Download or read book Engaging Reason written by Joseph Raz and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Engaging Reason on the Theory of Value and Action written by and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Engaging Reason written by Joseph Raz and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2000-01-13 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging Reason offers a penetrating examination of a set of fundamental questions about human thought and action. In these tightly argued and interconnected essays Joseph Raz examines the nature of normativity, reason, and the will; the justification of reason; and the objectivity of value. He argues for the centrality, but also demonstrates the limits, of reason in action and belief. He suggests that our life is most truly our own when our various emotions, hopes, desires, intentions, and actions are guided by reason. He explores the universality of value and of principles of reason on one side, and on the other side their dependence on social practices, and their susceptibility to change and improvement. He concludes with an illuminating explanation of self-interest and its relation to impersonal values in general and to morality in particular. Joseph Raz has been since the 1970s a prominent, original, and widely admired contributor to the study of norms, values, and reasons, not just in philosophy but in political and legal theory. This volume displays the power and unity of his thought on these subjects, and will be essential reading for all who work on them.

Download or read book Reason and Value Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz written by R. Jay Wallace and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-04 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reason and Value collects fifteen brand-new papers by leading contemporary philosophers on themes from the moral philosophy of Joseph Raz. The subtlety and power of Raz's reflections on ethical topics - including especially his explorations of the connections between practical reason and the theory of value - make his writings a fertile source for anyone working in this area. The volume honours Raz's accomplishments in the area of ethical theorizing, and will contribute toan enhanced appreciation of the significance of his work for the subject.

Download or read book Reason and Value written by R. Jay Wallace and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2004-03-04 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reason and Value collects 15 new papers by leading contemporary philosophers on themes from the work of Joseph Raz. Raz has made major contributions in a wide range of areas, including jurisprudence, political philosophy, and the theory of practical reason; but all of his work displays a deep engagement with central themes in moral philosophy. The subtlety and power of Raz's reflections on ethical topics make his writings a fertile source for anyone working in this area. Especially significant are his explorations of the connections between practical reason and the theory of value, which constitute a sustained and penetrating treatment of a set of issues at the very center of moral philosophy as it is practiced today. The contributors to the volume acknowledge the importance of Raz's contributions by engaging critically with his positions and offering independent perspectives on the topics that he has addressed. The volume aims both to honour Raz's accomplishments in the area of ethical theorizing, and to contribute to an enhanced appreciation of the significance of his work for the subject. Contributors: Michael E. Bratman, John Broome, Ruth Chang, Jonathan Dancy, Harry Frankfurt, Ulrike Heuer, Philip Pettit, Peter Railton, Donald H. Regan, T. M. Scanlon, Samuel Scheffler, Seana Valentine Shiffrin, Michael Smith, Michael Stocker, Michael Thompson, R. Jay Wallace.

Download or read book Contextuality in Practical Reason written by A. W. Price and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-03-27 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A. W. Price explores the varying ways in which context is relevant to our reasoning about what to do. He investigates the role of context in our interpretation and assessment of practical inferences (especially from one intention to another), practical judgements (especially involving the term 'ought'), inferences from conditional 'ought'-judgements, and the ascription to agents of reasons for action. Practical inferences are subject not to a special logic, but to a teleology that they share with action itself. Their inherent purpose is to forward an end of action, and not to be logically valid. Practical judgements are commonly to be understood relatively to an implicit context of goals and circumstances. Apparently conflicting or imprudent 'ought's can show up as true once they are interpreted contextually, with an eye to different ends, and different aspects of a situation. This makes acceptable certain patterns of inference that would otherwise license counter-intuitive conclusions. What reasons for action are ascribable to an agent depends both on the context of action, and on the deliberative context. Facts tell in favour of actions against a background of particular circumstances, and in ways whose relevance to an ascription to an agent of a reason for action depends upon the perspective within which the ascription is made.

Download or read book Reasons written by Eric Wiland and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-05-17 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we say we 'act for a reason', what do we mean? And what do reasons have to do with being good or bad? Introducing readers to a foundational topic in ethics, Eric Wiland considers the reasons for which we act. You do things for reasons, and reasons in some sense justify what you do. Further, your reasons belong to you, and you know the reasons for which you act in a distinctively first-personal way. Wiland lays out and critically reviews some of the most popular contemporary accounts of how reasons can function in all these ways, accounts such as psychologism, factualism, hybrid theories, constitutivist theories, and finally Anscombean views of reasons. Reasons also includes a brief guide to further reading to help readers master this important topic in contemporary writing in ethics and the philosophy of action.

