Download or read book The Demands of Reason written by Casey Perin and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-04-22 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sextus Empiricus' Outlines of Pyrrhonism is one of the most important and influential texts in the history of Greek philosophy. In The Demands of Reason Casey Perin exams those aspects of Pyrrhonian Scepticism as Sextus describes it in the Outlines that are of special philosophical significance: its commitment to the search for truth and to certain principles of rationality, its scope, and its consequences for action and agency. Perin argues that the Sceptic is engaged in the search for truth and that since this is so, the Sceptic aims to satisfy certain basic rational requirements. He explains how the fact that the Sceptic has this aim makes it necessary, as Sextus says it is, for the Sceptic to suspend judgment under certain conditions. Perin defends an interpretation of the scope of Scepticism according to which the Sceptic has no beliefs about how things are rather than merely appear to him to be. He then explores whether, and how, Sextus can respond to the objection that since the Sceptic lacks beliefs of this kind, he cannot act and Scepticism is not, as Sextus claims it is, a possible way of life.
Download or read book Meeting the Demands of Reason written by Jay Bergman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Soviet physicist, dissident, and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. The first Russian to have been so recognized, Sakharov in his Nobel lecture held that humanity had a "sacred endeavor" to create a life worthy of its potential, that "we must make good the demands of reason," by confronting the dangers threatening the world, both then and now: nuclear annihilation, famine, pollution, and the denial of human rights.Meeting the Demands of Reason provides a comprehensive account of Sakharov's life and intellectual development, focusing on his political thought and the effect his ideas had on Soviet society. Jay Bergman places Sakharov's dissidence squarely within the ethical legacy of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, inculcated by his father and other family members from an early age.In 1948, one year after receiving his doctoral candidate's degree in physics, Sakharov began work on the Soviet hydrogen bomb and later received both the Stalin and the Lenin prizes for his efforts. Although as a nuclear physicist he had firsthand experience of honors and privileges inaccessible to ordinary citizens, Sakharov became critical of certain policies of the Soviet government in the late 1950s. He never renounced his work on nuclear weaponry, but eventually grew concerned about the environmental consequences of testing and feared unrestrained nuclear proliferation.Bergman shows that these issues led Sakharov to see the connection between his work in science and his responsibilities to the political life of his country. In the late 1960s, Sakharov began to condemn the Soviet system as a whole in the name of universal human rights. By the 1970s, he had become, with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the most recognized Soviet dissident in the West, which afforded him a measure of protection from the authorities. In 1980, however, he was exiled to the closed city of Gorky for protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1986, the new Gorbachev regime allowed him to return to Moscow, where he played a central role as both supporter and critic in the years of perestroika.Two years after Sakharov's death, the Soviet Union collapsed, and in the courageous example of his unyielding commitment to human rights, skillfully recounted by Bergman, Sakharov remains an enduring inspiration for all those who would tell truth to power.
Download or read book The Moral Demands of Affluence written by Garrett Cullity and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2006-09-21 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How much are we morally required to do to help people who are much worse off than us? On any credible moral outlook, other people's pressing need for assistance can ground moral requirements on us to help them—-requirements of beneficence. How far do those requirements extend? One way to think about this is by means of a simple analogy: an analogy between joining in efforts to help people at a distance and rescuing a needy person yourself, directly. Part I of Garrett Cullity's book examines this analogy. In some ways, the analogy is not only simple, but politically and metaphysically simplistic. However, it contains an important truth: we are morally required to help other people, indirectly as well as directly. But the number of needy people in the world is enormous, and their need is very great. Once we start to recognize requirements to help them, when is it morally acceptable to stop? Cullity answers this question in Part II. Examining the nature of beneficence, he argues that its requirements only make sense on the assumption that many of the interests we share in common-rich and poor alike-are interests it is not wrong to pursue.
Download or read book What Reason Demands written by Rüdiger Bittner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989-04-28 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the arguments in favor of moral demands in contemporary ethical theory.
Download or read book Epistemic Risk and the Demands of Rationality written by Richard Pettigrew and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-14 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How much does rationality constrain what we should believe on the basis of our evidence? According to this book, not very much. For most people and most bodies of evidence, there is a wide range of beliefs that rationality permits them to have in response to that evidence. The argument, which takes inspiration from William James' ideas in 'The Will to Believe', proceeds from two premises. The first is a theory about the basis of epistemic rationality. It's called epistemic utility theory, and it says that what it is epistemically rational for you to believe is what it would be rational for you to choose if you were given the chance to pick your beliefs and, when picking them, you were to care only about their epistemic value. So, to say which beliefs are permitted, we must say how to measure epistemic value, and which decision rule to use when picking your beliefs. The second premise is a claim about attitudes to epistemic risk, and it says that rationality permits many different such attitudes. These attitudes can show up in epistemic utility theory in two ways: in the way you measure epistemic value; and in the decision rule you use to pick beliefs. This book explores the latter. The result is permissivism about epistemic rationality: different attitudes to epistemic risk lead to different choices of prior beliefs; given most bodies of evidence, different priors lead to different posteriors; and even once we fix your attitudes to epistemic risk, if they are at all risk-inclined, there is a range of different priors and therefore different posteriors they permit.
