There is long standing agreement both among philosophers and linguists that the term ‘counterfactual conditional’ is misleading if not a misnomer. Speakers of both non-past subjunctive (or ‘would’) conditionals and past subjunctive (or ‘would have’) conditionals need not convey counterfactuality. The relationship between the conditionals in question and the counterfactuality of their antecedents is thus not one of presupposing. It is one of conversationally implicating. This paper provides a thorough examination of the arguments against the presupposition view as applied to (...) past subjunctive conditionals and finds none of them conclusive. All the relevant linguistic data, it is shown, are compatible with the assumption that past subjunctive conditionals presuppose the falsity of their antecedents. This finding is not only interesting on its own. It is of vital importance both to whether we should consider antecedent counterfactuality to be part of the conventional meaning of the conditionals in question and to whether there is a deep difference between indicative and subjective conditionals. (shrink)

Kierkegaard the Christian thinker is introduced, beginning with his cultural background, his basic assumptions about the structure of the Christian universe, and the development of his vocation as religious writer. The author shows why he is different from others in his treatment of Christianity, then follows his presentations of Christian ideality and the tension and opposition in his authorship between Christianity as godly enjoyment of the world and Christianity as renunciation and total self-denial. Distributed in the US by Books International. (...) Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Julia Kristeva refracts the impulse to hate (and our attempts to subvert, sublimate, and otherwise process it) through psychoanalysis and text, exploring worlds, women, religion, portraits, and the act of writing. Her inquiry spans themes, topics, and figures central to her writing, and her paths of discovery advance the theoretical innovations that are so characteristic of her thought. Kristeva rearticulates and extends her analysis of language, abjection, idealization, female sexuality, love, and forgiveness. She examines the "maladies of the soul," (...) utilizing examples from her practice and the ailments of her patients, such as fatigue, irritability, and general malaise. She sources the Bible and texts by Marguerite Duras, St. Teresa of Avila, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Georgia O'Keefe. Balancing political calamity and individual pathology, she addresses internal and external catastrophes and global and personal injuries, confronting the nature of depression, obliviousness, fear, and the agony of being and nothingness. Throughout Kristeva develops the notion that psychoanalysis is the key to serenity, with its processes of turning back, looking back, investigating the self, and refashioning psychical damage into something useful and beautiful. Constant questioning, Kristeva contends, is essential to achieving the coming to terms we all seek at the core of forgiveness. (shrink)

During the turbulent last years of the fifth century BC, Athens twice suffered the overthrow of democracy and the subsequent establishment of oligarchic regimes. In an in-depth treatment of both political revolutions, Julia Shear examines how the Athenians responded to these events, at the level both of the individual and of the corporate group. Interdisciplinary in approach, this account brings epigraphical and archaeological evidence to bear on a discussion which until now has largely been based on texts. Dr Shear (...) particularly focuses on the recreation of democracy and the city, both ritually and physically, in the aftermath of the coups and demonstrates that, whilst reconciliation after civil strife is difficult and contentious, it is also crucial for rebuilding a united society. Theories of remembering and forgetting are applied and offer a new way of understanding the dynamics in Athens at this time. (shrink)

The predominant view of moral virtue can be traced back to Aristotle. He believed that moral virtue must involve intellectual excellence. To have moral virtue one must have practical wisdom - the ability to deliberate well and to see what is morally relevant in a given context. Julia Driver challenges this classical theory of virtue, arguing that it fails to take into account virtues which do seem to involve ignorance or epistemic defect. Some 'virtues of ignorance' are counterexamples to (...) accounts of virtue which hold that moral virtue must involve practical wisdom. Modesty, for example, is generally considered to be a virtue even though the modest person may be making an inaccurate assessment of his or her accomplishments. Driver argues that we should abandon the highly intellectualist view of virtue and instead adopt a consequentialist perspective which holds that virtue is simply a character trait which systematically produces good consequences. (shrink)

This paper discusses the inefficacy problem that arises in contexts of “collective harm.‘ These are contexts in which by acting in a certain sort of way, people collectively cause harm, or fail to prevent it, but no individual act of the relevant sort seems to itself make a difference. The inefficacy problem is that if acting in the relevant way won’t make a difference, it’s unclear why it would be wrong. Each individual can argue, “things will be just as bad (...) whether or not I act in this way, so there’s no point in doing otherwise.‘ The goal of this paper is to give an overview of some of the main responses available to the problem and to highlight central issues that arise for each type of response. In the final section, I explain what I take to be the most promising strategy and discuss the form that this strategy should take. (shrink)

