Search Results

Pascal's Wager: Pragmatic Arguments and Belief in God

Jeff Jordan

What if there is no strong evidence that God exists? Is belief in God when faced with a lack of evidence illegitimate and improper? Evidentialism answers yes. According to Evidentialism, it is ... More

What if there is no strong evidence that God exists? Is belief in God when faced with a lack of evidence illegitimate and improper? Evidentialism answers yes. According to Evidentialism, it is impermissible to believe any proposition lacking adequate evidence. And, if any thesis enjoys the status of a dogma among philosophers, it is Evidentialism. Presenting a direct challenge to Evidentialism are pragmatic arguments for theism, which are designed to support belief in the absence of adequate evidence. Pascal's Wager is the most prominent theistic pragmatic argument, and issues in epistemology, the ethics of belief, and decision theory, as well as philosophical theology, all intersect at the Wager. This book explores various theistic pragmatic arguments and the objections employed against them. It presents a new version of the Wager, the so-called ‘Jamesian Wager’, and argues that this survives the objections hurled against theistic pragmatic arguments and provides strong support for theistic belief. Objections found in Voltaire, Hume, and Nietzsche against the Wager are scrutinized, as are objections issued by Richard Swinburne, Richard Gale, and other contemporary philosophers. The ethics of belief, the many-gods objection, the problem of infinite utilities, and the propriety of a hope-based acceptance are also examined.Less

Spectres of False Divinity: Hume's Moral Atheism

Thomas Holden

This book presents an historical and critical interpretation of Hume's rejection of the existence of a deity with moral attributes. It argues that in Hume's view no first cause or designer ... More

This book presents an historical and critical interpretation of Hume's rejection of the existence of a deity with moral attributes. It argues that in Hume's view no first cause or designer responsible for the ordered universe could possibly have moral attributes; nor could the existence (or non-existence) of such a being have any real implications for human practice or conduct. Hume's case for this ‘moral atheism’ is a central plank of both his naturalistic agenda in metaphysics and his secularizing program in moral theory. It complements his wider critique of traditional theism, and threatens to rule out any religion that would make claims on moral practice. This book situates Hume's commitment to moral atheism in its historical and philosophical context, offers a systematic interpretation of his case for divine amorality, and shows how Hume can endorse moral atheism while maintaining his sceptical attitude toward traditional forms of cosmological and theological speculation.Less

Coleridge and Scepticism

Ben Brice

Coleridge tended to view objects in the natural world as if they were capable of articulating truths about his own poetic psyche. He also regarded such objects as if they were capable of illustrating ... More

Coleridge tended to view objects in the natural world as if they were capable of articulating truths about his own poetic psyche. He also regarded such objects as if they were capable of illustrating and embodying truths about a transcendent spiritual realm. After 1805, he posited a series of analogical ‘likenesses’ connecting the rational principles that inform human cognition with the rational principles that he believed informed the teleological structure of the natural world. Although he intuitively felt that nature had been constructed as a ‘mirror’ of the human mind, and that both mind and nature were ‘mirrors’ of a transcendent spiritual realm, he never found an explanation of such experiences that was fully immune to his own sceptical doubts. This book examines the nature of these doubts, and offers a new explanatory account of why Coleridge was unable to affirm his religious intuitions. The book situates his work within two important intellectual traditions. The first — a tradition of epistemological ‘piety’ or ‘modesty’ — informs the work of key precursors such as Kant, Hume, Locke, Boyle, and Calvin, and relates to Protestant critiques of natural reason. The second — a tradition of theological voluntarism — emphasizes the omnipotence and transcendence of God, as well as the arbitrary relationship subsisting between God and the created world. It is argued that Coleridge's familiarity with both of these interrelated intellectual traditions undermined his confidence in his ability to read the symbolic language of God in nature.Less

Hume's Skeptical Crisis: A Textual Study

Robert J. Fogelin

This work is a narrative study of the interactions between Hume's naturalism and his skepticism as they unfold in the Treatise of Human Nature and the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. More ... More

