scholarly journals Setting the story straight: fictionalism about grounding

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Way ◽  
Dependence Relations

AbstractThis paper explores a middle way between realism and eliminativism about grounding. Grounding-talk is intelligible and useful, but it fails to pick out grounding relations that exist or obtain in reality. Instead, grounding-talk allows us to convey facts about what metaphysically explains what, and about the worldly dependence relations that give rise to those explanations.

Skill-based engagement with a rich landscape of affordances as an alternative to thinking through other minds

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Kiverstein ◽  
Erik Rietveld
Keyword(s):  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Cultural Learning ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Middle Way ◽  
Internalist Account

Abstract Veissière and colleagues make a valiant attempt at reconciling an internalist account of implicit cultural learning with an externalist account that understands social behaviour in terms of its environment-involving dynamics. However, unfortunately the author's attempt to forge a middle way between internalism and externalism fails. We argue their failure stems from the overly individualistic understanding of the perception of cultural affordances they propose.

Reality and its Structure

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Current Literature ◽  
Dependence Relations ◽  
Metaphysical Dependence ◽  
The Subject

This volume brings together fourteen essays from leading and emerging scholars that address issues relating to the view that has come to be known as metaphysical foundationalism, and explore possibilities regarding its alternatives. According to the foundationalist, reality is hierarchically arranged with chains of entities ordered by metaphysical dependence relations that terminate in a fundamental ground populated by consistent and contingent entities. Each essay in this volume addresses some aspect or other of at least one of these core commitments. Must there be anything fundamental? Is reality hierarchically structured? Why should we be foundationalists? Is metaphysical infinitism possible? Is metaphysical coherentism possible? What does reality look like if we allow inconsistent fundamentalia? These are the sorts of pertinent questions seldom asked in the current literature, and exactly the kinds of questions addressed in this volume. The volume, then, aims to open up a much broader perspective on metaphysical dependence than currently exists, and point to ways of exploring new avenues of thought on the subject.

Aristotle on the Sources of the Ethical Life

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvia Berryman
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Common Belief ◽  
Ethical Life ◽  
Metaphysical Grounding ◽  
Middle Way ◽  
The Common

This work challenges the common belief that Aristotle’s virtue ethics is founded on an appeal to human nature, an appeal that is thought to be intended to provide both substantive ethical advice and justification for the demands of ethics. It is argued that it is not Aristotle’s intent, but the view is resisted that Aristotle was blind to questions of the source or justification of his ethical views. Aristotle’s views are interpreted as a ‘middle way’ between the metaphysical grounding offered by Platonists and the scepticism or subjectivist alternatives articulated by others. The commitments implicit in the nature of action figure prominently in this account: Aristotle reinterprets Socrates’ famous paradox that no one does evil willingly, taking it to mean that a commitment to pursuing the good is implicit in the very nature of action. This approach is compared to constructivism in contemporary ethics.

Schopenhauer, Buddhism, and Compassion

2020 ◽  
pp. 327-346
Author(s):  
Richard Reilly
Keyword(s):  
Metaphysical Explanation ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Middle Way ◽  
Perfect Duties ◽  
Kantian View ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Way

The focus of this chapter is Schopenhauer’s On The Basis of Morality (1841). His distinctive views are that compassion marks one’s being as spontaneously motivated to relieve another’s suffering as one’s own and that this requires a metaphysical explanation for how one identifies with another. The author defends these views and shows in some detail how they mirror the Mahayana account of compassion in Shantideva’s The Way of the Bodhisattva. Next, the author outlines Schopenhauer’s case for compassion being the sole basis of moral value and defends this claim against the Kantian view that acting beneficently cannot (rationally) override so-called perfect duties to others. Finally, the author explores how Buddha Shakyamuni’s teachings cohere with Schopenhauer’s account of suffering and how mystical consciousness, as represented in Mahayana Buddhism’s “Middle Way,” coheres with Schopenhauer’s asceticism—the “denial of the will”—as the path to overcoming suffering.

Making a Middle Way: Problems of Monhegan Identity

1972 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
George L. Hicks ◽  
David I. Kertzer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Way
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