There are many cases in which people collectively cause some morally significant outcome (such as a harmful or beneficial outcome) but no individual act seems to make a difference. The problem in such cases is that it seems each person can argue, ‘it makes no difference whether or not I do X, so I have no reason to do it.’ The challenge is to say where this argument goes wrong. My approach begins from the observation that underlying the problem and (...) motivating the typical responses to it is a standard, intuitive assumption. The assumption is that if an act will not make a difference with respect to an outcome, then it cannot play a sig- nificant, non-superfluous role in bringing that outcome about. In other words, helping to bring about an outcome requires making a difference. I argue that the key to solving the problem is to reject this assumption. I develop an account of what it is to help to bring about an outcome, where this does not require making a difference, and I use this explain our reasons for action in the problem cases. This account also yields an error theory that explains why the standard assumption is so tempting, even though it is mistaken. (shrink)

Staging and stratification are two diagnostic approaches that have introduced a more dynamic outlook on the development of diseases, thus participating in blurring the line between the normal and the pathological. First, diagnostic staging, aiming to capture how diseases evolve in time and/or space through identifiable and gradually more severe stages, may be said to lean on an underlying assumption of “temporal determinism”. Stratification, on the other hand, allows for the identification of various prognostic or predictive subgroups based on specific (...) markers, relying on a more “mechanistic” or “statistical” form of determinism. There are two medical fields in which these developments have played a significant role and have given rise to sometimes profound nosological transformations: oncology and psychiatry. Drawing on examples from these two fields, this paper aims to provide much needed conceptual clarifications on both staging and stratification in order to outline how several epistemological and ethical issues may, in turn, arise. We argue that diagnostic staging ought to be detached from the assumption of temporal determinism, though it should still play an essential role in adapting interventions to stage. In doing so, it would help counterbalance stratification’s own epistemological and ethical shortcomings. In this sense, the reflections and propositions developed in psychiatry can offer invaluable insights regarding how adopting a more transdiagnostic and cross-cutting perspective on temporality and disease dynamics may help combine both staging and stratification in clinical practice. (shrink)

Julia Annas offers a new account of virtue and happiness as central ethical ideas. She argues that exercising a virtue involves practical reasoning of the kind we find in someone exercising an everyday practical skill, such as farming, building, or playing the piano. This helps us to see virtue as part of an agent's happiness or flourishing.

Consequentialism is the view that the rightness or wrongness of actions depend solely on their consequences. It is one of the most influential, and controversial, of all ethical theories. In this book, Julia Driver introduces and critically assesses consequentialism in all its forms. After a brief historical introduction to the problem, Driver examines utilitarianism, and the arguments of its most famous exponents, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, and explains the fundamental questions underlying utilitarian theory: what value is to (...) be specified and how it is to be maximized. Driver also discusses indirect forms of consequentialism, the important theories of motive consequentialism and virtue consequentialism, and explains why the distinction between subjective and objective consequentialism is so important. Including helpful features such as a glossary, chapter summaries, and annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, Consequentialism is ideal for students seeking an authoritative and clearly explained survey of this important problem. (shrink)

Die Herausbildung von transnationalen Räumen ist aufs Engste mit Geschlechterverhältnissen verwoben. Durch die Zunahme transnationaler politischer, sozialer und wirtschaftlicher Verflechtungsbeziehungen müssen die Geschlechterordnungen auf nationaler und lokaler Ebene grundlegend neu vermessen werden. Ziel des Bandes ist es, die vielfältigen Verflechtungen von Transnationalisierungsprozessen mit Geschlecht aus feministischer Perspektive auf politischer, sozialer und wirtschaftlicher Makro-, Meso- und Mikroebene zu beleuchten.

Julia Markovits develops a desire-based, internalist account of what normative reasons are--an account which is compatible with the idea that moral reasons can apply to all of us, regardless of our desires. She builds on Kant's formula of humanity to defend universal moral reasons, and addresses the age-old question of why we should be moral.