Download or read book The Demands of Taste in Kant s Aesthetics written by Brent Kalar and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2006-10-15 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Typically philosophers have either viewed beauty as objective and judgments of beauty as universally valid, or else they have viewed beauty as subjective and regarded judgments of beauty as merely private preferences. Immanuel Kant is famous for his unique third path. Kant argues that beauty is subjective, but the judgment of taste about beauty is capable of universal validity. In his view, the beautiful is not a feature of objects themselves, but merely represents the way we respond to objects. Furthermore, the judgment of taste about beauty is a merely 'aesthetic' judgment - i.e., one based on a feeling of pleasure we take in the object. The judgment of taste, on the other hand, possesses 'universal validity': to call something beautiful is implicitly to 'demand' that all others find it beautiful as well. Kant's views about the taste for the beautiful have long been the subject of controversy. Scholars have differed over the interpretation of the demand contained in a judgment of taste and whether Kant's attempt to legitimate this demand is successful. Brent Kalar argues that the demands of taste should be understood as involving a uniquely aesthetic normativity rooted in Kant's cognitive psychology. If the basis of aesthetic pleasure in the activity of the cognitive faculties is properly understood, then Kant's attempt to legitimate the demands of taste may be regarded as a success. This leads Kalar to give a new interpretation of the nature of the beautiful according to Kant that re-examines the relationship between 'free play' and the 'form of purposiveness' in Kant's aesthetics, and restores the 'aesthetic ideas' to their rightful centrality in Kant's theory.
Download or read book The Original Sceptics written by Myles Burnyeat and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of five essays debating the nature and scope of ancient scepticism, and providing an introduction to the thought of the original sceptics. The book seeks to shed new light on how their thought relates to sceptical arguments in modern philosophy.
Download or read book Kant and the Demands of Self Consciousness written by Pierre Keller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study offers a striking new interpretation of Kant's theory of self-consciousness.
Download or read book Demands of Citizenship written by Catriona McKinnon and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2004-12-30 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the seventeenth century liberal thinkers have been interested in the rights of individuals and their capacities to engage as free equals in the political activity of their community. However, as many in the republican tradition have noted, the maintenance of certain types of communities - predicated on broadly shared ethical expectations, modes of communication and patterns of activity - is a precondition of the meaningful exercise of citizenship rights.This volume presents essays from many of the major names in the field, exploring citizenship from a fresh perspective. After two decades of strident individualism, in the light of claims that the liberal democratic state is under threat of collapse from the forces of globalization, and in the midst of a theoretical debate about the possible and desirable limits of individual autonomy, they argue that it is high time to go beyond the standard concern of what can be ascribed to citizens. We must ask what should be demanded of them, in the name of the protection of liberty, equality and stability.
Download or read book Religion a Rational Demand written by George John Kirn and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Moral Demands of Affluence written by Garrett Cullity and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-21 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given that there is a forceful case for thinking that the affluent are morally required to devote a substantial proportion of what they have to helping the poor, Garrett Cullity examines, refines and defends an argument of this form. He then identifies its limits.
Download or read book Rights and Demands written by Margaret Gilbert and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Margaret Gilbert presents the first full-length treatment of a central class of rights: demand-rights. To have such a right is to have the standing or authority to demand a particular action of another person. Gilbert argues that joint commitment is a ground of demand-rights, and gives joint commitment accounts of both agreements and promises. [Source : éditeur].
Download or read book Mind written by and published by . This book was released on 1922 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A quarterly review of philosophy.
Download or read book The Man of Reason written by Genevieve Lloyd and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition of Genevieve Lloyd's classic study of the maleness of reason in philosophy contains a new introduction and bibliographical essay assessing the book's place in the explosion of writing and gender since 1984.
Download or read book Tragic Dilemmas in Christian Ethics written by Kate Jackson-Meyer and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tragic Dilemmas in Christian Ethics develops a new theological understanding of tragic dilemmas rooted in moral philosophy, contemporary case studies, and psychological literature on moral injury. Both academically rigorous and deeply pastoral, Jackson-Meyer offers practical strategies to Christian communities for dealing with tragic dilemmas.
Download or read book Reasoned Administration and Democratic Legitimacy written by Jerry L. Mashaw and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-27 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reasoned Administration and Democratic Legitimacy: How Administrative Law Supports Democratic Government explores the fundamental bases for the legitimacy of the modern administrative state. While some have argued that modern administrative states are a threat to liberty and at war with democratic governance, Jerry L. Mashaw demonstrates that in fact reasoned administration is more respectful of rights and equal citizenship and truer to democratic values than lawmaking by either courts or legislatures. His account features the law's demand for reason giving and reasonableness as the crucial criterion for the legality of administrative action. In an argument combining history, sociology, political theory and law, this book demonstrates how administrative law's demand for reasoned administration structures administrative decision-making, empowers actors within and outside the government, and supports a complex vision of democratic self-rule.
Download or read book Spheres of Reason written by Simon Robertson and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spheres of Reason comprises nine original essays on the philosophy of normativity, written by a combination of internationally renowned and up-and-coming philosophers working at the forefront of the topic. On one broad construal the normative sphere concerns norms, requirements, oughts, reasons, reasoning, rationality, justification, value. These notions play a central role in both everyday thought and philosophical enquiry; but there remains considerable disagreement about how to understand normativity — its nature, metaphysical and epistemological bases — and how different aspects of normative thought connect to one another. As well as exploring traditional and ongoing issues central to our understanding of normativity — especially those concerning reasons, reasoning and rationality — the volume's essays develop new approaches to and perspectives in the field. Notably, they make a timely and distinctive contribution to normativity as it features across each of the practical, epistemic and affective regions of thought, including the important issue of how normativity as it applies to action, belief and feeling may (or may not) be connected. In doing so, the essays engage topics within the philosophy of mind and action, epistemology, normative ethics and metaethics. With an editor's introduction providing a comprehensive and accessible background to the subject, Spheres of Reason is essential reading to anyone interested in the nature of normativity and the bearing it has on human thought.
