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Principles and Persons: The Legacy of Derek Parfit
Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, is widely believed to have been the most significant moral philosopher in well over a century. The twenty-one new essays in this book have all been inspired by his work. They address issues with which he was concerned in his writing, particularly in his seminal contribution to moral philosophy, Reasons and Persons (OUP, 1984). Rather than simply commenting on his work, these essays attempt to make further progress with issues, both moral and prudential, that Parfit believed matter to our lives: issues concerned with how we ought to live, and what we have most reason to do. Topics covered in the book include the nature of personal identity, the basis of self-interested concern about the future, the rationality of our attitudes toward time, what it is for a life to go well or badly, how to evaluate moral theories, the nature of reasons for action, the aggregation of value, how benefits and harms should be distributed among people, and what degree of sacrifice morality requires us to make for the sake of others. These include some of the most important questions of normative ethical theory, as well as fundamental questions about the metaphysics of personhood and personal identity, and the ways in which the answers to these questions bear on what it is rational and moral for us to do.
Probabilistic Extensions of Various Logical Systems
The contributions in this book survey results on combinations of probabilistic and various other classical, temporal and justification logical systems. Formal languages of these logics are extended with probabilistic operators. The aim is to provide a systematic overview and an accessible presentation of mathematical techniques used to obtain results on formalization, completeness, compactness and decidability. The book will be of value to researchers in logic and it can be used as a supplementary text in graduate courses on non-classical logics.
The Problem of Evil: Eight Views in Dialogue
One of those rare questions in philosophy that is not only technically recalcitrant but also engages the hearts and minds of the broad community is the so-called 'problem of evil': How can the existence of an absolutely perfect God be reconciled with the existence of suffering and evil? This collection of dialogues between eight philosophers of religion explores new ways of thinking about this longstanding problem, in the process reorienting and reinvigorating the philosophical debate around the relationship between God, goodness and evil: How exactly are these three notions connected, if at all? Is God the cause, or author, of evil and suffering? How is the goodness of God to be understood, and how is divine goodness related to human morality? Does God's perfect goodness entail that God must have reasons for permitting or bringing about suffering, and if so what could his reasons be? These questions are of momentous existential and theoretical interest, and they have exercised the finest intellects across the centuries. The time is ripe for a wholesale reconsideration of the problem of evil. To make progress towards this goal, eight distinct perspectives are placed in mutual dialogue, giving voice to both traditional and relatively unorthodox approaches. What emerges from these critical but friendly exchanges is a diversity of fruitful and innovative ways of thinking about the nature of divinity and its relationship to evil.
The Problem of Universals in Early Modern Philosophy
The ancient topic of universals was central to scholastic philosophy, which raised the question of whether universals exist as Platonic forms, as instantiated Aristotelian forms, as concepts abstracted from singular things, or as words that have universal signification. It might be thought that this question lost its importance after the decline of scholasticism in the modern period. However, the fourteen contributions contained in The Problem of Univerals in Early Modern Philosophy indicate that the issue of universals retained its vitality in modern philosophy. Modern philosophers in fact were interested in 3 sets of issues concerning universals: (i) issues concerning the ontological status of universals, (ii) issues concerning the psychology of the formation of universal concepts or terms, and (iii) issues concerning the value and use of universal concepts or terms in the acquisition of knowledge. Chapters in this volume consider the various forms of "Platonism," "conceptualism" and "nominalism" (and distinctive combinations thereof) that emerged from the consideration of such issues in the work of modern philosophers. Furthermore, this volume covers not only the canonical modern figures, namely, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant, but also more neglected figures such as Pierre Gassendi, Pierre-Sylvain Regis, Nicolas Malebranche, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth and John Norris.
Problems in Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Introduction to Contemporary Debates
Problems in Epistemology and Metaphysics takes a pro and con approach to two central philosophical topics.Each chapter begins with a question: Can We Have Knowledge? How are Beliefs Justified? What is the mind? Contemporary philosophers with opposing viewpoints are then paired together to argue their position and raise problems with conflicting standpoints. Alongside an up-to-date introduction to a core philosophical stance, each contributor provides a critical response to their opponent and clear explanation of their view. Discussion questions are included at the end of each chapter to guide further discussion.With chapters covering core questions surrounding religious beliefs, scientific knowledge, truth, being and reality, this is a comprehensive introduction to debates lying at the heart of what we know, how we know it and the nature of the world we live in.
