This book offers an analysis of erotic love in the Bible, patristic theology, mystical writings, philosophy, and literature. Eschewing hyper-conservative shaming of lust and overly optimistic views of eros as sacred and liberating, the book demonstrates how eros illuminates core Christian beliefs about Jesus Christ, the afterlife, and the Trinity.
This work argues for an original way of marking off thinking subjects, in particular human beings, from other intentional systems, both natural and artificial.
Imagine a human society, perhaps in pre-history, in which people were generally of a psychological kind with us, had the use of natural language to communicate with one another, but did not have any properly moral concepts in which to exhort one another to meet certain standards and to lodge related claims and complaints. According to The Birth of Ethics, the members of that society would have faced a set of pressures, and made a series of adjustments in response, sufficient to put them within reach of ethical concepts. Without any planning, they would have more or less inevitably evolved a way of using such concepts to articulate desirable patterns of behavior and to hold themselves and one another responsible to those standards. Sooner or later, they would have entered ethical space. While this central claim is developed as a thesis in conjectural history or genealogy, the aim of the exercise is philosophical. Assuming that it explains the emergence of concepts and practices that are more or less equivalent to ours, the story offers us an account of the nature and role of morality. It directs us to the function that ethics plays in human life and alerts us to the character in virtue of which it can serve that function. The emerging view of morality has implications for the standard range of questions in meta-ethics and moral psychology, and enables us to understand why there are divisions in normative ethics like that between consequentialist and Kantian approaches.
Believing the wrong thing can have drastic consequences. The question of when a person is not only ill-guided, but genuinely at fault for holding a particular belief goes to the root of our understanding of such notions as criminal negligence and moral responsibility. This book explores the conditions under which someone may be deemed blameworthy for holding a particular belief, drawing on contemporary epistemology, ethics and legal scholarship.
In this book, the author defends a unified externalists account of propositional attitudes and reference, and formalizes this view within possible world semantics. He establishes a link between philosophical analyses of intentionality and reference, and formal semantic theories of discourse representation and context change. The relation between belief change and the semantic analyses of conditional sentences and evidential (knowledge) and buletic (desire) propositional attitudes is discussed extensively.
Your favorite long-term client tells you they want to open up their relationship. Are you ready to help them? This groundbreaking guide to consensual nonmonogamy offers a reading experience that feels like consulting with a trusted advisor. Martha Kauppi equips you with the skills to be a true ally to clients who want to explore polyamory. Learn from the expert who trains experts as she debunks myths and shares the exact tools she uses with her own clients. Flip to any chapter for an understanding of what is possible, where things break down and why, and how to help. You’ll learn how to conceptualize complicated relational dynamics in a way that leads to effective treatment, and how to identify and disrupt maladaptive relational patterns without perpetuating negative cultural bias. A must-read for anyone looking for a framework to simplify the complexities of polyamory.
In this book, Richard Foley defends an epistemology that takes seriously the perspectives of individual thinkers. He argues that having rational opinions is a matter of meeting our own internal standards rather than standards that are somehow imposed upon us from the outside. It is a matter of making ourselves invulnerable to intellectual self-criticism. Foley also shows how the theory of rational belief is part of a general theory of rationality. He thus avoids treating the rationality of belief as a fundamentally different kind of phenomenon from the rationality of decision or action. His approach generates promising suggestions about a wide range of issues, e.g., the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic reasons for belief; the question of what aspects of the Cartesian project are still worth doing; the significance of simplicity and other theoretical virtues; the relevance of skeptical hypotheses; the difference between a theory of rational belief and a theory of knowledge; the difference between a theory of rational belief and a theory of rational degrees of belief; and the limits of idealization in epistemology. The book runs counter to a tendency in contemporary epistemology to discount the perspectives of individual thinkers. Endorsing a radically subjective conception of rational belief, Working Without A Net will interest students of philosophy, epistemology, and rationality.
In Just Results, Ralph E. Ellis provides an authoritative solution to one of the major problems in the field of public policy. Until now, analysts and planners have had no practical or accurate means of incorporating qualitative social concerns into the traditional quantitative formulas used in policymaking. By introducing a justice factor--a quantitative measure for social values--Ellis opens the door for more balanced policy decisions. Using concrete, real-world examples, Ellis shows how policy analysts can better account for the use value--or practical measurable utility--of universally agreed-upon social benefits such as life, health, safety, and environmental preservation when making cost-benefit analyses. In this way, policymakers, and by extension, society as a whole, can avoid making unjust tradeoffs between important social values and comparatively frivolous economic benefits. Drawing on philosophical works on justice from Kant through John Rawls, this book is informed by a theoretical defense of distributive justice that emphasizes diminishing marginal utility, thus favoring the poor. Just Results is a stimulating and highly applicable book that will be of great interest to philosophers, political scientists, policy analysts and planners.
It is natural to think that self-knowledge is gained through introspection, whereby we somehow peer inward and detect our mental states. However, so-called transparency theories emphasize our capacity to peer outward at the world, hence beyond our minds, in the pursuit of self-knowledge. For all their popularity in recent decades, transparency theories have also met with myriad challenges. This volume presents new perspectives on transparency-theoretic approaches to self-knowledge. It addresses many under-explored dimensions of transparency theories and considers their wider implications for epistemology, philosophy of mind, and psychology. Some chapters in this volume aim to deepen our understanding of key themes at the heart of transparency theories, such as the ways in which transparent self-knowledge is properly "first-personal" or "non-alienated". Other chapters offer arguments for extending transparency accounts of self-knowledge to different kinds of mental states and phenomena, such as memory, actions, social groups, and credences. Finally, there are chapters in the volume which discuss interesting relationships between transparency theories, projection, second-order sincerity, and Moore’s Paradox. This book will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and psychology.