My aim in this article is to argue that Philippa Foot fails to provide a convincing basis for moral evaluation in her book Natural Goodness. Foot's proposal fails because her conception of natural goodness and defect in human beings either sanctions prescriptive claims that are clearly objectionable or else it inadvertently begs the question of what constitutes a good human life by tacitly appealing to an independent ethical standpoint to sanitize the theory's normative implications. Foot's appeal to natural facts about human goodness is in this way singled out as an Achilles' heel that undermines her attempt to establish an independent framework for virtue ethics. This problem might seem to be one that is uniquely applicable to the bold naturalism of Foot's methodology; however, I claim that the problem is indicative of a more general problem for all contemporary articulations of virtue ethics.

We argue that philosophy education across the globe is still bedevilled with the ‘politics’ of marginalization of less favoured traditions like African philosophy. Extant works show that the conventional curriculum of philosophy used in educational institutions across the globe is predominantly Western and, as such, very much colonial. We contend that this amounts to a sort of ‘epistemic injustice’ that is detrimental to knowledge production. We argue specifically that this ‘politics’ should be discontinued. We propose the conversational tradition, out of which a philosophy curriculum that is comprehensive and antithetical to the politics of exclusion may be developed.

For the last 40 years or so the is/ought gap, the fact/value distinction and the naturalistic fallacy have figured prominently in ethical debates. This longevity, however, has had an adverse side effect. So familiar have they become that they—and their respective rationales—have tended to become blurred. It is the purpose of this paper to explain why they should be kept distinct.

Philosophers of religion have begun to explore the value question of whether God’s existence would add to, detract from, or have no impact on the value of our world. The Meaningful Life Argument is one of the most promising arguments in support of the view that God’s existence would make the world worse, at least for certain individuals. I offer an objectivized version of the Meaningful Life Argument and show why recent objections leveled against it by Myron A. Penner do not apply to this version.

In the Meno we have a chance, rare in Greek philosophy, to compare a philosophical theory with the data which make up its ostensible evidence. Meno asks if there is any way Socrates can show him that “learning” is recollecting. Socrates offers to produce the proof on the spot. Meno will see the slave-boy learning, and this will show that he was recollecting. I wish to make the most of this opportunity to examine the presented data before considering the theory. To this I will devote the first and somewhat longer part of the paper, where I will seek by controversial argument to establish the right interpretation of the text. While doing this, it will be convenient to use “recollection” in quotes, suspending judgment upon its philosophical implications and even withholding attention from its dictionary meaning. Plato says the boy is “recollecting” and so shall I of this and all other situations which are equivalent to it in a sense which I shall make clear. When a decision has been reached on what exactly is taking place when people are “recollecting” in this purely nominative sense, it will be time to examine Plato's thesis that this “recollecting” is recollecting.

Philip Kitcher's new book is very ambitious in scope, more ambitious, certainly, than any of his previous books. Unlike Kitcher's Abusing Science: The Case against Creationism (1982), this is not a book that focusses on just one single issue in contemporary science or educational policy; nor is it, like his The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge (1983) and Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature (1985), a book that emphasizes just one relatively narrow philosophical topic. The Advancement of Science presents a complete, and quite general, position within the philosophy of natural science. Its purpose is much closer to Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959) or even to Nagel's The Structure of Science (1961) than it is to any of Kitcher's earlier books. Kitcher starts off with an explicit epistemology, moves to a “goal” for science based on that epistemology, and then uses this epistemic goal as the target for the various methodological and social or institutional strategies that he offers.

I here defend the thesis that the best life is the life that one plays as a game—specifically, a ‘Suitsian’ game that meets the definition proposed in The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits. Even more specifically, it is a nested, open, role-playing game where the life’s quality as a game partly depends on there being no more people than players. To defend this thesis I refute two powerful challenges to it, one from Thomas Hurka (2006) and another from within The Grasshopper itself. In the process, I offer a new interpretation of that enigmatic and challenging book.

In this paper I put forward what I think is a new approach to the problem of induction. I sketched the approach in brief sections of a book published in 1983 (chap. 4, sec. 5 and chap. 6, sec. 7). The same idea had occurred to the English philosopher John Foster and he presented it in a paper at about the same time (1983).

This article analyzes the later work of Michel Foucault on ethics, freedom, and self-governance as it applies to the ethics of consumption and to new ethical consumerist movements such as fair-trade coffee. Foucault's emphasis on practices of the self helps elucidate the virtue ethics involved in consumption choices. Ethical consumption is cast as a set of practices of self-development: through critical activity and the quest for freedom, persons seek to transform themselves to live in reciprocal relationships with other persons and nature. This requires public deliberation and collective action to effect change within ourselves and our practical systems of consumption and production.

