Scientists no longer accept the existence of a distinct moral organ as phrenologists once did. A generation of young neurologists is using advanced technological medical equipment to unravel specific brain processes enabling moral cognition. In addition, evolutionary psychologists have formulated hypotheses about the origins and nature of our moral architecture. Little by little, the concept of a 'moral brain' is reinstated.

As the crossover between disciplines focusing on moral cognition was rather limited up to now, this book aims at filling the gap. Which evolutionary biological hypotheses provide a useful framework for starting new neurological research? How can brain imaging be used to corroborate hypotheses concerning the evolutionary background of our species?

In this reader, a broad range of prominent scientists and philosophers shed their expert view on the current accomplishments and future challenges in the field of moral cognition and assess how cooperation between neurology and evolutionary psychology can boost research into the field of the moral brain.

An African-American single mother is harassed and threatened with violence until she moves out of an all 'white' neighborhood. A hate crime has occurred and we wonder, who is responsible? Is it just the few people who actively threatened the woman and her children, or does responsibility extend further? This book explores these questions in detail and ultimately finds that responsibility may extend far beyond active perpetrators.
Within philosophy, these kinds of questions are typically discussed in the debate over 'collective' or 'group' responsibility. This book reviews the debate and examines the standard objections to group responsibility. It also evaluates some currently available accounts but finds them unsatisfying in various ways. Ultimately, drawing on work in social psychology, narrative ethics, and feminist philosophy, the author presents a new account which answers the standard objections while also giving practical guidance to individuals who take their group-related responsibilities seriously.

Particularism and the Space of Moral Reasons critically assesses the startling idea that our moral reasoning does not need to use moral principles. If we don't have principles, how do we work out what to do? This book examines 'moral particularism', a controversial idea at the forefront of contemporary moral theory.

This book seeks to clarify the concept of irony and its relation to moral commitment. Frazier provides a discussion of the contrasting accounts of Richard Rorty and Soren Kierkegaard. He argues that, while Rorty's position is much more defensible and thoughtful than his detractors tend to recognize, it turns out to be surprisingly more parochial than Kierkegaard's.

Thomas Carson offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date investigation of moral and conceptual questions about lying and deception. Part I addresses conceptual questions and offers definitions of lying, deception, and related concepts such as withholding information, "keeping someone in the dark," and "half truths." Part II deals with questions in ethical theory. Carson argues that standard debates about lying and deception between act-utilitarians and their critics are inconclusive because they rest on appeals to disputed moral intuitions. He defends a version of the golden rule and a theory of moral reasoning. His theory implies that there is a moral presumption against lying and deception that causes harm - a presumption at least as strong as that endorsed by act-utilitarianism. He uses this theory to justify his claims about the issues he addresses in Part III: deception and withholding information in sales, deception in advertising, bluffing in negotiations, the duties of professionals to inform clients, lying and deception by leaders as a pretext for fighting wars (with special attention to the case of Bush and Cheney), and lying and deception about history (with special attention to the Holocaust), and cases of distorting the historical record by telling half-truths. The book concludes with a qualified defence of the view that honesty is a virtue.

It is well over a decade since John Fischer and Mark Ravizza - and before them, Jay Wallace and Daniel Dennett - defended responsibility from the threat of determinism. But defending responsibility from determinism is a potentially endless and largely negative enterprise; it can go on for as long as dissenting voices remain, and although such work strengthens the theoretical foundations of these theories, it won't necessarily build anything on top of those foundations, nor will it move these theories into new territory or explain how to apply them to practical contexts.

To this end, the papers in this volume address these more positive challenges by exploring how compatibilist responsibility theory can be extended and/or applied in a range of practical contexts.For instance, how is the narrow philosophical concept of responsibility that was defended from the threat of determinism related to the plural notions of responsibility present in everyday discourse, and how might this more fine-grained understanding of responsibility open up new vistas and challenges for compatibilist theory? What light might compatibilism shed, and what light might be shed upon it, by political debates about access to public welfare in the context of responsibility for one's own health, and by legal debates about the impact of self-intoxication on responsibility. Does compatibilist theory, which was originally designed to cater for analysis of individual actions, scale to scenarios that involve group action and collective responsibility - e.g. for harms due to human-induced climate change?

This book's chapters deal with a range of theoretical problems discussed in classic compatibilist literature - e.g. the relationship between responsibility and capacity, the role of historical tracing in discounting the exculpatory value of incapacities, and the justifiability of retributive punishment. But instead of motivating their discussions by focusing on the alleged threat that determinism poses to responsibility, these chapters' authors have animated their discussions by tackling important practical problems which crop up in contemporary debates about responsibility.

