Must God Be Dead? Reinventing the Sacred

Newton became a death knell for a theistic God and for a non-epiphenominal mind. The culprit is the deterministic causal closure of classical physics. Two major revolutions are taking us beyond this closure. The first is Quantum Mechanics, which is non-deterministic. The second revolution may just be happening. The emergence and evolution of life in our or any biosphere is governed by no law at all. This freedom suggests one sense of God as the natural creativity of the Universe.     

Must an Educated Being Be a Human Being?

This paper argues that an educated being logically does not have to be a human. Philosophers analyzing the concept of education have reached a consensual notion of the matter; but in applying that idea, they have barely discussed whether or not human beings are the only entities that may be educated. Using their notion as the core of a heuristic conception of education, this paper attempts to show that in some contexts it might make sense to predicate education of certain non-human entities. In addition, the paper examines the place of beliefs, reflective intelligence, practical thinking, and feelings in education. It concludes by discussing its implications for educational theory and practice and for the connections between the educated being and personhood and the right to education.

Must the Rational Emotive Therapist Be Like Albert Ellis?

The author believes that some counselors may avoid the use of Rational Emotive Therapy techniques because they feel that they could not deal with clients in the same active-directive manner as of Albert Ellis, the originator of RET. Counselors who may be interested in applying RET principles with clients are urged to adapt the techniques of RET to their own personalities and styles of counseling.     

How Outlandish Can Imaginary Cases Be?

It is common in moral philosophy to test the validity of moral principles by proposing counter‐examples in the form of cases where the application of the principle does not give the conclusion we intuitively find valid. These cases are often imaginary and sometimes rather ‘outlandish’, involving ray guns, non‐existent creatures, etc. I discuss whether we can test moral principles with the help of outlandish cases, or if only realistic cases are admissible. I consider two types of argument against outlandish cases: 1) Since moral principles are meant for guiding action in this world, cases drawn from other worlds are irrelevant. 2) We lack the capacity to apply our intuitive moral competence to outlandish cases. I argue that while the first approach is importantly flawed, the second approach is plausible, not because our moral competence per se is limited to cases from this world, but because we lack the capacity to imagine outlandish cases, and we cannot apply our moral competence to a case we fail to imagine properly.     

How Bad Can Good People Be?

Can a virtuous person act contrary to the virtue she possesses? Can virtues have “holes”—or blindspots—and nonetheless count as virtues? Gopal Sreenivasan defends a notion of a blindspot that is, in my view, an unstable moral category. I will argue that no trait possessing such a “hole” can qualify as a virtue. My strategy for showing this appeals to the importance of motivation to virtue, a feature of virtue to which Sreenivasan does not adequately attend. Sreenivasan’s account allows performance alone to be a reliable indicator of the possession of virtue. I argue that, at least with respect to a classical, Aristotelian conception of virtue, this assumption is mistaken: a person is said to possess a virtue only when she is properly motivated. In my view, the nature of motivation required for the possession of Aristotelian virtue does not admit of blindspots. I am not primarily interested in details about the situationist critique of virtue theory but rather the implications that blindspots have for our conception of virtue. I argue that because the practical reasoning of the virtuous requires both cognitive and motivational coherence, the motivational structure of the virtuous agent cannot accommodate blindspots. My conclusion is neither a defense of motivational internalism nor of an idealized conception of Aristotelian virtue. My aim is to show that because blindspotted virtue does not cohere well with Aristotle’s conception of virtuous agency, friends of virtue theory must choose one or the other; they cannot have both.     

How Can Decision Making Be Improved?

ABSTRACT— The optimal moment to address the question of how to improve human decision making has arrived. Thanks to 50 years of research by judgment and decision-making scholars, psychologists have developed a detailed picture of the ways in which human judgment is bounded. This article argues that the time has come to focus attention on the search for strategies that will improve bounded judgment because decision-making errors are costly and are growing more costly, decision makers are receptive, and academic insights are sure to follow from research on improvement. In addition to calling for research on improvement strategies, this article organizes the existing literature pertaining to improvement strategies and highlights promising directions for future research.     

How Does It Feel to Be a Star?

Over the past three decades, research on the social dimensions of emotions has grown exponentially, particularly in the area of “emotion management.” In this project, we will attempt to add to this body of research by studying the social aspects of labeling or “instantiating” feelings. The data for the project come from televised red-carpet interviews conducted with celebrities immediately prior to awards ceremonies. By focusing on the generic aspects of the emotional claims-making put forth by interviewers and interviewees, we demonstrate how the labeling of emotions is an interpretive, interactive task.

How Tolerant Can You Be? Carnap on Rationality

In this paper I examine a neglected question concerning the centerpiece of Carnap's philosophy: the principle of tolerance. The principle of tolerance states that we are free to devise and adopt any well‐defined form of language or linguistic framework we please. A linguistic framework defines framework‐internal standards of correct reasoning that guide us in our first‐order scientific pursuits. The choice of a linguistic framework, on the other hand, is an ‘external’ question to be settled on pragmatic grounds and so not itself constrained by these (framework‐internal) standards. However, even if choosing a framework is a practical matter, we would nevertheless expect the process of framework selection to be subject to rational norms. But which norms might those be? And where do they come from? I begin by showing that these questions are crucial to the success of Carnap's entire philosophical project. I then offer a response on behalf of the Carnapian which guarantees the rationality of the process of framework selection, while remaining true to Carnap's firm commitment to tolerance.     

How Clearly Must I See? Art and Ethics in Pedagogical Practice

This essay explores pedagogical practices and ethical obligations in the embrace of cultural and religious diversity by a faculty team in a theological school course. Attention is given to the interplay of art and ethical dilemmas in an educational praxis that calls into question students’ taken‐for‐granted worldviews and theologies. In the first of three sections the writers identify several assumptions they brought to the conduct of the course regarding diversity, art, and pedagogy. The second section describes student encounters with and responses to art from a variety of cultural contexts. The paper concludes with a critical reflection on ethical and political issues arising from pedagogical practices that engage students with art.     

Was Schopenhauer a Kantian Ethicist?

ABSTRACT

Commentators have generally seen the compassionate person as a second-rate character vis-à-vis the ascetic ‘saint’ who denies the will-to-life and resigns from willing altogether in Schopenhauer's ethical thought. In this paper I offer another way to interpret Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion, which is textually grounded and genuinely Schopenhauerian, but which draws out similarities to Kant’s ethics that, I shall argue, have not been hitherto appreciated. Once these Kantian similarities are appreciated one sees that the compassionate person is no longer a runner up ethically and epistemically to the saint, rather, the compassionate person and the saint are at odds with each other, and really represent – unbeknownst to Schopenhauer himself–two distinct and incompatible ethical ideals.

To motivate this interpretation, I will first delineate the traditional interpretation of what Schopenhauer means by the compassionate person’s intuitive insight into the way the world really is. Second, I will offer a novel, and to my mind, textually preferable reading of what this intuitive insight consists in. Finally, I’ll suggest in light of recent work in metaethics by Colin Marshall – notably in his 2018 book titled Compassionate Moral Realism–that my interpretation of Schopenhauer’s ethics offers a creditable moral realist option for the contemporary landscape.