Problems in Value Theory: An Introduction to Contemporary Debates
Problems in Value Theory takes a pro and con approach to central topics in aesthetics, ethics and political theory.Each chapter begins with a question: What Makes Actions Right or Wrong? Does Morality Depend on God? Do We Need Government? Contemporary philosophers with opposing viewpoints are then paired together to argue their position and raise problems with conflicting standpoints. Alongside an up-to-date introduction to a core philosophical stance, each contributor provides a critical response to their opponent and clear explanation of their view. Discussion questions are included at the end of each chapter to guide further discussion.With chapters ranging from why the government should never wage war to what is art and does morality depend on God, this introduction covers questions lying at the heart of debates about what does and does not have value.
Proceedings of the 2022 3rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Education (Atlantis Highlights in Computer Sciences #9)
This is an open access book.The 2022 3rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Education（ICAIE 2022） will be held in Chengdu, China during June 24-26, 2022. The meeting focused on the new trends in the development of "artificial intelligence" and "education" under the new situation, and jointly discussed how to empower and promote the high-quality development of "artificial intelligence" and "education". An ideal platform to share views and experiences with industry experts.The conference invites experts and scholars in the field to conduct wonderful exchanges based on their own research results based on the development of the times. The themes are around artificial intelligence technology and applications; intelligent and knowledge-based systems; information-based education; intelligent learning; advanced information theory and neural network technology ; software computing and algorithms; intelligent algorithms and computing and many other topics.
Process, Action, and Experience
There has been a philosophical upheaval recently in our understanding of the metaphysics of the mind. The philosophy of mind and action has traditionally treated its subject matter as consisting of states and events, and completely ignored the category of ongoing process. So the mental things that happen - experiences and actions - have been taken to be completed events and not ongoing processes. But events by their very nature as completed wholes are never present to the agent or subject; only ongoing processes can be present to a subject in the way required for conscious experience and practical self-knowledge. This suggests that a proper understanding of processes is required to understand subjective experience and agency. This volume explores the possibility and advantages of taking processes to be the subject matter of the philosophy of mind and action. The central defining feature of the process argument is its use of the progressive (as opposed to perfective) aspect. But beyond this, philosophers working on the metaphysics of processes do not agree. The contributors to this volume take up this argument in the metaphysics of processes. Are processes continuants? Are they particulars at all, or should we rather be thinking of process activity as a kind of stuff? Process, Action, and Experience considers whether practical reasoning and practical self-knowledge require thinking of action in process terms, and it considers arguments for the processive nature of conscious experience.
Prophetic Futures
This book is based on the postmedieval journal special issue Prophetic Futures. It calls for renewed attention to prophecy and temporality, challenging in the process critical lenses that adhere to strict dualities of medieval/modern, superstitious/rationalized, and other problematic dyads that occlude our understanding of vatic language. The language, texts, and bodies of prophecy challenge commonplaces about a disenchanted modernity and point the way to new critical approaches to texts out of time. Previously published in postmedieval Volume 10, issue 1, March 2019.
Proust's In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives (OXFORD STUDIES IN PHIL AND LIT SERIES)
With the story of a madeleine dipped in tea, Marcel Proust makes famous moments that transport one to an earlier time thought lost forever. His In Search of Lost Time announces a quest narrative with lost time as its goal. We follow the journey of a young man as he strives to become the writer he longs to be, and his journey entails discovering a sense of self in which past and present intertwine. The narrator is delayed in his goal by various digressions, including journeys into the worlds of the salons and of art. For this reason, the novel offers far more avenues for philosophical reflection than simply a meditation on time and identity. In Search of Lost Time includes reflections on love and jealousy, joy and suffering, the enchantments of art and the disillusionments of friendship. This volume brings together prominent philosophers and critics to illuminate these many themes. Eight essays treat a wide range of topics including fiction, biography, temporality, music, love, jealousy, weather, and consciousness. One of the longest and most complex novels ever written, In Search of Lost Time has fascinated philosophers for decades. The contributors in this volume build upon earlier approaches to offer new avenues and directions for philosophical thought.
Psychology and Value in Plato, Aristotle, and Hellenistic Philosophy: The Ninth Keeling Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy
Ancient Greek thought saw the birth, in Western philosophy, of the study now known as moral psychology. In its broadest sense, moral psychology encompasses the study of those aspects of human psychology relevant to our moral lives—desire, emotion, ethical knowledge, practical moral reasoning, and moral imagination—and their role in apprehending or responding to sources of value. This volume draws together contributions from leading international scholars in ancient philosophy, exploring central issues in the moral psychology of Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic schools. Through a series of chapters and responses, these contributions challenge and develop interpretations of ancient views on topics from Socratic intellectualism to the nature of appetitive desires and their relation to goodness, from the role of pleasure and pain in virtue, to our capacities for memory, anticipation and choice and their role in practical action, to the question of the sufficiency or otherwise of the virtues for a flourishing human life.