Download or read book Future People written by Tim Mulgan and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-01-05 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we owe to our descendants? How do we balance their needs against our own? Tim Mulgan develops a new theory of our obligations to future generations, based on a new rule-consequentialist account of the morality of individual reproduction. He argues that the resulting theory accounts for a wide range of independently plausible intuitions - covering individual morality, intergenerational justice, and international justice. In particular, the moderate consequentialist approach is superior to its two main rivals in this area - person-affecting theories and traditional consequentialism. The former fall foul of Parfit's Non-Identity Problem, while the latter are invariably implausibly demanding. Mulgan also claims that most puzzles in contemporary value theory (such as Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion) are actually puzzles in the theory of right action, and can only be solved if we abandon strict consequentialism for a more moderate alternative. The heart of the book is the first systematic exploration of the rule-consequentialist account of the morality of individual reproduction. Mulgan demostrates that this account is superior to all available alternatives, both consequentialist and non-consequentialist. Once we recognise the intergenerational dimension, moral and political philosophy cannot be considered in isolation. The latter must be founded on the former. Rule consequentialism provides the best foundation for a theory of intergenerational justice. Future People brings together several different contemporary philosophical discussions: obligations to future generations, the morality of individual reproduction, the demands of morality, and international justice. While the focus is on developing a new account, there are also substantial discussions of alternative views, especially contract-based accounts of intergenerational justice and competing forms of consequentialism.

Download or read book Contrastive Reasons written by Justin Snedegar and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Justin Snedegar develops and defends contrastivism about reasons. This is the view that normative reasons are fundamentally reasons for or against actions or attitudes only relative to sets of alternatives. Simply put, reasons are always reasons to do one thing rather than another, instead of simply being reasons to do something, full stop. Work on reasons has become central to several areas of philosophy, but besides a couple of exceptions, this view has not been discussed. Contrastive Reasons makes the case that this is a mistake. Snedegar develops three kinds of arguments for contrastivism. First, contrastivism gives us the best account of our ordinary discourse about reasons. Second, contrastivism best makes sense of widespread ideas about what reasons are, including the idea that they favor the things they are reasons for and the idea that they involve the promotion of certain kinds of objectives. Third, contrastivism has attractive applications in different areas of normative philosophy in which reasons are important. These include debates in normative ethics about whether better than might be intransitive and debates in both epistemology and practical reasoning about the rationality of withholding or suspending belief and intention.

Download or read book Being for Beauty written by Dominic McIver Lopes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No values figure as pervasively and intimately in our lives as beauty and other aesthetic values. They animate the arts, as well as design, fashion, food, and entertainment. They orient us upon the natural world. And we even find them in the deepest insights of science and mathematics. For centuries, however, philosophers and other thinkers have identified beauty with what brings pleasure. Concerned that aesthetic hedonism has led us to question beauty's significance, Dominic McIver Lopes offers an entirely new theory of beauty in this volume. Beauty engages us in action, in concert with others, in the context of social networks. Lopes's 'network theory' explains the social dimension of aesthetic agency, the tie between beauty and pleasure, the importance of disagreement in matters of taste, and the reality of aesthetic values as denizens of the natural world. The two closing chapters shed light on why aesthetic engagement is so important to quality of life, and why it deserves (and gets) lavish public support. Being for Beauty offers a fresh contribution to aesthetics but also to thinking about metanormativity, the metaphysics of value, and virtue theory.

Download or read book Selling Transformed written by Philip Squire and published by Kogan Page Publishers. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn how to develop the values proven to boost sales performance, to ensure customers choose you over the competition in today's crowded marketplace. For years, sales people have struggled with cliched views of how they sell, while at the same time customers have become more sophisticated and discerning, stopping off at different or unconventional places in the sales funnel. The result is that the technique of sales people controlling the sales conversation and learning how to influence the customer no longer works. Selling Transformed introduces the new world of selling, and addresses the reasons why sales people are so poorly perceived. Selling Transformed provides fresh, tangible ideas on how to develop better sales practices. Focusing as much on the customers as on the sellers, it explains key theories of selling effectively and introduces four proven strategies that are based on the values customers look for in sales people: authenticity, client-centricity, proactive creativity and being tactfully audacious. Explaining what customers look for in sales people, and advising on how to develop and deliver these values, this is a new type of sales manual guaranteed to improve sales performance.

