Download or read book Modality Morality and Belief written by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-01-27 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modality, morality and belief are among the most controversial topics in philosophy today, and few philosophers have shaped these debates as deeply as Ruth Barcan Marcus. Inspired by her work, a distinguished group of philosophers explore these issues, refine and sharpen arguments and develop new positions on such topics as possible worlds, moral dilemmas, essentialism, and the explantion of actions by beliefs. This state of the art collection honors one of the most rigorous and iconoclastic of philosophical pioneers.

Download or read book God Modality and Morality written by William E. Mann and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one new and sixteen previously published essays, William E. Mann presents a modern interpretation of a traditional theory in philosophical theology, according to which God is a metaphysically simple, necessarily existing, personal being. Mann addresses such issues as God's independence and sovereignty, God's relationship to creation, and humans' relationship to God.

Download or read book God Modality and Morality written by William E. Mann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suppose that God exists: what difference would that make to the world? The answer depends on the nature of God and the nature of the world. In this book, William E. Mann argues in one new and sixteen previously published essays for a modern interpretation of a traditional conception of God as a simple, necessarily existing, personal being. Divine simplicity entails that God has no physical composition or temporal stages; that there is in God no distinction between essence and existence; that there is no partitioning of God's mental life into beliefs, desires, and intentions. God is thus a spiritual, eternal being, dependent on nothing else, whose essence is to exist and whose mode of existence is identical with omniscience, omnipotence, and perfectly goodness. In metaphysical contrast, the world is a spatial matrix populated most conspicuously by finite physical objects whose careers proceed sequentially from past to present to future. Mann defends a view according to which the world was created out of nothing and is sustained in existence from moment to moment by God. The differences in metaphysical status between creator and creatures raise questions for which Mann suggests answers. How can God know contingent facts and necessary truths without depending on them? Why is it so easy to overlook God's presence? Why would self-sufficient God create anything? Wouldn't a perfect God create the best world possible? Can God be free? Can we be free if God's power is continuously necessary to sustain us in existence? If God does sustain us, is God an accomplice whenever we sin? Mann responds to the Euthyphro dilemma by arguing for a kind of divine command metaethical theory, whose normative content lays emphasis on love. Given the metaphysical differences between us, how can there be loving relationships between God and creatures? Mann responds by examining the notions of piety and hope.

Download or read book Modality written by Yitzhak Y. Melamed and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ever since the beginnings of philosophical thought in Greek antiquity, philosophers have made use of modalities such as necessity and possibility. In particular, the concepts of necessity and 'what must be' played an important role in Pre-Socratic thought. For example, Anaximander maintained that things perish into that from which they came to be 'in accordance with what must be' (kata to chreôn). Heraclitus held that 'everything comes about in accordance with strife and what must be (kat' erin kai chreôn)'. In his poem, Parmenides asserts that what is (to eon) is entirely still and changeless because 'powerful Necessity (Anagkê) holds it in the bonds of a limit, which encloses it all around'. Among the atomists, Democritus identified necessity with a whirl of atoms, holding that 'everything comes about in accordance with necessity, inasmuch as the whirl - which he calls necessity - is the cause of the coming about of all things'. Finally, Plato in the Timaeus describes the creation of the cosmos as the result of the interplay between divine demiurgic Intelligence and natural Necessity. While necessity figures centrally in the cosmologies presented by Plato and the Pre-Socratics, we do not have any evidence that these thinkers provided an account of the nature of necessity in general. The first philosopher known to have provided such an account is Aristotle. In his logical and metaphysical works, Aristotle develops a systematic theory of necessity and related modalities such as possibility and impossibility"--

Download or read book Saul Kripke written by G. W. Fitch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saul Kripke is one of the most original and creative philosophers writing today. His work has had a tremendous impact on the direction that philosophy has taken in the last thirty years and continues to dominate some of its most fundamental aspects. Given Kripke's importance it is perhaps surprising that there is no introduction to his philosophy available to the general student. This book fills that gap. As much of Kripke's work is highly technical, the book's central aim is to provide clear exposition of Kripke's ideas in a form that is understandable to a beginning readership as well as a commentary on them that more advanced students will find useful. The book begins with a discussion of Kripke's early work on modal logic, which provides the foundation for many of his later philosophical contributions, before examining in detail Kripke's central ideas and arguments contained in Naming and Necessity. In further chapters, Kripke's work on semantic paradoxes and his theory of truth are outlined as well as his controversial interpretation of Wittgenstein's famous private language argument. Kripke's ideas are situated alongside those of his precursors and some of the most important and interesting responses to them are explored. The reader is thus able to appreciate the path-breaking nature of Kripke's contributions, how they have challenged fundamentally traditional interpretations, and how they have sparked some of the most important philosophical debates of recent years.