"

What lies at the foundation of our moral beliefs? If we dig down far enough do we find that our moral values have no ground at all to stand on, and so are apt to collapse upon serious philosophical investigation? This book seeks to answer these and related questions by positing an indubitable foundation for our moral beliefs - they arise from the phenomenon of 'primary recognition', and are fundamentally shaped by 'basic moral certainties'. Drawing on philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Knud Ejler Logstrup, this book draws together insights from both Analytic and Continental philosophy to provide a convincing new picture of our moral foundations. And it does so in a way that eschews moral conservativism and opens the way for a rich understanding of the variety and particularity of our human moral systems, while also keeping a significant place for those moral beliefs that occur universally, across cultures.

Metaethics is the inquiry into the nature of morality (or ethics, I use the words 'morality', 'morals', and 'ethics' as synonyms). When we pass moral judgements, what kind of claims are we then making? I speak of this as the semantic metaethical question. a re there moral facts, to be discovered by us and existing independently of our thoughts and conceptualisation? I speak of this as the ontological or me- physical metaethical question. a nd, if there are, can we know about them; and, if we can, how do we get this kind of knowledge? I speak of this as the epistemic metaethical question. a ll these metaethical questions, the semantic, the ontological, and the epistemic ones, are raised and discussed in this book, but they are not the core questions raised. I have been more concerned with another kind of questions, which deserve to be called metaethical as well: what are the problems of morality? a re there many different moral questions, or, do they all, in the final analysis, reduce to only a few, or perhaps just one? t his question is of special importance to a non-naturalist objectivist and realist like the present author, who believes that we do make truth-claims when we pass moral judgements and who believes that there is a truth in these matters so that we must face the possibility that even our most cherished moral judgements may be false.

Alan Bailey offers a clear and vigorous exposition and defence of the philosophy of Sextus Empiricus, one of the most influential of ancient thinkers, the father of philosophical scepticism. The subsequent sceptical tradition in philosophy has not done justice to Sextus: his views stand up today as remarkably insightful, offering a fruitful way to approach issues of knowledge, understanding, belief, and rationality. Bailey's refreshing presentation of Sextus to a modern philosophical readership rescues scepticism from the sceptics.

This work begins from our Socratic ignorance of empathy. It applies four philosophical methods -- phenomenology, self psychology, language analysis, and interpretive suspicion (hermeneutics) to generating a clearing for empathy as authentic being with one another in community. In philosophical empathy, the other individual humanizes the one who, in turn, give humanity back to the other in everyday empathy. Examples of empathy in story telling, literature, self psychology, and neurology explore the scope of empathy as the foundation for the community of fellow travelers in finitude. The inquiry is initially guided by Martin Heidegger's call for a 'hermeneutic of empathy.' It is informed by Edmund Husserl's posthumous writings on empathy, and it integrates the contribution of the Anglo-American tradition of John Searle. The result is an exposure of the deep structure of empathy as a fundamentally human capability for creating possibilities of community and human relations.

This book is amongst the first academic treatments of the emerging debate on autonomous weapons. Autonomous weapons are capable, once programmed, of searching for and engaging a target without direct intervention by a human operator. Critics of these weapons claim that 'taking the human out-of-the-loop' represents a further step towards the de-humanisation of warfare, while advocates of this type of technology contend that the power of machine autonomy can potentially be harnessed in order to prevent war crimes. This book provides a thorough and critical assessment of these two positions. Written by a political philosopher at the forefront of the autonomous weapons debate, the book clearly assesses the ethical and legal ramifications of autonomous weapons, and presents a novel ethical argument against fully autonomous weapons.

Evoking the contemporary Zeitgeist of looming ecological, political and economic disaster, The Catastrophic Imperative brings together a distinguished group of thinkers who invite a compelling reconsideration of the ways we, as representing subjects, might be more deeply implicated in catastrophic events than we ordinarily imagine. From their individual historical, philosophical, psychoanalytic and literary perspectives, the contributors collectively put a non-eschatological thought of catastrophe to task. What emerges from this forcing ground is a logic that undermines our habitual understanding of causality, charging us with the disconcerting responsibility not to prevent but, in Jean Dupuy's immortal words, to render the catastrophe unavoidable.
Contributing major new essays on Kant, Hegel, Derrida, Lacan, Badiou, i ek, Deleuze, James, Coetzee, Barres and Hitchcock, this collection also marks the long-overdue introduction of renowned German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, to the English-speaking world.
Contributors: Alain Badiou, Gert Buelens, Gil Chaitin, Justic Clemens, Tom Cohen, Joanna Hodge, J. Hillis Miller, Patience Moll, Dany Nobus, Aaron Schuster, Sjoerd van Tuinen and Eric Vogt.