Metaphysics of Science is the philosophical study of key concepts that figure prominently in science and that, prima facie, stand in need of clarification. It is also concerned with the phenomena that correspond to these concepts. Exemplary topics within Metaphysics of Science include laws of nature, causation, dispositions, natural kinds, possibility and necessity, explanation, reduction, emergence, grounding, and space and time. Metaphysics of Science is a subfield of both metaphysics and the philosophy of science—that is, it can be allocated to (...) either, but it exhausts neither. Unlike metaphysics simpliciter, Metaphysics of Science is not primarily concerned with metaphysical questions that may already arise from everyday phenomena such as what makes a thing (a chair, a desk) the very thing it is, what its identity criteria are, out of which parts is it composed, whether it remains the same if we exchange a couple of its parts, and so forth. Nor is it concerned with the concrete entities (superstrings, molecules, genes, and so forth) postulated by specific sciences; these issues are the subject matter of the special philosophies of science (for example, of physics, of chemistry, of biology). Metaphysics of Science is concerned with more abstract and general concepts that inform all of these sciences. Many of these concepts are interwoven with each other. For example, metaphysicians of science inquire whether dispositionality, lawhood, and causation can be accounted for in nonmodal terms; whether laws of nature presuppose the existence of natural kinds; and whether the properties of macrolevel objects supervene on dispositional or nondispositional properties. This article surveys the scope (section 1), historical origin (section 2), exemplary subject matters (section 4), and methodology (section 5) of Metaphysics of Science, as well as the motivation that drives it (section 3). (shrink)

Sentences containing predicates of personal taste exhibit two striking features: whether they are true seems to lie in the eye of the beholder and whether they are true can be—and often is—subject to disagreement. In the last decade, there has been a lively debate about how to account for these two features. In this paper, I shall argue for two claims: first, I shall show that even the most promising approaches so far offered by proponents of so-called indexical contextualism fail (...) to account for the disagreement feature. They might be able to account for some disagreement data, but they have trouble accounting for two kinds of disagreement data that caused the estrangement from indexical contextualism and the migration to relativism in the first place: the denial and the retraction data. Second, I shall show that we still do not have to abandon indexical contextualism, because what I shall call the superiority approach—a new pragmatically extended version of indexical contextualism—can very well account for the data. (shrink)

Altered Conditions provides a bold new intervention into existing theories of the human body and its meanings in a variety of cultural contexts. By exploring the history of medical narratives, especially medical case histories, as well as the exciting work that has been done in feminist and lesbian and gay studies, Julia Epstein poses a number of provocative questions about the relations between bodies, selves, and identities. Epstein focuses on a number of diagnoses that shed light on what is (...) at stake when cultures regulate human bodies, including hermaphroditism, birth malformations, and AIDS. She pays special attention to the regulation of sexual minorities and women and looks carefully at the ways in which cultures attempt to define and control behaviors seen as threatening or subversive. (shrink)

Recognized as one of the greatest philosophers in classical China, Chu Hsi is especially known in the West through translations of one of his many works, theChin-su Lu. Julia Ching, a noted scholar of Neo-Confucian thought, provides the first book-length examination of Chu-Hsi's religious thought, based on extensive reading in both primary and secondary sources.

This paper investigates the norm of presupposition, as one pervasive type of indirect speech act. It argues against the view that sees presuppositions as an indirect counterpart of the direct speech act of assertion and proposes instead that they are much more similar to the direct speech act of assumption. More concretely, it suggests that the norm that governs presuppositions is not an epistemic or doxastic attitude such as knowledge, justified belief, or mere belief; it's a practical attitude, most plausibly (...) the attitude of rational acceptance. This view has important ramifications well beyond debates in philosophy of language and linguistics. It affects not only our view of which speech act sequences are fine and which are off; it bears on whether presuppositions can function as testimony, whether they can be lies, and whether they are ontologically committal, thus addressing central topics in epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics. (shrink)

Many people follow Grice in thinking that all conversational implicatures are cancellable. And often enough, they use this insight as a test for conversational implicatures. If you want to find out whether something is a conversational implicature, the test has it, you should ask yourself whether the thing in question is cancellable; if you find that it is not cancellable, you can infer that it is not a conversational implicature. If you find that it is cancellable, you can infer that (...) it might well be a conversational implicature and that you should now do further testing. Various philosophers and linguists have questioned the test however. Some have held that Grice's cancellability claim is subject to counterexamples and that the test is not reliable. Others have argued that even though Grice's claim can be defended against the examples in question, the test is not as informative as people have hoped. This article provides an overview of the recent discussion on the cancellability test and suggests a way forward. (shrink)