Download or read book Moral Dilemmas written by and published by . This book was released on with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Moral Dilemmas and Moral Theory written by H. E. Mason and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-07-11 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do moral dilemmas truly exist? What counts as a moral dilemma? Can an adequate moral theory admit the possibility of genuine conflicts of moral obligations? In this book, twelve prominent moral theorists examine these and other questions from a wide variety of philosophical perspectives. Concerned throughout with the implications of moral dilemmas for moral theory, this collection of essays captures in striking fashion the full scope and vitality of the current moral dilemmas debate. Including both realist and anti-realist meta-ethical positions, and Kantian and consequentialist normative views, Moral Dilemmas and Moral Theory sheds new light on several standing controversies in moral philosophy while raising a fresh set of challenging issues. Contributors include Simon Blackburn, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Alan Donagan, Terrance McConnell, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Mary Mothersill, Norman Dahl, David Brink, Peter Railton, Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Christopher Gowans, and H.E. Mason.

Download or read book God Belief and Perplexity written by William E. Mann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents fourteen of William E. Mann's essays on three prominent figures in late Patristic and early medieval philosophy: Augustine, Anselm, and Peter Abelard. The essays explore some of the quandaries, arguments, and theories presented in their writings. The essays in this volume complement those to be found in Mann's God, Modality, and Morality (OUP, 2015). While the essays in God, Modality, and Morality are primarily essays in philosophical theology, those found in the present volume are more varied. Some still deal with issues in philosophical theology. Other essays are aporetic in nature, discussing cases of philosophical perplexity, sometimes but not always leaving the cases unresolved. All the essays display, directly or indirectly, the philosophical influence that Augustine has had. His Confessions is a rich source for philosophical puzzlement. Individual essays examine his reflections on the alleged innocence of infants, which raises questions about cognitive, emotional, and linguistic development; his juvenile theft of pears and its relation to moral motivation; and his struggle with and resolution of the problem of evil. One essay presents the rudiments of an Augustinian moral theory, rooted in his understanding of the Sermon on the Mount. Another essay illustrates the theory by discussing his writings on lying. Mann argues that Abelard amplified Augustine's moral theory by emphasizing the crucial role that intention plays in wrongdoing. Augustine bequeathed to Anselm the notion of "faith seeking understanding." Mann argues that this methodological slogan shapes Anselm's "ontological argument" for God's existence and his efforts to explicate the doctrine of the Trinity.

Download or read book Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference written by Wayne A. Davis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-14 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference extends Wayne Davis's groundbreaking work on the foundations of semantics. Davis revives the classical doctrine that meaning consists in the expression of ideas, and advances the expression theory by showing how it can account for standard proper names, and the distinctive way their meaning determines their reference. He also shows how the theory can handle interjections, syncategorematic terms, conventional implicatures, and other caseslong seen as difficult for both ideational and referential theories.The expression theory is founded on the fact that thoughts are event types with a constituent structure, and that thinking is a fundamental propositional attitude, distinct from belief and desire. Thought parts ('ideas' or 'concepts') are distinguished from both sensory images and conceptions. Word meaning is defined recursively: sentences and other complex expressions mean what they do in virtue of what thought parts their component words express and what thought structure the linguisticstructure expresses; and unstructured words mean what they do in living languages in virtue of evolving conventions to use them to express ideas. The difficulties of descriptivism show that the ideas expressed by names are atomic or basic. The reference of a name is the extension of the idea it expresses,which is determined not by causal relations, but by its identity or content together with the nature of objects in the world. Hence a name's reference is dependent on, but not identical to, its meaning. A name is directly and rigidly referential because the extension of the idea it expresses is not determined by the extensions of component ideas. The expression theory thus has the strength of Fregeanism without its descriptivist bias, and of Millianism without its referentialist or causalistshortcomings.The referential properties of ideas can be set out recursively by providing a generative theory of ideas, assigning extensions to atomic ideas, and formulating rules whereby the semantic value of a complex idea is determined by the semantic values of its components. Davis also shows how referential properties can be treated using situation semantics and possible worlds semantics. The key is to drop the assumption that the values of intension functions are the referents of the words whosemeaning they represent, and to abandon the necessity of identity for logical modalities. Many other pillars of contemporary philosophical semantics, such as the twin earth arguments, are shown to be unfounded.

Download or read book Ethical and Religious Thought in Analytic Philosophy of Language written by Quentin Smith and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a critical history of analytic philosophy from its inception in the late-19th century to the present day. The book focuses on the connections between the four leading movements in the field - logical realism, logical positivism, ordinary language analysis and linguistic essentialism.

