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The Law of Non-Contradiction has been high orthodoxy in Western philosophy since Aristotle. The so-called Law has been the subject of radical challenge in recent years by dialetheism, the view that some contradictions are indeed true. Many philosophers have taken the Law to be central to many of our most important philosophical concepts. This book mounts the case against this view. Starting with an analysis of Aristotle on the Law, it discusses the nature of truth, rationality, negation, and logic itself, and argues that the Law is inessential to all of these things. The book develops Priest’s earlier ideas in In Contradiction.

BIOETHICS: A Systematic Approach is an extensive revision of Bioethics: A Return to Fundamentals. The subtitle has changed in order to emphasize that what distinguishes the authors’ approach to bioethics from almost all others is that it is systematic. It applies the account of morality and rationality presented in COMMON MORALITY: Deciding What To Do (2004) and MORALITY: Its Nature and Justification, Revised Edition (2005) to the moral problems that arise in the practice of medicine. The concept of rationality used to justify morality is the same concept that is used to define the concept of malady or disease. The book offers an account of the concept of death, and provides an account of euthanasia that fits within the systematic account of morality and rationality that have been provided. It also shows that this systematic account explains the controversy about the morality of abortion. There are new chapters on moral disagreements, abortion, and on “what doctors must know”, and significant improvements have been made in the treatment of the concepts of consent and malady. An entire chapter is devoted to the concept of mental maladies. Arguments are also developed against principlism and shows how principlism’s authors’ misunderstanding of this view undermines their criticisms.

Can we regard ourselves as free originators of some of our behavior? What is the place of values in a world of facts? What grounds the authority of moral imperatives, and why should we care about them? Unless satisfactory answers are provided for these questions, ethics has no credible status and is likely to be swallowed by psychology, history, or rational decision theory: an outcome quite common in recent (post-Hegelian) times as well as one to be strongly regretted. Immanuel Kant's philosophy is a sustained, bold, and successful effort aiming at offering us the answers we need, and this book is a clear and thorough account of this effort that builds on the author's previous interpretation of transcendental philosophy (as articulated in his Kant'sCopernican Revolution) and draws on the entire Kantian corpus. Free choice is rational choice, hence, it is also what reason would consider a good choice; evil behavior is not free — when we behave irrationally, we lose all control on our conduct and become obtuse wheels in the hands of irresistible nature. Which does not mean, however, that we should not take responsibility for our evil actions. On the contrary, that is exactly the right thing to do, despite the absurdity of the stance it involves. This very absurdity teaches us an important Kantian lesson on how to negotiate the bounds of sense: how there is not a single line demarcating sense from nonsense, but rather a variety of shades of (non)sense, experienced in the wake of an ideal of perfect meaningfulness but forever falling short of that ideal. In pursuing this troubling suggestion, the author brings additional light on Kant's understanding of the human form of life. Specifically, on its irremediably conflictual, undecidable character, and on the primacy unrealizable norms have in it.

The literature on theoretical reason has been dominated by epistemological concerns, treatments of practical reason by ethical concerns. This book overcomes the limitations of dealing with each separately. It sets out a comprehensive theory of rationality applicable to both practical and theoretical reason. In both domains, the book explains how experience grounds rationality, delineates the structure of central elements, and attacks the egocentric conception of rationality. It establishes the rationality of altruism and thereby supports major moral principles. The concluding part describes the pluralism and relativity the book's conception of rationality accommodates and, taking the unified account of theoretical and practical rationality in that light, constructs a theory of global rationality — the overall rationality of persons.

Jürgen Habermas seeks to defend the Enlightenment and with it an “emphatical”, “uncurtailed” conception of reason against the post-modern critique of reason on the one hand, and against so-called scientism (which would include critical rationalism and the greater part of analytical philosophy) on the other. His objection to the former is that it is self-contradictory and politically defeatist; his objection to the latter is that, thanks to a standard of rationality derived from the natural sciences or from Weber's concept of purposive rationality, it leaves normative questions to irrational decisions. Wishing to offer an alternative, Habermas tries to develop a theory of communicative action that can clarify the normative foundations of a critical theory of society as well as provide a fruitful theoretical framework for empirical social research. This study is a comprehensive and detailed analysis and a sustained critique of Habermas' philosophical system starting with his pragmatist turn in the seventies. It clearly and precisely depicts its long path from an analysis of speech acts to a discourse theory of law and the democratic constitutional state via the theory of communicative action, discourse ethics, and the attempts to apply the approach to, and support it with, empirical theories.

Different theologians give different accounts of the kind of faith that is necessary for the practice of a religion such as Christianity. For some it is simply belief that there is a God (and that he has done various actions); for others it is trust in God. This book analyses the nature of belief and trust, and considers when belief and trust are rational. It concludes that the practice of a religion requires a faith which involves both trust and belief, but a fairly weak kind of belief. The book reaches this conclusion by analysing the purposes for practising a religion — the rendering of due worship and obedience to God, and the attainment of salvation for oneself and others. Someone's religious practice is rational in so far as he or she has reason for believing that practising his or her religion is the best way to achieve these purposes, and that these purposes are greatly worthwhile.

Disagreement is common. Even informed, intelligent, and generally reasonable people often come to different conclusions when confronted with what seems to be the same evidence. Can the competing conclusions be reasonable? If not, what can we reasonably think about the situation? This book examines the epistemology of disagreement, with a focus on disagreements involving epistemic peers. Philosophical questions about disagreement arise in various areas, notably politics, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion: this book focuses on the general epistemic issues arising from informed disagreement. Ten leading philosophers offer specially written chapters which together will offer a starting-point for future work on this topic.