Download or read book Assuming Responsibility written by Gilbert L Stark Professor of Christian Ethics Jennifer A Herdt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent decades have witnessed an enthusiastic retrieval of eudaimonism, according to which the virtuous life is the happy life. But the critique launched by Kant - that eudaimonism is egoistic and distorts the character of duty or obligation - has persisted. Should I develop the virtues because these are the traits I need in order to flourish? Is it facts about my own happiness that determine my obligations to others? In this book, Jennifer Herdt deftly sifts through these debates, showing why we should embrace 'ecstatic' or 'goodness-prior' eudaimonism while rejecting 'welfare-prior' forms of eudaimonism. Grasping the character of ecstatic eudaimonism, she argues, has major implications, overcoming the common assumption of a sharp break between pagan and Christian eudaimonism, as well as of a late medieval or Protestant repudiation of eudaimonism in favor of divine command theory. Agents cannot rightly respond to the goods they encounter unless they respond to them precisely as good, and not merely as a means to promoting their own welfare; in responding well, their agency is thereby necessarily perfected. In conversation with vital strands of contemporary moral philosophy, Herdt goes on to articulate the distinctive character of obligation as a feature of accountability relations among agents. Assuming Responsibility offers a fresh point of departure for theological and philosophical approaches to virtue ethics, moral agency, and the contested relationship between the good and the right.

Download or read book Mimetic Politics written by Roberto Farneti and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: War, violence, and the disruption of social orders are critical areas of focus in mimetic theory, and a mimetic perspective applied to the study of politics illuminates social processes and phenomena over and beyond typical explanations offered by mainstream political science. Unlike traditional political science ontology, the mimetic perspective highlights neither individuals nor groups, but “doubles,” or “mimetic twins.” According to this perspective, in order to grasp the fundamental rationales of political processes, we need to concentrate on the distinctive propensity of either individuals or groups to engage in mimetic contests resulting from their unreflective disposition to imitate each other’s desire. This disposition has been strikingly described by the French-American anthropologist Rene Girard: “Once his basic needs are satisfied (indeed sometimes even before), man is subject to intense desires, though he may not know precisely for what.” Via mimetic theory, Farneti highlights phenomena that political scientists have consistently failed to notice, such as reciprocal imitation as the fundamental cause of human discord, the mechanisms of spontaneous polarization in human conflicts (i.e., the emergence of dyads or “doubles”), and the strange and ever-growing resemblance of the mimetic rivals, which is precisely what pushes them to annihilate each other.

Download or read book Semantics for Reasons written by Bryan R. Weaver and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Semantics for Reasons is a book about what we mean when we talk about reasons. It not only brings together the theory of reasons and natural language semantics in original ways but also sketches out a litany of implications for metaethics and the philosophy of normativity. In their account of how the language of reasons works, Bryan R. Weaver and Kevin Scharp propose and defend a view called Question Under Discussion (QUD) Reasons Contextualism. They use this view to argue for a series of novel positions on the ontology of reasons, indexical facts, the reasons-to-be- rational debate, moral reasons, and the reasons-first approach.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of the Mind written by Harold Pashler and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2013-01-14 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's hard to conceive of a topic of more broad and personal interest than the study of the mind. In addition to its traditional investigation by the disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience, the mind has also been a focus of study in the fields of philosophy, economics, anthropology, linguistics, computer science, molecular biology, education, and literature. In all these approaches, there is an almost universal fascination with how the mind works and how it affects our lives and our behavior. Studies of the mind and brain have crossed many exciting thresholds in recent years, and the study of mind now represents a thoroughly cross-disciplinary effort. Researchers from a wide range of disciplines seek answers to such questions as: What is mind? How does it operate? What is consciousness? This encyclopedia brings together scholars from the entire range of mind-related academic disciplines from across the arts and humanities, social sciences, life sciences, and computer science and engineering to explore the multidimensional nature of the human mind.

Download or read book New Essays on the Normativity of Law written by Stefano Bertea and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-08-10 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important part of the legal domain has to do with rule-governed conduct, and is expressed by the use of notions such as norm, obligation, duty and right. These require us to acknowledge the normative dimension of law. Normativity is, accordingly, to be regarded as a central feature of law lying at the heart of any comprehensive legal-theoretical project. The essays collected in this book are meant to further our understanding of the normativity of law. More specifically, the book stages a thorough discussion of legal normativity as approached from three strands of legal thought that are particularly influential and which play a key role in shaping debates on the normative dimension of law: the theory of planning agency, legal conventionalism and the constitutivist approach. While the essays presented here do not aspire to give an exhaustive picture of these debates - an aspiration that would be, by its very nature, unrealistic - they do provide the reader with some authoritative statements of some widely discussed families of views of legal normativity. In pursuing this objective, these essays also encourage a dialogue between different traditions of study of legal normativity, stimulating those who would not otherwise look outside their tradition of thought to engage with new ideas and, ultimately, to arrive at a more comprehensive account of the normativity of law.

Download or read book Structures of Agency written by Michael E. Bratman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-04 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of published and unpublished essays by distinguished philosopher Michael E. Bratman of Stanford University. They revolve around his influential theory, know as the "planning theory of intention and agency." Bratman's primary concern is with what he calls "strong" forms of human agency--including forms of human agency that are the target of our talk about self-determination, self-government, and autonomy. These essays are unified and cohesive in theme, and will be of interest to philosophers in ethics and metaphysics.