Download or read book Moral Skepticism written by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-19 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "All contentious moral issues - from gay marriage to abortion and affirmative action - raise difficult questions about the justification of moral beliefs. How can we be justified in holding on to our own moral beliefs while recognizing that other intelligent people feel quite differently and that many moral beliefs are distorted by self-interest and by corrupt cultures? Even when almost everyone agrees - e.g. that experimental surgery without consent is immoral - can we know that such beliefs are true? If so, how?" "These profound questions lead to fundamental issues about the nature of morality, language, metaphysics, justification, and knowledge. They also have tremendous practical importance in handling controversial moral questions in health care ethics, politics, law, and education. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong here provides an extensive overview of these difficult subjects, looking at a wide variety of questions, including: Are any moral beliefs true? Are any justified? What is justified belief? The second half of the book explores various moral theories that have grappled with these issues, such as naturalism, normativism, intuitionism, and coherentism, all of which are attempts to answer moral skepticism. Sinnott-Armstrong argues that all these approaches fail to rule out moral nihilism - the view that nothing is really morally wrong or right, bad or good. Then he develops his own novel theory, - "moderate Pyrrhonian moral skepticism"--Which concludes that some moral beliefs can be justified out of a modest contrast class but no moral beliefs can be justified out of an extreme contrast class. While explaining this original position and criticizing alternatives, Sinnott-Armstrong provides a wide-ranging survey of the epistemology of moral beliefs."--Jacket.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind written by Brian McLaughlin and published by Oxford University Press (UK). This book was released on 2009-01-15 with total page 833 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the most authoritative and comprehensive guide ever published to the state of the art in philosophy of mind, a flourishing area of research. An outstanding team of contributors offer 45 new critical surveys of a wide range of topics.

Download or read book The Scientific Basis of Morals written by William Kingdon Clifford and published by . This book was released on 1884 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Moral Beliefs and Moral Theory written by M.G. Forrester and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some time ago I wrote a book (Moral Language, 1982) in which I argued that moral judgments are capable of being true ('truth-apt,' to use a current phrase, or descriptive and having truth-value, to use a more traditional term), that the methods of discovering moral facts are fundamentally similar to those of discovering non-moral facts, and that moral judgments may be true. What I did not do at that time was to develop a moral theory which would demonstrate how the method of discovering moral truths would work and what the criteria of truth actually are. In a later work (Persons, Animals, and Fetuses, 1996) I did propose a moral theory as to what the criteria for moral truth are; however, I presented it primarily as an introduction to the discussion of several practical ethical issues and did not argue fully for that theory. It is high time that I did so, because without showing that such a theory can be developed my defense of moral realism is incomplete. It is all very well to say that we can discover what moral beliefs are true, but unless we can demonstrate just which beliefs are true, the thesis that we can discover this truth cannot be fully defended. For this reason the biggest (although not the only) challenge to showing that ethical objectivity is possible is the presence of moral disagreement - and the contention of many that such disagreement cannot be definitively resolved.

Download or read book The Ethics of Belief written by William Kingdon Clifford and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-05-29 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book combines the two essays which comprise the famous philosophical exchange between the mathematician William Kingdon Clifford and William James, a psychologist and philosopher. Famous for articulating their arguments and discussing morality surrounding belief, these two papers are united in a single edition.

Download or read book Moral Dilemmas written by Philippa Foot and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2002-10-17 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral Dilemmas is the second volume of collected essays by the eminent moral philosopher Philippa Foot. It fills the gap between her famous 1978 collection Virtues and Vices (now reissued) and her acclaimed monograph Natural Goodness, published in 2001. Moral Dilemmas presents the best of Professor Foot's work from the late 1970s to the 1990s. In these essays she develops further her influential critique of the 'non-cognitivist' approaches that have dominated moral philosophy over the last fifty years. She shows why it is a mistake to think of morality in terms of special psychological states, expressed in special kinds of judgement and a special 'moral' kind of language. Instead she portrays thoughts about the goodness of human will and action as a particular case of the evaluation of other operations of human beings, and indeed of all living things. Among other topics, she discusses the nature of moral judgement, practical rationality, and the conflict of virtue with desire and self-interest. Moral Dilemmas, alongside Professor Foot's other two books, completes the summation of her distinctive and lasting contribution to twentieth-century moral philosophy.

Download or read book Religion and Morality written by D. Z. Phillips and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflection on religion inevitably involves consideration of its relation to morality. When great evil is done to human beings, we may feel that something absolute has been violated. Can that sense, which is related to gratitude for existence, be expressed without religious concepts? Can we express central religious concerns, such as losing the self, while abandoning any religious metaphysic? Is moral obligation itself dependent on divine commands if it is to be objective, or is morality not only independent of religion, but its accuser if God is said to allow horrendous evils? In any case, what happens to the absolute claims of religion in what is, undeniably, a morally pluralistic world? These are the central questions discussed by philosophers of religion and moral philosophers in this collection. They do so in ways which bring new aspects to bear on these traditional issues.