Goodness and Justice*

In Goodness and Justice, Joseph Mendola defends three related views in normative ethics: a novel form of consequentialism, a Bentham‐style hedonism about “basic” value, and a maximin principle about the value of a world. In defending these views he draws on his views in metaethics, action theory, and the philosophy of mind. It is an ambitious and wide‐ranging book. I begin with a quick explanation of Mendola’s views, and then raise some problems.     

'One Commixture of Light': Rethinking some Modern Uses and Critiques of Gregory of Nazianzus on the Unity and Equality of the Divine Persons

Gregory of Nazianzus' doctrine of the Trinity is both a constructive source and an object of critique for Leonardo Boff's account of the Trinity. I argue that Gregory's account of the unity of the Trinity in the monarchy of the Father does not entail the ontological subordination of Son and Spirit nor otherwise obviate the equality of the divine persons. On Gregory's account, the unity and equality of the divine persons is bound up with that of their distinct identities in the very particular modes in which they relate to one another: a unity transcending all human commonality. By contrast, Boff's theology of the Trinity seems to elide the real distinction between God and creatures and erode the differences between the divine persons, so subverting the social programme he derives from his doctrine.     

Mental Maps1

It’s often hypothesized that the structure of mental representation is map‐like rather than language‐like. The possibility arises as a counterexample to the argument from the best explanation of productivity and systematicity to the language of thought hypothesis—the hypothesis that mental structure is compositional and recursive. In this paper, I argue that the analogy with maps does not undermine the argument, because maps and language have the same kind of compositional and recursive structure.     

On the Content of Experience*

The intentionalist about consciousness holds that the qualitative character of experience, “what it’s like,” is determined by the contents of a select group of special intentional states of the subject. Fred Dretske (1995) , Mike Thau (2002) , Michael Tye (1995) and many others have embraced intentionalism, but these philosophers have not generally appreciated that, since we are intimately familiar with the qualitative character of experience, we thereby have special access to the nature of these contents. In this paper, we take advantage of this fact to show that intentionalism is incompatible with the idea that these contents are singular or general propositions, and thus that intentionalism is incompatible with one dominant trend in thinking about contents in general. In particular, there appear to be insoluble difficulties in explaining how the phenomenology of place and time can be explained by any intentionalist theory appealing to singular or general propositions.