Philosophy

Medicine relies on objective evidence to verify the absence or presence of disease, but the hypochondriac is unable to accept reassurance when no such evidence is found. By exploring the tension between these two positions, this book offers a reevaluation of medical and popular accounts of hypochondria, claiming that contemporary hypochondria should be understood less as a mental illness in particular patients than as a rational if maladaptive condition emerging from gaps between what patients expect of medicine and what doctors can achieve. We might say that, over the last half-century, patients have become postmodern while modern medicine has not. Hypochondria, as a cultural condition characterized by doubt and exacerbated by increased popular access to medical information and increased patient participation clinical decision-making, casts new light on the relationship between vulnerable embodiment and the implicit promises of science-based healthcare practices. The book's four parts examine hypochondria as a condition of biology, of medicine, of culture, and of narrative. Arguing that the hypochondria is rooted in practices of reading, the skeptical interpretation of symptoms and stories about a stubbornly opaque body, and analyzing texts ranging from medical journals and psychiatric diagnostic taxonomies through published illness narratives and horror films, this study is both an example of, and a case for, the place of serious humanities scholarship in understanding the anxious epistemologies of contemporary Western medicine and its practitioners and patients.

Presenting a discussion of classic philosophical questions surrounding death, this book investigates the great metaphysical and moral problems of death. The first part argues that a definition of life is necessary before death can be defined. It maintains that death is a conceptual mystery—it cannot be defined as the cessation of life, or in any other similar way. After an exploration of several of the most plausible accounts of the nature of life and death and a demonstration of their failure, a conceptual scheme involving life, death, existence, personality, and related concepts emerges from the book's analysis. The second part returns to ethical and value-theoretical questions about death. Addressing the ancient Epicurean ethical problems about the evil of death, it argues that death can be a great evil for those who die, even if they do not exist after death, because it may deprive them of the goods they would have enjoyed had they continued to live. After formulating principles that purport to evaluate the badness (or goodness) of death, the book concludes with a novel consequentialist theory about the morality of killing, applying it to such thorny practical issues as abortion, suicide, and euthanasia.

Moral responsibility can be explained by analogy with a conversation. The relation between a morally responsible agent and those who hold her morally responsible is like the relation between a speaker and her audience. A responsible agent’s actions are bearers of meaning, agent meaning, just as a speaker’s utterances are bearers of speaker meaning. Agent meaning is a function of the morally quality of the will with which an agent acts. Those who hold an agent morally responsible for what she does do so by responding to her as if in a conversation. By responding with certain morally reactive attitudes, such as resentment or indignation, they thereby communicate their regard for the meaning taken to be revealed in that agent’s actions. It is then open for the agent held responsible to respond to those holding her responsible by offering an apology, a justification, an excuse, or some other response, thereby extending the evolving conversational exchange. The conversational theory of moral responsibility accepts two features of P.F. Strawson’s theory. One is that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal so that being responsible must be understood by reference to the nature of holding responsible. Another is that the moral emotions are central to holding responsible.

Calls for a “consilient” or “vertically integrated” approach to the study of human mind and culture have, for the most part, been received by scholars in the humanities with either indifference or hostility. One reason for this is that consilience has often been framed as bringing the study of humanistic issues into line with the study of nonhuman phenomena, rather than as something to which humanists and scientists contribute equally. The other major reason that consilience has yet to catch on in the humanities is a dearth of compelling examples of the benefits of adopting a consilient approach. This book is the product of a workshop that brought together international scholars from a variety of fields to address both these issues. It includes representative work from workshop speakers and participants that examine how adopting such a consilient stance—informed by cognitive science and grounded in evolutionary theory—would concretely impact specific topics in the humanities, studying each topic in a manner that not only cuts across the humanities-natural science divide, but also across individual humanistic disciplines. By taking seriously the fact that science-humanities integration is a two-way exchange, this volume seeks to facilitate the creation of a new, shared framework for the sciences and humanities.

This book is a systematic study of Descartes's theory of causation and its relation to the medieval and early modern scholastic philosophy that provides its proper historical context. The argument here is that even though Descartes offered a dualistic ontology that differs radically from what we find in scholasticism, his views on causation were profoundly influenced by scholastic thought on this issue. This influence is evident not only in his affirmation in the Meditations of the abstract scholastic axiom that a cause must contain the reality of its effects, but also in the details of the accounts of body‐body interactions in his physics, of mind‐body interaction in his psychology, and of the causation that he took to be involved in free human action. In contrast to those who have read Descartes as endorsing the “occasionalist” conclusion that God is the only real cause, a central thesis of this study is that he accepted what in the context of scholastic debates regarding causation is the antipode of occasionalism, namely, the view that creatures rather than God are the causal source of natural change. What emerges from the defense of this interpretation of Descartes is a new understanding of his contribution to modern thought on causation.