In this book I look at the tradition of eudaimonistic ethics which stems from Aristotle's treatment of ethics, and which takes distinct, though related forms in Epicurus, the Stoics and the Sceptics. I look at this tradition from different points of view: how is it related to human nature, how does it account for other-related virtue and action, and how much does it require in terms of revising previously held priorities. I discuss the methodology of discussing ancient texts in ways (...) that relate them to contemporary concerns, particularly the importance of respecting the texts and avoiding anachronism. (shrink)

In The Virtues of Ignorance the author demonstrates that classical theories of virtue are flawed and developes a consequentialist theory of virtue. ;Virtues are excellences of character. They are traits which are considered to be valuable in some way. A person who is virtuous is one who has a tendency to act well. Classical philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, believed that virtues, as human excellences, could not involve ignorance in any way. On their view, the virtuous agent, when acting (...) well, knows what she is doing under the description which makes the action conform to virtue. For example, the generous person must know that she is, in fact, helping others in need. Yet, there is a class of virtues, the "virtues of ignorance," which essentially involve ignorance. For example, modesty requires that the agent underestimate self worth. In the first portion of the dissertation, this class of virtues is discussed, and problems raised for the traditional theories of virtue. ;In the latter portion of the dissertation, the author outlines a consequentialist theory of virtue. It is argued that the only hope of developing a unified theory of virtue is along consequentialist lines, because attempts at identifying the psychological state which is necessary for virtue have failed. On a consequentialist theory, a virtue is defined in terms of its consequences. Thus, the moral quality of the character trait is determined by how much good it brings about . The virtues of ignorance can easily be accommodated in such a theory because these traits do bring about good, even if the agent possessing the trait acts out of ignorance. (shrink)

This reply to an ongoing debate between conspiracy theory researchers from different disciplines exposes the conceptual confusions that underlie some of the disagreements in conspiracy theory research. Reconciling these conceptual confusions is important because conspiracy theories are a multidisciplinary topic and a profound understanding of them requires integrative insights from different fields. Specifically, we distinguish research focussing on conspiracy *theories* (and theorizing) from research of conspiracy *belief* (and mindset, theorists) and explain how particularism with regards to conspiracy theories does not (...) mean we cannot define a problematic subclass of conspiracy beliefs, while avoiding the problems of generalism. We hope this reply helps conspiracy theory researchers recognize the differences between studying conspiracy theories and conspiracy beliefs and appreciate the possibilities for fruitful, integrative, and interdisciplinary research. (shrink)

People disagree frequently, about both objective and subjective matters. But while at least one party must be wrong in a disagreement about objective matters, it seems that both parties can be right when it comes to subjective ones: it seems that there can be faultless disagreements. But how is this possible? How can people disagree with one another if they are both right? And why should they? In recent years, a number of philosophers and linguists have argued that we must (...) become relativists about truth to understand faultless disagreements. This book shows that we can dispense with relativism. It combines a more standard semantics with a novel pragmatic theory to develop a superior approach. The book discusses both classic and recent literature in philosophy and linguistics. It provides a general introduction to the debate about the semantics and pragmatics of perspectival expressions, as well as an original contribution to the contemporary discussion. (shrink)

Recently, macroscopic accounts of chemical kind individuation have been proposed as alternatives to the microstructural essentialist account advocated by Kripke, Putnam, and others. These accounts argue that individuation of chemical kinds is based on macroscopic criteria such as reactivity or thermodynamics, and they challenge the essentialism that grounds the Kripke-Putnam view. Using a variety of chemical examples, I argue that microstructure grounds these macroscopic accounts, but that this grounding need not imply essentialism. Instead, kinds are individuated on the basis of (...) similarity of reactivity between substances, and microstructure explains similarity of reactivity. (shrink)

_Ethics: The Fundamentals_ explores core ideas and arguments in moral theory by introducing students to different philosophical approaches to ethics, including virtue ethics, Kantian ethics, divine command theory, and feminist ethics. The first volume in the new Fundamentals of Philosophy series. Presents lively, real-world examples and thoughtful discussion of key moral philosophers and their ideas. Constitutes an excellent resource for readers coming to the subject of ethics for the first time.