Purpose and Procedure in Philosophy of Perception
Contemporary philosophy of perception is dominated by highly polarized debates. The polarization is particularly acute in the debate between naïve realist disjunctivists and their opponents, but divisions seem almost as stark in other areas of dispute, for example, the debate over whether we experience so-called 'high-level' properties, and the debate concerning individuation of the senses. The guiding hypothesis underlying this volume is that such polarization stems from insufficient attention to how we should go about settling these debates. In general, there is widespread, largely implicit disagreement concerning what philosophical theories of perception are supposed to explain, the claims that we should hold fixed in the course of theorizing, and the methods that such theorizing should employ. The goal of this volume is to move such methodological questions from the background to the front of the debate, in the hope of facilitating progress. The contributions constitute an initial effort to spur more explicit, systematic discussion of methodology in philosophy of perception, covering a wide range of relevant topics, from the relation between scientific and philosophical theorizing about perception, to lessons we can learn from the history of philosophy of perception.
The Quest for the Good Life: Ancient Philosophers on Happiness
How should I live? How can I be happy? What is happiness, really? These are perennial questions, which in recent times have become the object of diverse kinds of academic research. Ancient philosophers placed happiness at the centre of their thought, and we can trace the topic through nearly a millennium. While the centrality of the notion of happiness in ancient ethics is well known, this book is unique in that it focuses directly on this notion, as it appears in the ancient texts. Fourteen papers by an international team of scholars map the various approaches and conceptions found from the Pre-Socratics through Plato, Aristotle, Hellenistic Philosophy, to the Neo-Platonists and Augustine in late antiquity. While not promising a formula that can guarantee a greater share in happiness to the reader, the book addresses questions raised by ancient thinkers that are still of deep concern to many people today: Do I have to be a morally good person in order to be happy? Are there purely external criteria for happiness such as success according to received social norms or is happiness merely a matter of an internal state of the person? How is happiness related to the stages of life and generally to time? In this book the reader will find an informed discussion of these and many other questions relating to happiness.
Questions About God: Today's Philosophers Ponder the Divine
From young children, with their guileless, searching questions, to the recently bereaved, trying to make sense of tragic loss, humans wrestle with our relationship to God--and with God's essence, motivations, and power--throughout our lives: Why does God permit catastrophe and senseless tragedy, again and again? Is God's power limited in any way? Can He change the past? Does He know the future? Why does God require prayer? Why does He not provide stronger evidence of His presence? Whom does God consign to hell, and why? Does God change? Suffer? What can we make of the conflicting diversity within world religions, of the many gods of different religious traditions? Such questions engage, confront, and perplex us on a daily basis. In this rich, concise volume, leading philosophers who have long pondered God's nature and ways take on these core problems and present their findings in a manner likely to engage believer and non-believer, general reader and specialist alike.
Questions of Character
This collection features 26 new essays on character from first-rate scholars in philosophy, psychology, economics, and law. The essays are elegantly written and combine forceful argumentation with original ideas on a wide range of questions, such as:"Is Aristotle's theory of character a moral theory?," "Are character traits in tension with personal autonomy", "How do traits differ from mental disorders?," "What is the role of gossip in character attribution?," and "Can businessmen be virtuous?" The chapters are organized thematically into 5 sections, each prefaced by its own special introduction. In the introductions, the editor brings out often unexpected connections among different lines of argument pursued by the authors and raises important questions for further discussion. The collection as a whole offers students of character a unique opportunity to engage with some of the best contemporary work on the topic.
Quine, Structure, and Ontology (Mind Association Occasional Series)
W.V. Quine, a champion of philosophical naturalism and pioneer of mathematical logic, was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Contemporary thought in ontology, epistemology, and the philosophy of logic and language owes much to his influence, yet recent work in these areas has become increasingly dismissive of his views. This is often because of mistaken or overly simplified conceptions of his philosophy which overlook the development of his views over time, in particular the growing importance of a kind of structuralism to his system as it evolved. This volume provides a fuller, richer picture of Quine's views and their development. With contributions from leading philosophers in a range of subfields including philosophical logic, philosophy of language, history of philosophy, mathematics, philosophy of time, and set theory, it is the first to investigate Quine's views on structure and how it permeates and shapes his attitude to a range of philosophical questions.
Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition's Popular Heritage
Republicanism is a powerful resource for emancipatory struggles against domination. Its commitment to popular sovereignty subverts justifications of authority, locating power in the hands of the citizenry who hold the capacity to create, transform, and maintain their political institutions. Republicanism's conception of freedom rejects social, political, and economic structures subordinating citizens to any uncontrolled power - from capitalism and wage-labour to patriarchy and imperialism. It views any such domination as inimical to republican freedom. Moreover, it combines a revolutionary commitment to overturning despotic and tyrannical regimes with the creation of political and economic institutions that realise the sovereignty of all citizens, institutions that are resilient to threats of oligarchical control. This volume is dedicated to retrieving and developing this radical potential, challenging the more conventional moderate conceptions of republicanism. It brings together scholars at the forefront of tracing this radical heritage of the republican tradition, and developing arguments, texts, and practices into a critical and emancipatory body of political and social thought. The volume spans historical discussions of the English Levellers, French and Ottoman revolutionaries, and American abolitionists and trade unionists; explorations of the radical republican aspects of the thought of Machiavelli, Marx, and Rousseau; and theoretical examinations of social domination and popular constitutionalism. It will appeal to political theorists, historians of political thought, and political activists interested in how republicanism provides a robust and successful radical transformation to existing social and political orders.
Rational and Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman
Michael Bratman's work has been unusually influential, with significance in disciplines as diverse as philosophy, computer science, law, and primatology. This is a collection of critical essays by some of contemporary philosophy's most distinguished figures, including Margaret Gilbert, Richard Holton, Christine Korsgaard, Alfred Mele, Elijah Milgram, Kieran Setiya, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Scott Shapiro, Michael Smith, J. David Velleman, R. Jay Wallace. It also contains an introduction by the editors, situating Bratman's work and its broader significance. The essays in this volume engage with ideas and themes prominent in Bratman's work. The volume also includes a lengthy reply by Bratman that breaks new ground and deepens our understanding of the nature of action, rationality, and social agency.
Re-Envisioning Christian Humanism: Education and the Restoration of Humanity
Since the early 1980s, there has been renewed scholarly interest in the concept of Christian Humanism. A number of official Catholic documents have stressed the importance of 'Christian humanism', as a vehicle of Christian social teaching and, indeed, as a Christian philosophy of culture. Fundamentally, humanism aims to explore what it means to be human and what the grounds are for human flourishing. Featuring contributions from internationally renowned Christian authors from a variety of disciplines in the humanities, Re-Envisioning Christian Humanism recovers a Christian humanist ethos for our time. The volume offers a chronological overview (from patristic humanism to the Reformation and beyond) and individual examples (Jewell, Calvin) of past Christian humanisms. The chapters are connected through the theme of Christian paideia as the foundation for liberal arts education.
Re-imagining Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1780-1870
Re-imagining Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1780-1870 examines the ways in which the ancient concept of "democracy" was re-imagined as relevant to the modern world in Latin America and the Caribbean between the later eighteenth and later nineteenth centuries. In most regions this process largely followed the French Revolution, while in Latin America it more closely followed independence movements of the 1810s and 20s. A sequel to two previous volumes edited by Joanna Innes and Mark Philp, Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland 1750-1850 and Re-imagining Democracy in the Mediterranean 1770-1860, this volume studies how a variety of political actors and commentators used "democracy" to characterize or debate modern conditions through the ensuing half-century. By 1870, it was firmly established in mainstream political lexicons throughout the region. Here, specialists in the field contribute wide-ranging accounts of aspects of the context in which the word was re-imagined, highlighting state formation, race, constitutionalism, urban political culture, education, and outside views of the region the six concluding chapters explore differences in its fortune from location to location. Ultimately, this edited volume deftly explores the history of the language of democracy and encourages new debates about its meaning.
