Credo

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Gopal Sreenivasan
Keyword(s):  
Moral Significance ◽  
Practical Situation ◽  
Virtuous Action ◽  
Ways Of Being

This chapter focuses on the role that emotion plays in virtue, emphasizing that acting virtuously is the central and most important dimension of virtue. It analyses the centrality of roles in virtue as a matter of their being tied to virtuous action, which is more central than every role in virtue that is not tied to virtuous action. It also discusses reference to virtue in other traditions that serves to emphasize the moral significance of certain ways of being, instead of doing. The chapter concentrates on two virtues: compassion and courage, and two emotions: sympathy and fear. It argues that having a modified sympathy trait is indispensable to being a reliably correct judge of which action require compassion in a practical situation.

Aboutness

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Yablo
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Library Science ◽  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
Major Advance ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Made In

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. However, it has played no real role in philosophical semantics, which is surprising. This is the first book to examine through a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection—about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned. This book maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results—directed content—is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology. The book represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language.

Beyond Religious Freedom

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Religious Tolerance ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
Religious Difference ◽  
Power Difference ◽  
Ways Of Being

In recent years, North American and European nations have sought to legally remake religion in other countries through an unprecedented array of international initiatives. Policymakers have rallied around the notion that the fostering of religious freedom, interfaith dialogue, religious tolerance, and protections for religious minorities are the keys to combating persecution and discrimination. This book argues that these initiatives create the very social tensions and divisions they are meant to overcome. It looks at three critical channels of state-sponsored intervention: international religious freedom advocacy, development assistance and nation building, and international law. It shows how these initiatives make religious difference a matter of law, resulting in a divide that favors forms of religion authorized by those in power and excludes other ways of being and belonging. In exploring the dizzying power dynamics and blurred boundaries that characterize relations between “expert religion,” “governed religion,” and “lived religion,” the book charts new territory in the study of religion in global politics. The book provides new insights into today's most pressing dilemmas of power, difference, and governance.

Ways of Being Roman

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Revell
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Being

Moral Responsibility for Unwitting Omissions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Kay Nelkin ◽  
Samuel C. Rickless
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Value Judgments ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
Common Sense Morality ◽  
And Control

Unwitting omissions pose a challenge for theories of moral responsibility. For common-sense morality holds many unwitting omitters morally responsible for their omissions, even though they appear to lack both awareness and control. People who leave dogs in their car on a hot day or forget to pick something up from the store as they promised seem to be blameworthy. If moral responsibility requires awareness of one’s omission and its moral significance, it appears that the protagonists of these cases are not morally responsible. This chapter considers and rejects a number of influential views on this problem, including a view that grounds responsibility for such omissions in previous exercises of conscious agency, and “Attributionist” views that ground responsibility for such omissions in the value judgments or other aspects of the agents’ selves. The chapter proposes a new tracing view that grounds responsibility for unwitting omissions in past opportunities to avoid them.

Virtues, Inclinations, and Oneness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip J. Ivanhoe
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
The Self ◽  
Virtuous Action

This chapter develops various implications of the oneness hypothesis when applied to theories of virtue, drawing on several claims that are closely related to the hypothesis. Many of the views introduced and defended are inspired by neo-Confucianism and so the chapter offers an example of constructive philosophy bridging cultures and traditions. It focuses on Foot’s theory, which holds that virtues correct excesses or deficiencies in human nature. The alternative maintains that vices often arise not from an excess or deficiency in motivation but from a mistaken conception of self, one that sees oneself as somehow more important than others. The chapter goes on to argue that such a view helps address the “self-centeredness objection” to virtue ethics and that the effortlessness, joy, and wholeheartedness that characterizes fully virtuous action are best conceived as a kind of spontaneity that affords a special feeling of happiness dubbed “metaphysical comfort.”

Near-Death Experiences and the Religious Metacultures of Western Modernity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Schlieter
Keyword(s):  
Moral Significance ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Religious Meaning ◽  
Near Death Experiences ◽  
Being Religious

Building on earlier conceptions of “metacultures,” this chapter defines four metacultures that are important for Western near-death discourse: Christian, Gnostic–Esoteric, and the Spiritualist–Occult, being religious in outlook; the fourth, however, the Naturalist metaculture, is of a nonreligious nature. The three former metacultures assign religious meaning to the content of near-death experiences, affirming by and large the soul’s survival of death. The chapter argues that this meaning has (a) ontological, (b) epistemic, (c) intersubjective or communicative, and (d) moral significance. Naturalist metaculture is defined as offering pharmacological, neurological, or psychological explanations of near-death experiences, usually declaring their content to be hallucinatory.

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