Editorial: Newman and Ecclesiology

Jerusalem is at the centre of Christian culture – the place of the Lord's Passion and Resurrection and the place of Pentecost – and the image of Jerusalem is fundamental to any Christian vision of the Church and the Kingdom. There was an earthly city and one in heaven; and since the temple was inseparable from the city, temple imagery – the Garden of Eden, the Holy Wisdom, the Messiah – appears in Christian hymns about Jerusalem. In the centuries preceding the advent of Christianity, both city and temple had become corrupt, so when Jesus cleansed the temple and prophesied the destruction of the city, many people would have applauded him. The harlot city that burned in the Book of Revelation was Jerusalem, and when the emperor Constantine built the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem, he was building a Christian temple, replacing not the one destroyed in 70 CE, but the original temple of Solomon.     

Finitism and Divisibility: A Reply to Puryear

Puryear (AJP, 2014) develops an objection against a prominent attempt to show that the universe must have a temporal beginning. Here I formulate a reply.     

Ethics and Intuitions: A Reply to Singer

In a recent paper, Peter Singer suggests that some interesting new findings in experimental moral psychology support what he has contended all along—namely that intuitions should play little or no role in adequate justifications of normative ethical positions. Not only this but, according to Singer, these findings point to a central flaw in the method (or epistemological theory) of reflective equilibrium used by many contemporary moral philosophers. In this paper, we try to defend reflective equilibrium from Singer’s attack and, in part, we do this by discussing Singer’s own favoured moral methodology as outlined in his Practical Ethics. Although basing ethics solely on (certain kinds of) intuitions certainly is problematic, we argue, basing it solely on ‘reason’ gives rise to similar problems. The best solution would arguably be one which could strike a balance between the two—but, we suggest, this is precisely what reflective equilibrium is all about.     

Truth-Making and Analysis: A Reply to Rodriguez-Pereyra

Abstract

The law requires that plaintiffs in fraud cases be ‘justified’ in relying on a misrepresentation. I deploy the accumulated intuitions of the law to defend externalist accounts of epistemic justification and knowledge against Laurence BonJour's counterexamples involving clairvoyance. I suggest that the law can offer a well-developed model for adding a no-defeater condition to either justification or to knowledge but without requiring that subjects possess positive reasons to believe in the reliability of an epistemic source.     

Inwardness and Sociability: A Reply to Carter

Carter argues that Wittgensteinian moral philosophy – typified by the work of Raimond Gaita and Christopher Cordner – rests on shaky foundations because it vacillates between grounding moral judgements in grammar and in a form of life. In this article, I respond to Carter's criticism. I defend Wittgensteinian moral philosophy by showing that Gaita and Cordner specifically repudiate the purported dichotomy between grammar and a form of life. I then go on to explain why Wittgensteinian moral philosophers are right not to try to ground moral judgements in features of a shared form of life.     

Asymmetry and Incoherence: A Reply to Cyr

In defense of the Deprivation Approach to the badness of death against the Lucretian objection that death is relevantly similar to prenatal nonexistence, John Martin Fischer and Anthony L. Brueckner have suggested that whereas death deprives us of things that it is rational for us to care about, prenatal nonexistence does not. I have argued that this suggestion, even if correct, does not make for a successful defense of the Deprivation Approach against the Lucretian objection. My criticism involved a thought experiment in which a person avoids being tortured. Recently, Taylor Cyr has defended Fischer and Brueckner’s approach, arguing that my thought experiment is incoherent. In this response, I question both the truth and relevance of Cyr’s incoherence claim.