On the Circumstances for ‘the hexis-priority’ in Aristotle’s ‘mean’(mesotēs; meson): Focusing on the Debates regarding ‘explanatory priority’

2021 ◽  
Vol 133 ◽  
pp. 29-51
Author(s):  
Dohyoung Kim
Keyword(s):  
Explanatory Priority

Because Without Cause

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Lange
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Scientific Explanations ◽  
Physical Necessity ◽  
Explanatory Priority ◽  
Causal Laws

This chapter investigates non-causal scientific explanations that work by describing how the explanandum involves stronger-than-physical necessity by virtue of certain facts (“constraints”) that possess some variety of necessity stronger than ordinary causal laws possess. In particular, the chapter offers an account of the order of explanatory priority in explanations by constraint. It examines several important examples of explanations by constraint, distinguishing their natural kinds. It gives an account of the sense in which constraints are modally stronger than ordinary causal laws and an account of why certain deductions of constraints exclusively from other constraints possess explanatory power whereas others lack explanatory power.

Naturalizing Christians: A Response to Joel Marcus, John the Baptist in History and Theology

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-46
Author(s):  
Erin Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
John The Baptist ◽  
Theory Of Religion ◽  
Truth Claim ◽  
Explanatory Priority ◽  
Social Type

Abstract This essay examines the conceptual framework that informs Marcus’s distinction between history and theology, and considers what stands to be gained by this manner of classification. The essay observes that Marcus’s classification hinges upon a theory of religion that views gospels as artifacts expressive of sincere belief and, further, suggests this approach serves to mystify the origins of the Christian theological metanarrative by replicating the explanation asserted within the gospels themselves. By reversing the conceptual framework and the explanatory priority, one could deploy a theory of religion that sees gospels as artifacts of persuasion and thereby argue that they aim to naturalize the initially unnatural truth claim that Jesus was the christ by connecting him to a known social type: John. From this approach, it would not be belief in Jesus as the christ that explains the modified constructions of John the Baptist; rather, modifications of John the Baptist would be precisely what construct belief in Jesus as the christ.

Reasons First

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Schroeder
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Action Theory ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Justify Belief ◽  
Moral Worth ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Common Currency ◽  
Normative Concepts ◽  
The World ◽  
Explanatory Priority

The last fifty years or more of ethical theory have been preoccupied by a turn to reasons. The vocabulary of reasons has become a common currency not only in ethics, but in epistemology, action theory, and many related areas. It is now common, for example, to see central theses such as evidentialism in epistemology and egalitarianism in political philosophy formulated in terms of reasons. And some have even claimed that the vocabulary of reasons is so useful precisely because reasons have analytical and explanatory priority over other normative concepts—that reasons in that sense come first. Reasons First systematically explores both the benefits and burdens of the hypothesis that reasons do indeed come first in normative theory, against the conjecture that theorizing in both ethics and epistemology can only be hampered by neglect of the other. Bringing two decades of work on reasons in both ethics and epistemology to bear, Mark Schroeder argues that some of the most important challenges to the idea that reasons could come first are themselves the source of some of the most obstinate puzzles in epistemology—about how perceptual experience could provide evidence about the world, and about what can make evidence sufficient to justify belief. And he shows that along with moral worth, one of the very best cases for the fundamental explanatory power of reasons in normative theory actually comes from knowledge.

The freedom of Christ and explanatory priority

2013 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
TIMOTHY PAWL
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
The People ◽  
Explanatory Priority ◽  
Human Intellect ◽  
In Virtue Of

AbstractCall the claim, common to many in the Christian intellectual tradition, that Christ, in virtue of his created human intellect, had certain, infallible, exhaustive foreknowledgethe Foreknowledge Thesis. Now consider what I will callthe Conditional:if the Foreknowledge Thesis is true, then Christ's created human will was not free. In so far as many, perhaps all, of the people who affirm the Foreknowledge Thesis also wish to affirm the freedom of Christ's human will, the truth of the Conditional would be most unwelcome to them. I consider an argument in support of the Conditional; I argue that it is not successful.