Some expressions, such as ‘generous’ and ‘stingy’, are used not only to describe the world around us. They are also used to evaluate the things to which they are applied. In this paper, I suggest a novel account of how this evaluation is conveyed—the conventional triggering view. It partly agrees and partly disagrees with both the standard semantic view and its popular pragmatic contender. Like the former and unlike the latter, my view has it that the evaluation is conveyed due (...) to the conventional meaning of the sentences in question. Unlike the former and much like the latter, my view suggests that the evaluation is a secondary rather than a primary content. (shrink)

In response to the lack of empirical studies examining the internal disclosure behavior in the Chinese context, this study tested a whistleblowing -decision-making process among employees in the Chinese banking industry. For would-be whistleblowers, positive affect and organizational ethical culture were hypothesized to enhance the expected efficacy of their whistleblowing intention, by providing collective norms concerning legitimate, management-sanctioned behavior. Questionnaire surveys were collected from 364 employees in 10 banks in the Hangzhou City, China. By and large, the findings supported the (...) hypotheses. Issues of whistleblowing in the Chinese context and implications were discussed. (shrink)

This paper examines the surprisingly central role of sympathetic love within Margaret Cavendish’s philosophy. It shows that such love fulfils a range of metaphysical functions, and highlight an important shift in Cavendish’s account vis-a-vis earlier conceptions: sympathetic love is no longer given an emanative or mechanistic explanation, but is naturalized as an active emotion. It furthers investigate to what extent Cavendish’s account reveals a rift between the realm of nature and the realm of human sociability, and whether this rift really (...) prompts an inward turn, as some interpreters have suggested. (shrink)

The indexical thesis says that the indexical terms, “I”, “here” and “now” necessarily refer to the person, place and time of utterance, respectively, with the result that the sentence, “I am here now” cannot express a false proposition. Gerald Vision offers supposed counter-examples: he says, “I am here now”, while pointing to the wrong place on a map; or he says it in a note he puts in the kitchen for his wife so she’ll know he’s home even though he’s (...) gone upstairs for a nap, but then he leaves the house, forgetting to remove the note. The first sentence is false by virtue of “here” not necessarily referring to the place of utterance, the second sentence, by virtue of “now” not necessarily referring to the time of utterance. We argue that these sentences express falsehoods only because the terms are being used demonstratively, not indexically – the distinction pertains not to words simpliciter, but to uses of words. When used indexically, the terms refer in accord with the indexical thesis; but when used demonstratively, their referents depend on how devices of ostension are used with their utterance – pointings, and the like. Thus Vision’s first sentence really says, “I am there now”, referring to the place on the map the finger is pointing to. As for his second sentence, we distinguish the time of utterance or production of a sentence from the time of its uptake. Due to the pragmatics of interpretation, the sentence really says “I” – the person ‘uttering’ the note – “am here” – here where the note is, with the note serving as a kind of proxy ‘finger’ – “now” – where “now” refers to the time of uptake of the note, i.e., when it is read. “I” refers indexically, “here”, demonstratively, and “now”, indexically, but indexically to the time of uptake. Since the sentence is not purely indexical, its falsehood doesn’t threaten the indexical thesis. A similar treatment is given of teletyped messages about the typer’s location. (shrink)

This volume launches a new series of contemporary conversations about scientific classification. Most philosophical conversations about kinds have focused centrally or solely on natural kinds, that is, kinds whose existence is not dependent on the scientific process of synthesis. This volume refocuses conversations about classification on unnatural, or synthetic, kinds via extensive study of three paradigm cases of unnatural kinds: nanomaterials, stem cells, and synthetic biology.

In this book, Julia Ching offers a survey of over 4,000 years of Chinese civilization through an examination of the relationship between kingship and mysticism. She investigates the sage-king myth and ideal, arguing that institutions of kingship were bound up with cultivation of trance states and communication with spirits. Over time, the sage-king myth became a model for the actual ruler. As a paradigm, it was also appropriated by private individuals who strove for wisdom without becoming kings. As the (...) Confucian tradition interacted with the Taoist and the Buddhist, the religious character of spiritual and mystical cultivation became more pronounced. But the sage-king idea continued, promoting expectations of benevolent despotism rather than democratization in Chinese civilization. (shrink)

The emerging field of synthetic biology aims to engineer novel biological entities. The envisioned future bio-based economy builds largely on “cell factories”: organisms that have been metabolically engineered to sustainably produce substances for human ends. In this paper, we argue that synthetic biology’s goal of creating efficient production vessels for industrial applications implies a set of ontological assumptions according to which living organisms are machines. Traditionally, a machine is understood as a technological, isolated and controllable production unit consisting of parts. (...) But modified organisms, or hybrids, require us to think beyond the machine paradigm and its associated dichotomies between artificial and natural, organisms and artefacts. We ask: How may we conceptualise hybrids beyond limiting ontological categories? Our main claim is that the hybrids created by synthetic biology should be considered not as machines but as metabolic systems. We shall show how the philosophical account of metabolism can inform an ontology of hybrids that moves beyond what we call the “machine ontology”, considering that metabolism enables thinking beyond the dominant dichotomies and allows us to understand and design lifeforms in a bio-based economy. Thus, the aim of this paper is twofold: first, to develop the philosophical ontology of hybrids, and second, to move synthetic biology beyond the problematically limiting view of hybrids. (shrink)

