What I Really Said about Secularisation

The author sets out the different elements in his approach to secularization over forty years from a conceptual critique to an empirical general theory, initially covering Europe and America and later global Christianity, taking into account different historical inflections to secularization as a component of master narratives. The author presents his interest in secularization as strongly linked to his interest in religion and politics, faith and violence.     

What Lenny Bruce Really Died For

Book reviewed in this article:
Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon     

Justifying Desires

According to an influential conception of reasons for action, the presence of a desire or some other conative state in the agent is a necessary condition for the agent's having a reason for action. This is sometimes known as internalism. This article presents a case for the considerably stronger thesis, which we may call hyper‐internalism, that the presence of a desire is a sufficient condition for the agent's having a (prima facie) reason for action.     

Selfless Desires

David Lewis's unified theory of the contents of de se and de dicto attitudes faces a problem. Whether or not it is adequate for representing beliefs, it misrepresents the content of many of our desires, which rank possible outcomes in which the agent with the desire does not exist. These desires are shown to play a role in the rational explanation of action, and recognising them is important in our understanding of ourselves.     

What Really Happened: A Tribute to John C. Fletcher

John C. Fletcher, a pioneer in the field of bioethics and friend and mentor to many generations of bioethicists, died tragically on May 27th at the age of 72. The son of an Episcopal priest from Bryan, TX, Fletcher graduated in 1953 with a degree in English Literature from the University of the South in Sewanee, TN. After completing a Masters in Divinity degree from the Virginia Theological Seminary and a stint as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Heidelberg in 1956, he was ordained in the Episcopal Church and received a doctorate in Christian ethics from the Union Theological Seminary in New York. After ordination, Fletcher worked in various Episcopal churches and founded the Interfaith Metropolitan Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. However, despite his religious faith, he was also a skeptic, and renounced his ordination in the mid-1990s due to his need for ‘intellectual honesty.’

Fletcher began his bioethics contributions in the early 1970's, when he became a founding Fellow of the Hastings Center and eventually the first Chief of the Bioethics Program at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health. At the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, he was the Founding Director of the Center for Bioethics and a professor of biomedical ethics at the medical school, and became the Kornfeld Professor of Biomedical Ethics until his retirement in 1999. Fletcher was a prominent authority and voice in the national and international bioethical dialogue through his talks, his testimonies before scientific and congressional panels, his many articles, and his bioethical and religiously-orientated books, including: An Introduction to Clinical Ethics (1997), Coping with Genetic Disorders: a Guide for Clergy and Parents (1982), Ethics and Human Genetics: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (1989), which he wrote with sociologist Dorothy C. Wertz. Dr. Fletcher received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities in 2000. With the passing of Dr. John C. Fletcher, bioethics has lost one of its great voices, a dedicated teacher and mentor, and a friend and colleague to scholars in bioethics and a host of other fields. Below is a touching tribute from one of his former students.     

实践推理:从信念和愿望应该形成什么目标

这篇文章探讨实践推理中目标推理的问题,试图发现一个理性主体从信念和愿望形成目标的基本逻辑标准。文中的分析以循序渐进的方式展开,从只包含信念和愿望的基础模型开始,到增加了数值和排序方式表示愿望偏好的混合拓展模型结束,都给出了相应的目标形成标准,并构造出了形式化的目标形成理论。最后,我们探讨了不同模型形成的目标之间的关系,并证明了混合拓展模型中目标的存在性等基本定理。     

Dark Desires

An influential view of sexual morality claims that participant consent is sufficient for the moral permissibility of a sexual act. I argue that the complex and frequently dark nature of sexual desire precludes this, because some sexual desire has a character such that it should not be gratified, even if this were consented to. I illustrate this with a discussion of a famous literary character, the Vicomte de Valmont, and draw on Kant's anthropology to illuminate the nature of such desire, before offering an account of its psychological roots. In the course of the paper I explain why the view of sexual desire endorsed by my main opponents is mistaken, and attack the limited conception of the normative which is a central plank in the argument of a prominent recent defender of the view, Igor Primoratz.     

Past Desires

Philosophical Studies -     

作为个人品德的自我认同

自我认同涉及的是个体如何对待自我以及自我与"他人"的关系问题,其内核是自我人格的同一性,这种人格同一性反映了个体的自我完善和道德精神境界。自我人格同一性的本质是自我真实性,其要旨在于,使个体"成为一个人并尊敬他人为人"。自我认同中的自我反思及其持续展开,使个体成为一个具有道德反思能力的主体。自我真实性与道德反思能力,是个人品德的重要构成因子。     

Beyond the Grand Illusion: What Change Blindness Really Teaches Us About Vision

Experiments on scene perception and change blindness suggest that the visual system does not construct detailed internal models of a scene. These experiments therefore call into doubt the traditional view that vision is a process in which detailed representations of the environment must be constructed. The non-existence of such detailed representations, however, does not entail that we do not perceive the detailed environment. The “grand illusion hypothesis” that our visual world is an illusion rests on (1) a problematic “reconstructionist” conception of vision, and (2) a misconception about the character of perceptual experience.