Special Concern and Personal Identity

2021 ◽  
pp. 15-38
Author(s):  
David O. Brink
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Compensation Principle ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Henry Sidgwick ◽  
Explanatory Priority ◽  
Special Concern ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
Equal Concern

As discussed by John Locke, Joseph Butler, and Thomas Reid, prudence involves a special concern for the agent’s own personal good that she does not have for others. This should be a concern for the agent’s overall good that is temporally neutral and involves an equal concern for all parts of her life. In this way, prudence involves a combination of agent relativity and temporal neutrality. This asymmetrical treatment of matters of interpersonal and intertemporal distribution might seem arbitrary. Henry Sidgwick raised this worry, and Thomas Nagel and Derek Parfit have endorsed it as reflecting the instability of prudence and related doctrines such as egoism and the self-interest theory. However, Sidgwick thought that the worry was unanswerable only for skeptics about personal identity, such as David Hume. Sidgwick thought that one could defend prudence by appeal to realism about personal identity and a compensation principle. This is one way in which special concern and prudence presuppose personal identity. However, as Jennifer Whiting has argued, special concern displayed in positive affective regard for one’s future and personal planning and investment is arguably partly constitutive of personal identity, at least on a plausible psychological reductionist conception of personal identity. After explaining both conceptions of the relation between special concern and personal identity, the chapter concludes by exploring what might seem to be the paradoxical character of conjoining them, suggesting that there may be no explanatory priority between the concepts of special concern and personal identity.

Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Tiwald
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Confucian Ethics ◽  
Right Action ◽  
Explanatory Priority ◽  
The Relationship

In this chapter the author defends the view that the major variants of Confucian ethics qualify as virtue ethics in the respects that matter most, which concern the focus, investigative priority, and explanatory priority of virtue over right action. The chapter also provides short summaries of the central Confucian virtues and then explains how different Confucians have understood the relationship between these and what some regard as the chief or most comprehensive virtue, ren (humaneness or benevolence). Finally, it explicates what most Confucians take to be a requirement of all virtues, which the author calls “wholeheartedness,” and concludes by highlighting some neglected implications of the wholeheartedness requirement for ethics more generally. These include reasons for linking conceptions of virtue and human nature, for thinking that good character necessitates that individuals change how things seem to them, and for endorsing automatic as opposed to intensively deliberative judgments and decisions.

scholarly journals Wittgenstein’s Critique of the Additive Conception of Language

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
James F. Conant
Keyword(s):  
Internal Relation ◽  
Mode Of Occurrence ◽  
Explanatory Priority ◽  
The Senses

This paper argues that Wittgenstein, both early and late, rejects the idea that the logically simpler and more fundamental case is that of "the mere sign" and that what a meaningful symbol is can be explained through the elaboration of an appropriately supplemented conception of the sign: the sign plus something (say, an interpretation or an assignment of meaning). Rather the sign, in the logically fundamental case of its mode of occurrence, is an internal aspect of the symbol. The Tractatus puts this point as follows: “The sign is that in the symbol which is perceptible by the senses.” Conversely, this means that it is essential to a symbol – to what a symbol is – that it have an essentially perceptible aspect. For Wittgenstein there is no privileged direction of explanatory priority between symbol and sign here: without signs there are no symbols (hence without language there is no thought) and without some sort of relation to symbols there are no signs (hence the philosopher’s concept of the supposedly "merely linguistic" presupposes an internal relation to symbols).

Idealism and Fine-Tuning

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Ross
Keyword(s):  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Physical Parameters ◽  
Explanatory Role ◽  
Similar Reasoning ◽  
Final Cause ◽  
Ontological Priority ◽  
Explanatory Priority ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Fundamental Physical

This chapter argues that, given certain background assumptions, a kind of idealism follows from a version of the fine-tuning thesis. The kind of idealism in question ascribes explanatory priority, not ontological priority, to the mental. The version of the fine-tuning thesis in question is the strong fine-tuning for consciousness thesis, according to which (i) the values of the fundamental physical parameters are fine-tuned for consciousness and (ii) this fine-tuning for consciousness is not the inevitable by-product of fine-tuning for something more basic than consciousness, such as life. The chapter argues that, assuming a particular account of the nature of explanation—namely, the unificationist account—the strong fine-tuning for consciousness thesis entails that consciousness plays a fundamental explanatory role in nature, and so this thesis entails explanatory idealism. The chapter concludes by arguing that similar reasoning leads to the conclusion that consciousness is the final cause of the universe.

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