This essay explores the question of how to be good. My starting point is a thesis about moral worth that I’ve defended in the past: roughly, that an action is morally worthy if and only it is performed for the reasons why it is right. While I think that account gets at one important sense of moral goodness, I argue here that it fails to capture several ways of being worthy of admiration on moral grounds. Moral goodness is more multi-faceted. (...) My title is intended to capture that multi-facetedness: the essay examines saintliness, heroism, and sagacity. The variety of our common-sense moral ideals underscores the inadequacy of any one account of moral admirableness, and I hope to illuminate the distinct roles these ideals play in our everyday understanding of goodness. Along the way, I give an account of what makes actions heroic, of whether such actions are supererogatory, and of what, if anything, is wrong with moral deference. At the close of the essay, I begin to explore the flipside of these ideals: villainy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWide-ranging semantic flexibility is often considered a magic cure for contextualism to account for all kinds of troubling data. In particular, it seems to offer a way to account for our intuitions regarding embedded perspectival sentences. As has been pointed out by Lasersohn [2009. “Relative Truth, Speaker Commitment, and Control of Implicit Arguments.” Synthese 166 : 359â374], however, the semantic flexibility does not present a remedy for all kinds of embeddings. In particular, it seems ineffective when it comes to embeddings (...) under operators with truth evaluative adverbs such as ‘correctly believes that’ and ‘incorrectly believes that’ and under factive verbs. This paper takes a closer look at the problematic embedding data with respect to predicates of personal taste. It argues that there is indeed no semantic solution for contextualism but a pragmatic way out. (shrink)

Hohwy et al.’s (2008) model of binocular rivalry (BR) is taken as a classic illustration of predictive coding’s explanatory power. I revisit the account and show that it cannot explain the role of reward in BR. I then consider a more recent version of Bayesian model averaging, which recasts the role of reward in (BR) in terms of optimism bias. If we accept this account, however, then we must reconsider our conception of perception. On this latter view, I argue, organisms (...) engage in what amounts to policy-driven, motivated perception. (shrink)

On Moral Certainty, Justification and Practice presents a view of morality that is inspired by the later Wittgenstein. Hermann explores the ethical implications of Wittgenstein's remarks on doubt, justification, rule-following, certainty and training, offering an alternative to interpretations of Wittgenstein's work that view it as being intrinsically ethical. The book scrutinises cases in which doubt and justification do not make sense, and contrasts certain justificatory demands made by philosophers with the role of moral justification in concrete situations. It offers an (...) account of moral certainty, which is linked to a view of moral competence. Contrary to the views propounded by philosophers who emphasise the importance of moral principles, it is argued that moral agency is first and foremost a matter of having certain capacities. The book takes an anti-intellectualist stance and remains close to concrete practices. The practice-based view of morality it endorses has implications for moral education, intercultural moral dialogue and the prospects for moral agreement, change and progress. (shrink)

The book provides a commentary on Plato's Republic which encourages the reader to be stimulated to philosophical thinking by Plato's wide-ranging discussions.

This volume, which follows hard on the heels of publication of the final volume of the 26-volume set of Kierkegaard's writings , allows its readers 'to find their way quickly to relevant sources of help,' elucidates Kierkegaard's 'central concepts,' and demonstrates the contemporary relevance of his ideas.

This essay defends moral expertise against the skeptical considerations raised by Gilbert Ryle and others. The core of the essay articulates an account of moral expertise that draws on work on expertise in empirical moral psychology, and develops an analogy between moral expertise and linguistic expertise. The account holds that expertise is contrastive, so that a person is an expert relative to a particular contrast. Further, expertise is domain specific and characterized by “automatic” behavior and judgment. Some disagreements in the (...) literature regarding moral expertise are diagnosed as being due to failures to adequately distinguish different ways in which someone can be a moral expert. For example, expertise in action does not imply expertise in judgment or analysis. (shrink)