On Being Unprincipled

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics -     

On Being Annoyed

What is it that unites episodes of the emotion of annoyance? The paper considers possible analyses of the content of the state of annoyance, and concludes that this emotion should be understood to involve a negative construal of an object, event, or state of affairs as having failed to exemplify one of a suite of kinds of everyday quality or excellence. This account permits us to see what is common to a varied range of superficially‐disjointed emotional responses, and to make sense of the conditions under which annoyance is appropriate or inappropriate. Moreover, it reveals something of what we care about in everyday and social contexts, in our ordinary dealings with persons and artefacts.     

On Philosophical Translator-Advocates and Linguistic Injustice

Abstract

This paper argues for the need of philosophical translator-advocates to overcome the (would-be) limitations produced by the linguistic narrowness of analytic philosophy. It draws on a model used to analyze epistemic communities in order to characterize a form of linguistic injustice. In particular it does so by treating language as an epistemic barrier to entry of ideas and people and by treating philosophical translator-advocates as engaged in a form of arbitrage. Along the way I specify some necessary and jointly sufficient characteristics of a philosophical translator-advocate. My argument is illuminated and vivified with examples from the history of analytic philosophy and other episodes from the history of philosophy.     

On Being Responsible and Holding Responsible

A number of philosophers have recently argued that we should interpret the debate over moral responsibility as a debate over the conditions under which it would be “fair” to blame a person for her attitudes or conduct. What is distinctive about these accounts is that they begin with the stance of the moral judge, rather than that of the agent who is judged, and make attributions of responsibility dependent upon whether it would be fair or appropriate for a moral judge to react to the agent in various (negative) ways. This is problematic, I argue, because our intuitions about whether and when it would be fair to react negatively to another are sensitive to a host of considerations that appear to have little or nothing to do with an agent’s responsibility or culpability for her attitudes or behavior. If this is correct, then theories which make attributions of responsibility dependent upon the appropriateness of our reactions as moral judges will turn out to be fundamentally misguided. I am grateful to Barbara Herman, T. M. Scanlon, and two anonymous reviewers for The Journal of Ethics for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to Pamela Hieronymi and the members of her Fall 2201 graduate seminar on moral responsibility at UCLA, and to the audience members at Simon Fraser University, for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this material. My biggest debt of gratitude goes to Jean Roberts, for stimulating discussion and insightful commentary on multiple drafts of this paper.     

Processio and The Place of Ontic Being: John Milbank and James K.A. Smith On Participation

James K.A. Smith argues that the ontology of participation associated with Radical Orthodoxy is incompatible with a Christian affirmation of the intrinsic being and goodness of creatures. In response, he proposes a Leibnizian view in which things are endowed with the innate dynamism of ‘force’. Creatures have a certain depth of being, and are intrinsically good, just because they each have an inner virtuality that they bring into expression. Such force is said to be a metaphysical component of the agent. In this paper it is asked whether John Milbank's ontology of participation can be defended by distinguishing between two senses of being a subject. Perhaps it is possible for a creature to bring into expression what is an infused ‘alien’ gift rather than a metaphysical component – to be expressive subject, but not ontic subject, for divine power. However, while this distinction promises to make sense of the reception of an indwelling ‘other’ in grace, knowledge and love, neither proper substance nor proper existence can be received in this way. A creature must be the ontic subject for its being, after all. Still, divine being might proceed from God as radical indwelling gift, as non‐ontic ground for ontic being.     

On Quine on Philosophical Analysis

Philosophical analysis is for Quine the replacement of a defective expression by another, sound expression, which performs the same work. In general, then, an analysis consists of two stages: (a) identifying the work that a defective expression performs, and (b) imbedding it in a safe domain. In this essay I argue that Quine's view does not truly reflect what we do in philosophy. The problem, I think, lies in both stages (a) and (b), but stems from Quine's assumption that we can control the work performed by language.     

近距离的鞭挞与远距离的哲思

面对当今"人造美女"的现象,仅有批评的激愤与学术睿智是不够的,更需要哲人式的深刻与从容.今后人们需要改变的是既定的认知观念,而不是"医疗美容"所代表的新的心理、社会层面的服务诉求.     

《中庸》新论:哲学与宗教性的诠释

本文在一个中西比较的视域中,结合新出土的历史文献,对《中庸》中“诚”、“性”、“情”、“礼”和“教”等最为重要的观念及其之间的内在关联进行了细致的分析,揭示了《中庸》所蕴涵的一个完整连贯的结构的哲学意义以及不同于西方的独特的宗教性。     

论“原始至上神”

本文简要地评介了西方人类学界对原始至上神的论点。根据我国当代民族志材料,认为原始至上神信仰是信奉原始宗教民族中比较普遍的现象。原始至上神信仰不是一种教,不同于阶级社会一神教的至上神,是原始人基于强烈的求生愿望,对于有序世界的思考而形成的一种信仰,它和万物有灵观念同属于原始宗教的早期形态,却是原始观念两个系统上并行的产物。