J'ai mieux aimé vous parler de la philosophie de l'existence plutôt que de l'existentialisme, pour une raison, que vous devinez probablement. Le terme d'existentialisme a fini par désigner presque exclusivement le mouvement philosophique qui s'est produit en France après 1945 sous l'impulsion principalement de Sartre. Or, ce mouvement philosophique, en réalité, a des antécédents; il est lié à toute une tradition de pensée philosophique, tradition qui est compliquée, qui est longue, puisqu'il s'agit en réalité tout d'abord de la philosophie de Kierkegaard, il s'agit ensuite, en Allemagne, de philosophies comme celles de Husserl et de Heidegger, il s'agit, en France, même avant Sartre, d'une philosophie comme celle de Gabriel Marcel. Si bien qu'il est extrêmement difficile d'isoler la tentative de Sartre par rapport aux autres tentatives très connues elles-mêmes que je viens de mentionner. Il m'a semblé que Sartre ayant une originalité indiscutable — mais Sartre relevant quand même de tout un courant de pensée — il était vraiment impossible de prendre sa tentative philosophique, philosophico-politique en elle-même et de la séparer du reste. De sorte que je me propose de vous donner d'abord une vue sur ce qu'a été l'entrée en France de la pensée existentielle.

I argue that in order to solve the main difficulties confronted by the classical versions of the causal theory of action, it is necessary not just to make room for intentions, considered as irreducible to complexes of beliefs and desires, but also to distinguish among several types of intentions. I present a three-tiered theory of intentions that distinguishes among future-directed intentions, present-directed intentions, and motor intentions. I characterize each kind of intention in terms of its functions, its type of content, its dynamics, and the rationality and time constraints that bear on it. I then try to show how the difficulties encountered by the causal theory can be solved within this new framework.

The concept of human wisdom is fundamental for an understanding of the Apology. But it has not been properly understood. The received interpretations offer insufficient resources for explaining how Socrates could have been humanly wise before Apollo’s oracle, when he falsely believed that he was not wise at all. I argue that a satisfactory interpretation of human wisdom can be given in terms of “philosophia”. Socrates was humanly wise before the oracle because he loved wisdom—even though he did not know that he did. The analysis is confirmed by its resolution of some enduring difficulties in the interpretation of Apology, in particular, the question of why Socrates continued to search for knowledge he thought impossible to attain.

Applied ethics is at a watershed. In all its domains a gulf between the theory of applied ethics and the practice of applied ethics is now being recognized. In medical ethics, for example, it has been observed that “practicing clinicians often feel let down by bioethics.” The disappointment of clinicians is attributed in part to their own unrealistic expectations but is also said to be a function of

the extent to which bioethics as a discipline doesn't seem to be in possession of the realities of practice. Bioethicists tend to leave the “facts” of clinical medicine to the doctors; their task is then to apply elegant and compelling arguments drawn from first principles of ethics … to these undisputed and indisputable facts. Unfortunately, when the relationship between clinical medicine and bioethics is conceived … [in this way], the result is a very sterile discourse.

Almost everyone has had an intuitive experience of authenticity that seems to reveal a glimmer of one’s true identity. Yet by positing the existence of a ‘true self,’ authenticity introduces metaphysical challenges that resist systematic solutions. I argue that authenticity properly analyzed demands an essentialist structure that strains to be applied to personal identity. I then assess the three most influential types of accounts in modern philosophical discussions against this framework: Romanticism and autonomy; late existentialism; and virtue conceptions of authenticity. This analysis casts doubt on the possibility of generating a complete philosophical account of authenticity.

ABSTRACT: This article examines the possibility of an ethical treatment of plants grounded in empathy. Upon considering whether an empathetic approach to vegetal life is compatible with the crucial features of plant ontology, it is concluded that the feeling of empathy with plants disregards their mode of being and projects the constructs and expectations of the human empathizer onto the object of empathy. Vegetal life, thus, reveals the limits of empathy, as well as its anthropocentric and potentially unethical underpinnings.

Aristotle's account of phantasia in De anima, III, 3, occurs at a critical juncture of his inquiry into the nature and properties of the soul. Having just completed a long discussion of sensation (II, 5-III, 2), and wishing now to turn to a consideration of the power of thought (nous), which he regards both as distinct from and as analogous to sensation, he suggests that an explanation of phantasia is necessary at this point, since there is no thought without phantasia, just as there is no phantasia without sensation.1 But while this sketch of a complex dependency among the soul's cognitive powers makes clear the importance of phantasia and the need for some explanation of it, the intermediate place of phantasia in the discussion and the incidental way in which it is introduced are indications that Aristotle does not treat it for its own sake, but rather is compelled to turn to a consideration of it by the exigencies of the subject-matter at hand. The analysis of sensation, the characteristic power of animals, could, it seems, be adequately carried out with little reference to phantasia, even though Aristotle is elsewhere led to stress the closeness, and even, in some respect, the identity of these two powers; the discussion of thought, on the other hand, and specifically of the human thought which is Aristotle's concern in De anima, III, 4–8, apparently requires a special preliminary treatment of phantasia.

There are two related problems in the interpretation of Mill's ethics which become pressing once one has surmounted the more common misunderstandings and seen the over-all shape of his theory. One problem is to state his criterion of moral wrongness; the other is to show how he thinks this criterion derivable with the help ofthe Principle of Utility.

What is the source of epistemic normativity? In virtue of what do epistemic norms have categorical normative authority? According to epistemic teleologism, epistemic normativity comes from value. Epistemic norms have categorical authority because conforming to them is necessarily good in some relevant sense. In this article, I argue that epistemic teleologism should be rejected. The problem, I argue, is that there is no relevant sense in which it is necessarily good to believe in accordance with epistemic norms, including in cases where the matter at hand is completely trivial. Therefore, if epistemology is normative, its normativity won’t come from value.