Christos Yannaras pioneering critique of the concept of the right of the individual is presented in English for the first time. This central aspect of political theory (since Hegels Philosophy of Right) summarizes the philosophical and cultural identity of the paradigm of modernity, but the philosophical assumptions underlying the concept of right have not hitherto been subject to scrutiny. Yannaras shows that the starting-point of the concept of right is a phenomenalistic naturalism, which presupposes an abstract concept of the human subject as a fundamentally undifferentiated natural individual. The question is also explored of how the priority accorded to this concept of right is related to the contemporary crisis of the modern politico-social paradigm, while a new preface from the translator underlines the continued significance of Yannaras proposal for Anglophone readers. Against the modern concept of right with its illusion of objectivity, The Inhumanity of Right sketches out the basic lines of a political theory that prioritizes new social needs that reflect the relational character of the human person.

A Frightening Love radically rethinks God and evil. It rejects theodicy and its impersonal conception of reason and morality. Faith survives evil through a miraculous love that resists philosophical rationalization. Authors criticised include Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Marilyn McCord Adams, Peter van Inwagen, John Haldane, William Hasker.

The present collection represents an attempt to bring together several contributions to the ongoing debate pertaining to supervenience of the normative in law and morals and strives to be the first work that addresses the topic comprehensively. It addresses the controversies surrounding the idea of normative supervenience and the philosophical conceptions they generated, deserve a recapitulation, as well as a new impulse for further development. Recently, there has been renewed interest in the concepts of normativity and supervenience. The research on normativity - a term introduced to the philosophical jargon by Edmund Husserl almost one hundred years ago - gained impetus in the 1990s through the works of such philosophers as Robert Audi, Christine Korsgaard, Robert Brandom, Paul Boghossian or Joseph Raz. The problem of the nature and sources of normativity has been investigated not only in morals and in relation to language, but also in other domains, e.g. in law or in the c ontext of the theories of rationality. Supervenience, understood as a special kind of relation between properties and weaker than entailment, has become analytic philosophers' favorite formal tool since 1980s. It features in the theories pertaining to mental properties, but also in aesthetics or the law. In recent years, the 'marriage' of normativity and supervenience has become an object of many philosophical theories as well as heated debates. It seems that the conceptual apparatus of the supervenience theory makes it possible to state precisely some claims pertaining to normativity, as well as illuminate the problems surrounding it.

Die Bibliotheca Teubneriana, gegrundet 1849, ist die weltweit alteste, traditionsreichste und umfangreichste Editionsreihe griechischer und lateinischer Literatur von der Antike bis zur Neuzeit. Pro Jahr erscheinen 4-5 neue Editionen. Samtliche Ausgaben werden durch eine lateinische oder englische Praefatio erganzt. Die wissenschaftliche Betreuung der Reihe obliegt einem Team anerkannter Philologen: Gian Biagio Conte (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa) Marcus Deufert (Universitat Leipzig) James Diggle (University of Cambridge) Donald J. Mastronarde (University of California, Berkeley) Franco Montanari (Universita di Genova) Heinz-Gunther Nesselrath (Georg-August-Universitat Goettingen) Dirk Obbink (University of Oxford) Oliver Primavesi (Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat Munchen) Michael D. Reeve (University of Cambridge) Richard J. Tarrant (Harvard University) Vergriffene Titel werden als Print-on-Demand-Nachdrucke wieder verfugbar gemacht. Zudem werden alle Neuerscheinungen der Bibliotheca Teubneriana parallel zur gedruckten Ausgabe auch als eBook angeboten. Die alteren Bande werden sukzessive ebenfalls als eBook bereitgestellt. Falls Sie einen vergriffenen Titel bestellen moechten, der noch nicht als Print-on-Demand angeboten wird, schreiben Sie uns an: [email protected] Samtliche in der Bibliotheca Teubneriana erschienenen Editionen lateinischer Texte sind in der Datenbank BTL Online elektronisch verfugbar.

Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship confronts a question that is central to Aristotle's political philosophy as well as to contemporary political theory: what is a citizen? Answers prove to be elusive, in part because late twentieth-century critiques of the Enlightenment called into doubt fundamental tenets that once guided us. Engaging the two major works of Aristotle's political philosophy, his Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics, Susan D. Collins poses questions that current discussions of liberal citizenship do not adequately address. Drawing a path from contemporary disputes to Aristotle, she examines in detail his complex presentations of moral virtue, civic education, and law; his view of the aims and limits of the political community; and his treatment of the connection between citizenship and the human good. Collins thereby shows how Aristotle continues to be an indispensable source of enlightenment, as he has been for political and religious traditions of the past.

A compelling argument of how human health is adversely affected by our poor treatment of non-human animals. The author contents that in order to successfully confront the 21st Century's health challenges, we need to broaden the definition of the word 'public' in public health to include non-human animals.