used to form beliefs. These issues are all addressed in the essays presented here. External world skepticism poses the classic problem for an epistemological theory. The final essay in this volume argues that evidentialism is uniquely well qualified to make sense of skepticism and to respond to its challenge. Evidentialism is a version of epistemic internalism. Recent epistemology has included many attacks on internalism and has seen the development of numerous externalist theories. The essays included here respond to those attacks and raise objections to externalist theories, especially the principal rival, reliabilism. Internalism generally has been criticized for having unacceptable deontological implications, for failing to connect epistemic justification to truth, and for failing to provide an adequate account of what makes basic beliefs justified. Each of these charges is answered in these essays. The collection includes two previously unpublished essays and new afterwords to five of the reprinted essays; it will be the definitive resource on evidentialism for all epistemologists. (shrink)

Reissued with a new preface, this famous collection of essays covers a remarkably wide range of philosophical issues, including essays on Wittgenstein, Austin, Kierkegaard, and the philosophy of language, and extending beyond philosophy into discussions of music and drama. Previous edition hb ISBN (1976): 0-521-21116-6 Previous edition pb ISBN (1976): 0-521-29048-1.

Based on the author's ethnographic research in India, the book explores the psychology of Hinduism, and offers an innovative synthesis of psychoanylsis with modern anthropological theories of cultural difference. Stanley N. Kurtz offers a new interpretation of the multiple "mother goddesses" of Hinduism, and explores how this multiplicity is key to understanding early childhood experience in which a child is raised by many "mothers" in the Hindu joint family. Arguing that traditional psychoanalytic approaches to Indian culture have applied Western (...) models without regard to differing cultural circumstances, Kurtz suggests that immersion in a joint family plays a central role in the development of feelings and needs which are carried over into adult life. The book concludes with a briefr comparison of mothering in India and contemporary America. _All the Mothers Are One_ makes a significant contribution to the growing debate concerning the role of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of culture and the study of cross-cultural human development. (shrink)

Background: Moral decision-making consists of a complex process requiring individuals to evaluate potential consequences of personal and social decisions, including applied organizational contexts.Methods: This research aims to investigate the behavioral (offer responses and reaction times, RTs) and electrophysiological (EEG) correlates underlying moral decision-making during three different choice conditions (professional fit, company fit, and social fit) and offers (fair, unfair, and neutral).Results: An increase of delta and theta frontal activity (related to emotional behavior and processes) and beta frontal and central activity (...) (linked to cognitive and attentional processes) was found. A left beta, delta, and theta frontal activity was observed for fair offers in professional fit conditions, while increased right frontal delta and theta activity was found in response to unfair offers in company fit conditions. Also, an increase of left delta and theta parietal activity for unfair offers in social fit condition was detected. Finally, higher accepted responses were found for fair and neutral offers in professional and social fit conditions, with increased RTs for unfair offers suggesting decisions’ cognitive load and complexity.Conclusions: By revealing a greater involvement of left and right frontal areas in decision-making processes based on choices and offers, personal interest evaluations and emotional values, and of parietal areas in more prosocial and altruistic moral behavior, current findings provide information about the neural and behavioral correlates underlying company moral behavior. (shrink)

Combining exemplary scholarship and analytic precision, Stanley Rosen illuminates the underpinnings of post-modernist thought, providing valuable insight as he pursues two arguments: first, that post-modernism, which regards itself as an attack upon the Enlightenment, is in fact the penultimate stage of the Enlightenment itself; and second, that the extraordinary contemporary emphasis upon hermeneutics is the latest consequence of the triumph of history over mathematics within the unstable essence of the Enlightenment. Hermeneutics is consequently at bottom a political phenomenon. In (...) developing these arguments, Rosen demonstrates the paradigmatic status of Kant for a proper understanding of post-modernism, analyzes Derrida's influential critique of Platonism as well as his defense of writing, explains the political dimension of the quarrel between the ancients and moderns by studying the hermeneutics of Leo Strauss and Alexander Kojhve, and shows how the modern notion of "theory" is intrinsically relativized by the triumph of history over mathematics into the notion of interpretation. A wide-ranging exploration into current critical thinking, Hermeneutics as Politics will generate considerable debate among scholars interested in post-modernism, the Enlightenment, hermeneutics, the relation of philosophy and politics, deconstruction, and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Plato's great attempt to define the nature of the sophist -- the false image of the philosopher -- has perplexed readers from classical times to the present. The dialogue has been central in the ongoing debate about the theory of forms, and it remains a crucial text for Plato scholars in both the analytical and the phenomenological traditions. Stanley Rosen's book is the first full-length study of the Sophist in English and one of the most complete in any language. (...) He follows the stages of the dialogue in sequence and offers an exhaustive analysis of the philosophical questions that come to light as Theaetetus and the Eleatic Stranger pursue the sophist through philosophical debate. Rosen finds the central problem of the dialogue in the relation between original and image; he shows how this distinction underlies all subsequent technical themes and analyzes in detail such problems as non-being or negation and false statement. Arguing that the dialogue must be treated as a dramatic unity, he pays careful attention throughout to the setting, the events, the language used, and the relations between the natures of the speakers and the topics under discussion. Rosen's new approach to the technical issues in the dialogue will be of interest to Plato scholars of all schools, and his analysis of the sophistical dimension of the world will engage all who have puzzled over what it means to be a philosopher. (shrink)

Stanley Rosen's book is the first full-length study of the Sophist in English and one of the most complete in any language. He follows the stages of the dialogue in sequence and offers an exhaustive analysis of the philosophical questions that come to light as Theaetetus and the Eleatic Stranger pursue the sophist through philosophical debate. Rosen finds the central problem of the dialogue in the relation between original and image; he shows how this distinction underlies all subsequent technical (...) themes and analyzes in detail such problems as non-being or negation and false statement. Arguing that the dialogue must be treated as a dramatic unity, he pays careful attention throughout to the setting, the events, the language used, and the relations between the natures of the speakers and the topics under discussion. (shrink)

The first part of my hypothesis, then, is simple enough, and would be accepted in principle by most students of Plato: the dramatic structure of the dialogues is an essential part of their philosophical meaning. With respect to the poetic and mathematical aspects of philosophy, we may distinguish three general kinds of dialogue. For example, consider the Sophist and Statesman, where Socrates is virtually silent: the principal interlocutors are mathematicians and an Eleatic Stranger, a student of Parmenides, although one who (...) is not always loyal to his master's teaching of what might be called monadic homogeneity. In these dialogues, the mathematical character of philosophy is not merely emphasized but exaggerated, and any attempt to interpret them must take this fact into account. Otherwise, we shall not be able to understand why the Stranger seems to classify the general's art in the same species of the genus hunting as the louse catcher. The significance of this step, which does not stem from humanitarian considerations, but rather illustrates how the human becomes invisible from the mathematical viewpoint, contributes its share to the obscurity of these two dialogues. Second, there are dialogues like the Phaedrus and Symposium, in which the style, the interlocutors, and even the subject-matter seem to be largely poetic and rhetorical. Here, the overwhelming impression is of enthusiasm, divine madness, and intoxication in speech and deed. Finally, there are dialogues like the Philebus and Republic, in which it is not so easy to say whether poetry or mathematics predominates, if indeed either may be said to do so. (shrink)

Introduction Cavell's Voices and Derrida's Grammatology The stature of Stanley Cavell is increasingly considered unique among living American philosophers ...