This work is a narrative study of the interactions between Hume's naturalism and his skepticism as they unfold in the Treatise of Human Nature and the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. More specifically, it examines the way in which the relationship between Hume's naturalism and skepticism shifts dramatically as he delves more deeply into the operations of the human understanding. At first, Hume's skeptical arguments largely play a subservient role of eliminating intellectualist competitors to his naturalistic account of belief formation. This is true, with one minor exception, in the first three parts of book 1 of the Treatise. The situation changes radically in part 4 of book 1, where Hume's investigation of human faculties reveals them to be capricious and unreliable. Hume finds the situation so dire that he comes to question whether anyone, himself included, possesses mental faculties capable of producing a science of human nature. This is Hume's skeptical crisis. The remainder of the book examines Hume's various efforts to extract himself from this difficulty, ending, in the Enquiry, with the claim that a suitable mitigated, or moderate, form of skepticism can arise by bringing radical Pyrrhonian doubts into a proper balance with common instinctive beliefs.Less

Moral Sentimentalism

Michael Slote

There has been a great deal of interest in moral sentimentalism in recent years, but most of that interest has been exclusively either in metaethical questions about the meaning of moral terms or in ... More

There has been a great deal of interest in moral sentimentalism in recent years, but most of that interest has been exclusively either in metaethical questions about the meaning of moral terms or in normative issues about benevolence, caring, and compassion and their place in the moral life. This book seeks to deal with both sorts of issues and to do so primarily in terms of the notion of empathy. Hume tried to do something like this more than two centuries ago, though he didn't have the word empathy and used the term sympathy instead. But Hume misconstrued the phenomenology of moral approval and disapproval, and the nascent theories of moral meaning he grounded in approval and disapproval allow for (much) less objectivity than moral judgments seem to possess. The present book uses a semi‐Kripkean reference‐fixing view of terms like right and wrong to show how moral claims can be objectively valid a priori and yet at the same time action‐guiding and motivating — something that Kantian ethics seeks to provide, but sentimentalism turns out to be more capable of giving us. In addition to dealing with semantic issues, this book shows how sentimentalist forms of moral education and moral learning are possible; and in its later chapters, it also focuses on normative issues of public morality: discussing respect, autonomy, justice, and objectivity itself in strictly sentimentalist care‐ethical terms and demonstrating that such an approach can be thoroughly feminist in its implications and goals. Rationalism now dominates the scene in moral philosophy, but there are signs of change, and this book works to encourage those possibilities.Less

Manifest Activity: Thomas Reid's Theory of Action

Gideon Yaffe

Manifest Activity examines Thomas Reid's efforts to provide answers to a host of traditional philosophical questions concerning the nature of the will, the powers of human beings, motivation, and the ... More

Manifest Activity examines Thomas Reid's efforts to provide answers to a host of traditional philosophical questions concerning the nature of the will, the powers of human beings, motivation, and the relation between human action and natural change. The concept of ‘active power’ stands at the centre of Reid's philosophy of action. He holds that actions are all and only the events of which some creature is the ‘efficient cause’, and he thinks a creature is the efficient cause of an event just in case it has the power to bring that event about and exerts it. Reid's conception both of human actions and changes in nature is deeply teleological. He holds that to exert a power is to direct an event towards an end, and he holds that all changes, whether actions or events in nature, flow from the exertion of power. The book explains the details of this view, Reid's reasons for holding it, and its implications to our understanding of action, agency, and our relation to the natural world.Less

Powers: A Study in Metaphysics

George Molnar

Stephen Mumford (ed.)