Most philosophers working in moral psychology and practical reason think that either the notion of “good” or the notion of “desire” have central roles to play in our understanding of intentional explanations and practical reasoning. However, philosophers disagree sharply over how we are supposed to understand the notions of ‘desire’ and ‘good’, how these notions relate, and whether both play a significant and independent role in practical reason. In particular, the “Guise of the Good” thesis — the view that desire (or perhaps intention, or intentional action) always aims at the good — has received renewed attention in the last twenty years. Can one have desire for things that the desirer does not perceive to be good in any, or form intentions to act in way that one does not deem to be good? Does the notion of good play any essential role in an account of deliberation or practical reason? Moreover, philosophers also disagree about the relevant notion of good. Is it a purely formal notion, or does it involve a substantive conception of the good? Is the primary notion, the notion of the good for a particular agent, or the notion of good simpliciter? Does the relevant notion of good make essential appeal to human nature, or would it in principle extend to all rational beings? While these questions are central in contemporary work in ethics, practical reason, and philosophy of action, they are not new; similar issues were discussed in the ancient period. The book aims to bring together “systematic” and more historically-oriented work on these issues.

Donald Davidson (1917–2003) was one of the most important philosophers of the late twentieth century. This book provides a systematic exposition and clarification of his work in the philosophy of language and the theory of meaning, and of his contributions to the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and epistemology that spring from it. In addition, it offers a critical assessment of Davidson’s program. The book is divided into three parts. The first part provides an historical introduction to Davidson’s program of truth-theoretic semantics and defends it against a variety of criticisms. The second part examines the foundations and prospects for the project of radical interpretation, including the grounding of the Principle of Charity, the indeterminacy of interpretation, and the reality of language. The third part examines a number of important conclusions that Davidson has argued for on the basis of reflection on the project of radical interpretation, including the impossibility of alternative conceptual schemes, the impossibility of massive error, the nature and grounding of first person authority, the inscrutability of reference, and the necessity of language for thought. The book argues for the soundness of the truth-theoretic approach to the theory of meaning, but argues that the project of radical interpretation fails, and that most of Davidson’s most important theses based on it cannot be adequately supported.

This book has both a negative aim and a positive aim. The negative aim is to show that some recent influential scientific claims about free will, consciousness, and action‐production are not warranted by the data. These claims (by Benjamin Libet, Daniel Wegner, and others) include the following: your brain routinely decides what you will do before you become conscious of its decision; there is only a 100‐millisecond window of opportunity for free will, and all you can freely do in that window is veto conscious intentions that you were about to execute; intentions and their physical correlates play no role in producing corresponding actions; and free will is an illusion. The positive aim is to show that there is powerful empirical support for the thesis that there are effective conscious decisions and intentions to act.

The Stoics (Chrysippus, Seneca, Epictetus) tell us how to get rid of unwanted emotions by re-evaluating situations (cognitive therapy). In their view, an emotion is a pair of value judgements that harm or benefit if at hand, and that it is appropriate to react. Bodily and mental shocks (e.g., crying) are not part of the emotion. One Stoic, Posidonius, protested that such judgements are neither necessary nor sufficient for emotion, not necessary, for example, for emotion produced by melody, or in animals. Seneca replied that what is produced by music and the arts, or in animals, is only preliminary shocks or ‘first movements’. Others (Galen) suggested that bodily factors are important and need separate physical treatment, and recent brain studies (LeDoux) explain why. But the Stoics are right that cognitive therapy can often on its own remove unwanted emotion. Moreover, their two judgements are the right targets for re-evaluation, and it is a muddle to be sad (William James) because I cry. Crying is only a shock. We need not share the Stoic ideal of apatheia — freedom from all emotions — just freedom from unwanted ones. Some Christians (Origen, Evagrius) took up the idea of first movements and converted them from preliminary shocks into preliminary ‘bad thoughts’, which act as temptations. They worked out a whole art of nipping them in the bud to achieve the Stoic ideal of apatheia. But Augustine favoured Aristotle's emotion in moderation, except for example for lust, which he saw as disobedient to will.

The fundamental question asked in this book is: what is the contribution of experience of knowledge? The book develops an account of experience that allows it to inform knowledge while respecting two constraints—the contribution of experience to knowledge must be both rational and substantial. The book argues that these constraints cannot be met if we make the assumption that experience only acquaints us with partial truth about the world. Instead the book uses tools from philosophical logic, specifically the logic of interdependent concepts, to show that a natural account of experience is available using the interdependence of views and perceptual judgments. In essence, the book argues for a reformed empiricism that embraces experience as conditional.