This volume of essays examines the psychological processes that underlie judicial decision making. Chapters in the first section of the book take as their starting point the fact that judges make many of the same judgments and decisions that ordinary people make and consider how our knowledge about judgment and decision-making in general applies to the case of legal judges. Chapters in the second section focus on the specific tasks that judges perform within a unique social setting and examine the expertise and particular modes of reasoning that judges develop to deal with their tasks in this unique setting. Chapters in the third section raise questions about whether and how we can evaluate judicial performance, with implications for the possibility of improving judging through the selection and training of judges and structuring of judicial institutions. Together the essays apply a wide range of psychological insights to help us better understand how judges make decisions and to open new avenues of inquiry into the influences on judicial behavior.

This book aims to construct a theory of rational decision making for real agents—not ideal agents. Real agents have limited cognitive powers, but traditional theories of rationality have applied only to idealized agents that lack such constraints. The book argues that theories of ideal rationality are largely irrelevant to the decision making of real agents. This book aims to provide a theory of “real rationality”.

The topic of introspection stands at the interface between questions in epistemology about the nature of self-knowledge and questions in the philosophy of mind about the nature of consciousness. What is the nature of introspection such that it provides us with a distinctive way of knowing about our own conscious mental states? And what is the nature of consciousness such that we can know about our own conscious mental states by introspection? How should we understand the relationship between consciousness and introspective self-knowledge? Should we explain consciousness in terms of introspective self-knowledge or vice versa? Until recently, questions in epistemology and the philosophy of mind were pursued largely in isolation from one another. This book aims to integrate these two lines of research by bringing together fourteen new chapters and one reprinted piece on the relationship between introspection, self-knowledge, and consciousness.

The goal of Philosophy of Science after Feminism is not only a (descriptively and normatively) more adequate philosophy of science than what we have now, but also a more socially engaged and socially responsible philosophy of science, one that can help to promote a more socially engaged and socially responsible science. Its main message is that philosophy of science needs to locate science within its wider societal context, ceasing to analyze science as if it existed in a social/political/economic vacuum; and correlatively, that philosophy of science needs to aim for a more comprehensive understanding of scientific rationality, one that integrates the ethical with the epistemic. Since feminists—feminist scientists and historians of science as well as feminist philosophers of science—have been pursuing this kind of philosophy of science in gender-related areas for three decades now, two chapters reflect on their contributions and derive from these reflections an “ideal of socially responsible science” that is further developed and defended in other chapters. The articulation of this ideal, it is made clear, is a central project of socially responsible philosophy of science. Other projects are also spelled out.

In recent years, philosophical discussions of free will have focused largely on whether or not free will is compatible with determinism. In this challenging book, David Hodgson takes a fresh approach to the question of free will, contending that close consideration of human rationality and human consciousness shows that together they give us free will, in a robust and indeterministic sense. In particular, they give us the capacity to respond appositely to feature-rich gestalts of conscious experiences, in ways that are not wholly determined by laws of nature or computational rules. The author contends that this approach is consistent with what science tells us about the world; and he considers its implications for our responsibility for our own conduct, for the role of retribution in criminal punishment, and for the place of human beings in the wider scheme of things.

On May 21‐23, 2010, philosophers, family and friends gathered at the University of Notre Dame to celebrate the career and retirement of Alvin Plantinga, widely recognized as one of the world’s leading figures in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion. Plantinga has earned particular respect within the community of Christian philosophers for the pivotal role that he played in the recent renewal and development of philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. Each of the essays in this volume engages with some particular aspect of Plantinga’s views on metaphysics, epistemology, or philosophy of religion. Contributors include Michael Bergman, Ernest Sosa, Trenton Merricks, Richard Otte, Peter VanInwagen, Thomas P. Flint, Eleonore Stump, Dean Zimmerman, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. We include responses to each essay by Bas van Fraassen, Stephen Wykstra, David VanderLaan, Robin Collins, Raymond VanArragon, E. J. Coffman, Thomas Crisp and Donald Smith.

Relativist and constructivist conceptions of knowledge have become orthodoxy in vast stretches of the academic world in recent times. This book critically examines such views and argues that they are fundamentally flawed. The book focuses on three different ways of reading the claim that knowledge is socially constructed, one about facts and two about justification. All three are rejected. The intuitive, common sense view is that there is a way things are that is independent of human opinion, and that we are capable of arriving at belief about how things are that is objectively reasonable, and is binding on anyone capable of appreciating the relevant evidence, regardless of their social or cultural perspective. Difficult as these notions may be, it is a mistake to think that recent philosophy has uncovered powerful reasons for rejecting them.

Decision theory aims at a general account of rationality covering humans but to begin makes idealizations about decision problems and agents' resources and circumstances. It treats inerrant agents with unlimited cognitive power facing tractable decision problems. This book systematically rolls back idealizations and without loss of precision treats errant agents with limited cognitive abilities facing decision problems without a stable top option. It recommends choices that maximize utility using quantizations of beliefs and desires in cases where probabilities and utilities are indeterminate and using higher-order utility analysis in cases of limited access to probabilities and utilities. For agents burdened with mistakes, it advocates reasonable attempts to correct unacceptable mistakes before deciding. In decision problems without a stable top option, a topic of game theory, it proposes maximizing self-conditional utility among self-supporting options. In games of strategy, the new principles lead to solutions that are Pareto optimal among equilibria composed of jointly self-supporting strategies. Offering an account of bounded rationality, the bookmakes large strides toward realism in decision theory.