Re-Imagining Democracy in the Mediterranean, 1780-1860
Mediterranean states are often thought to have 'democratised' only in the post-war era, as authoritarian regimes were successively overthrown. On its eastern and southern shores, the process is still contested. Re-imagining Democracy looks back to an earlier era, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and argues it was this era when some modern version of 'democracy' in the region first began. By the 1860s, representative regimes had been established throughout southern Europe, and representation was also the subject of experiment and debate in Ottoman territories. Talk of democracy, its merits and limitations, accompanied much of this experimentation - though there was no agreement as to whether or how it could be given stable political form. Re-imagining Democracy assembles experts in the history of the Mediterranean, who have been exploring these themes collaboratively, to compare and contrast experiences in this region, so that they can be set alongside better-known debates and experiments in North Atlantic states. States in the region all experienced some form of subordination to northern 'great powers'. In this context, their inhabitants had to grapple with broader changes in ideas about state and society while struggling to achieve and maintain meaningful self-rule at the level of the polity, and self-respect at the level of culture. Innes and Philip highlight new research and ideas about a region whose experiences during the 'age of revolutions' are at best patchily known and understood, as well as to expand understanding of the complex and variegated history of democracy as an idea and set of practices.
Reading Hume on the Principles of Morals
Hume's Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals is one of the landmark works in the history of moral philosophy; this volume presents a section-by-section study of the work in the form of new interpretative essays by leading Hume scholars. The result is a comprehensive reassessment of Hume's 'recasting' of his moral philosophy in this work. Particular attention is given to the Enlightenment concepts of justice and benevolence, as well as to the concept of humanity and moral sentiment. Fifteen original chapters take the reader through the nine sections and four appendices of Hume's Enquiry, as well as 'A Dialogue,' to assess critically the moral philosophy he presents. How does it differ from the moral philosophy of the Treatise, and how should we understand the significance of the arguments he advances? Additional chapters examine the relation between Hume's mature moral philosophy and related subjects such as his epistemology, his writings on religion, beauty and criticism, the passions, and his own intellectual and philosophical development during the period in which he conceived and wrote the Enquiry.
Reading J. Z. Smith: Interviews & Essay
Over the course of a career of more than forty years, Jonathan Z. Smith was among the most important voices of critical reflection within the academic study of religion, distinguishing himself as perhaps the most influential theorist of religion of the last half century. Among his significant body of work are essays and lectures on teaching and the essential role of academic scholarship on religion in matters of education and public policy. The interviews and essay published here display something of the dynamic, thinking-on-his feet liveliness that Smith brought to questions about the study of religion, his theoretical preferences, and his methods of teaching. With refreshing candidness and clarity, Reading J.Z. Smith offers an often provocative introduction to discussions on issues that still dominate the complex and continually changing critical conversations in the academic study of religion.
Reading Rödl: On Self-Consciousness and Objectivity
Sebastian Rödl's Self-Consciousness and Objectivity is one of the most original and thought-provoking books in analytic philosophy for the last several years. An ambitious defence of absolute idealism, Rödl rejects the idea that we as thinking beings can position ourselves within a given, mind-independent reality, and instead advances the position that the very idea of an ‘objective reality’ coincides with the self-consciousness of thought. In this outstanding collection, a roster of international contributors critically examine the significance of Rödl's arguments and develop them in new directions. Their contributions are organised into the following six sections: Self-Consciousness and Objectivity and naturalism Self-Consciousness and Objectivity and formal idealism Self-Consciousness and Objectivity and quietism Self-Consciousness and Objectivity and absolute idealism Self-Consciousness and Objectivity and the power of judgment Self-Consciousness and Objectivity and the determinacy of the individual. The volume concludes with an extensive response by Sebastian Rödl to his critics. This book constitutes essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary debates at ther intersection of analytic philosophy and philosophical idealism.
Reading Roman Declamation: Seneca the Elder
Situated at the crossroads of rhetoric and fiction, the genre of declamatio offers its practitioners the freedom to experiment with new forms of discourse. This volume places the literariness of Roman declamation into the spotlight by showcasing its theoretical influences, stylistic devices, and generic conventions as related by Seneca the Elder, the author of the Controversiae and Suasoriae, which jointly make up the largest surviving collection of declamatory speeches from antiquity. Authored by an international group of leading scholars of Latin literature and rhetoric, the chapters explore not only the historical roles of individual declaimers, but also the physical and linguistic techniques upon which they collectively drew. In addition, the 'dark side of declamation' is illuminated by contributions on the competitiveness of the arena and the manipulative potential of declamatory skill and, in keeping with the overall treatment of declamation as a literary phenomenon, a section has also been dedicated to intertextuality. Drawing on thought-provoking analyses of Seneca the Elder's works, the volume highlights the complexity of these texts and maps out, for the first time, the socio-cultural context for their composition, delivery, and reception, as well as providing a comprehensive, innovative, and up-to-date treatment of Roman declamation that will be essential for both students and scholars in the fields of Latin literature, Republican Roman history, and rhetoric.