This book sees that the solution to a number of the problems of contemporary philosophy lies in the development of an alternative to Hume's metaphysics. This alternative would have real causal powers ... More

This book sees that the solution to a number of the problems of contemporary philosophy lies in the development of an alternative to Hume's metaphysics. This alternative would have real causal powers at its centre. This book sets about developing a thorough account of powers that might persuade those who remain, perhaps unknowingly, in the grip of Hume's assumptions. This book shows both that the notion of a power is central and that it could serve to dispel a number of long-standing philosophical problems. This book's account of powers is as realistic as any that has appeared so far, and shows that dispositions are as real as any other properties. Specifically, they do not depend on their manifestations for their existence; nevertheless, they are directed towards such manifestations. The book thus appropriates the notion of intentionality from Brentano and argues that it is the essential characteristic of powers. It offers a persuasive case for the existence of some basic and ungrounded powers, thus ruling out the reducibility of the dispositional to the non-dispositional. However, the book does allow that there are non-power properties as well as power properties. In this respect, the book's final position is dualistic.Less

Mind and Morality: An Examination of Hume's Moral Psychology

John Bricke

This is a philosophical study of the theory of mind and morality that David Hume developed in his Treatise of Human Nature and other writings. The chief elements in this theory of mind are Hume's ... More

This is a philosophical study of the theory of mind and morality that David Hume developed in his Treatise of Human Nature and other writings. The chief elements in this theory of mind are Hume's accounts of reasons for action and of the complex interrelations of desire, volition, and affection. On this basis, the book lays out and defends Hume's thoroughgoing non-cognitivist theory of moral judgement, and shows that cognitivist and standard sentimentalist readings of Hume are unsatisfactory, as are the usual interpretations of his views on the connections between morality, justice, and convention.Less

Hume Variations

Jerry A. Fodor

This book looks to David Hume for help in advancing our understanding of the mind. The book claims his Treatise of Human Nature as the foundational document of cognitive science: it launched the ... More

This book looks to David Hume for help in advancing our understanding of the mind. The book claims his Treatise of Human Nature as the foundational document of cognitive science: it launched the project of constructing an empirical psychology on the basis of a representational theory of mind. Going back to this work after more than 250 years we find that Hume is remarkably perceptive about the components and structure that a theory of mind requires. Careful study of the Treatise helps us to see what's amiss with much 20th-century philosophy of mind, and to get on the right track. Hume says in the Treatise that his main project is to construct a theory of human nature and, in particular, a theory of the mind. This book examines his account of cognition and how it is grounded in his ‘theory of ideas’. It discusses such key topics as the distinction between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ ideas, the thesis that an idea is some kind of picture, and the roles that ‘association’ and ‘imagination’ play in cognitive processes. It argues that the theory of ideas, as Hume develops it, is both historically and ideologically continuous with the representational theory of mind as it is now widely endorsed by cognitive scientists. This view of Hume is explicitly opposed to recent discussions by critics who hold that the theory of ideas is the Achilles heel of his philosophy and that he would surely have abandoned it if only he had read Wittgenstein carefully.Less

Reflective Knowledge: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, Volume II

Ernest Sosa

This book argues for a reflective virtue epistemology based on a kind of virtuous circularity that may be found explicitly or just below the surface in the epistemological writings of Descartes, ... More

This book argues for a reflective virtue epistemology based on a kind of virtuous circularity that may be found explicitly or just below the surface in the epistemological writings of Descartes, Moore, and now Davidson, who also relies crucially on an assumption of virtuous circularity. Along the way various lines of objection are explored. Part I of this book considers historical alternatives to the view developed in Part II. It begins with G. E. Moore's legendary proof, and the epistemology that lies behind it. That leads to classical foundationalism, a more general position encompassing the indirect realism advocated by Moore. Next the book turns to the quietist naturalism found in David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and P. F. Strawson. After that comes Thomas Reid's common sense alternative. A quite different option is the subtle and complex epistemology developed by Wilfrid Sellars over the course of a long career. Finally, Part I concludes with a study of Donald Davidson's distinctive form of epistemology naturalized (as the book argues). The second part of the book presents an alternative beyond the historical positions of Part I, one that defends a virtue epistemology combined with epistemic circularity. This alternative retains elements of the earlier approaches, while discarding what was found wanting in them.Less