The Value of Rationality

The Value of Rationality PDF Author: Ralph Wedgwood
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198802692
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Ralph Wedgwood gives a general account of what it is for states of mind and processes of thought to count as rational. Whether you are thinking rationally depends purely on what is going on in your mind, but rational thinking is a means to the goal of getting things right in your thinking, by believing the truth or making good choices.

The Value of Rationality

The Value of Rationality PDF Author: Ralph Wedgwood
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198802692
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Ralph Wedgwood gives a general account of what it is for states of mind and processes of thought to count as rational. Whether you are thinking rationally depends purely on what is going on in your mind, but rational thinking is a means to the goal of getting things right in your thinking, by believing the truth or making good choices.

The Value of Rationality

The Value of Rationality PDF Author: Ralph Wedgwood
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192523732
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Ralph Wedgwood gives a general account of the concept of rationality. The Value of Rationality is designed as the first instalment of a trilogy - to be followed by accounts of the requirements of rationality that apply specifically to beliefs and choices. The central claim of the book is that rationality is a normative concept. This claim is defended against some recent objections. Normative concepts are to be explained in terms of values (not in terms of 'ought' or reasons). Rationality is itself a value: rational thinking is in a certain way better than irrational thinking. Specifically, rationality is an internalist concept: what it is rational for you to think now depends solely on what is now present in your mind. Nonetheless, rationality has an external goal - the goal of thinking correctly, or getting things right in one's thinking. The connection between thinking rationally and thinking correctly is probabilistic: if your thinking is irrational, that is in effect bad news about your thinking's degree of correctness. This account of rationality explains how we should set about giving a theory of what it is for beliefs and choices to be rational. Wedgwood thus unifies practical and theoretical rationality, and reveals the connections between formal accounts of rationality (such as those of formal epistemologists and decision theorists) and the more metaethics-inspired recent discussions of the normativity of rationality. He does so partly by drawing on recent work in the semantics of normative and modal terms (including deontic modals like 'ought').

The Importance of Being Rational

The Importance of Being Rational PDF Author: Errol Lord
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192546759
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
The Importance of Being Rational systematically defends a novel reasons-based account of rationality. The book's central thesis is that what it is for one to be rational is to correctly respond to the normative reasons one possesses. Errol Lord defends novel views about what it is to possess reasons and what it is to correctly respond to reasons. He shows that these views not only help to support the book's main thesis, they also help to resolve several important problems that are independent of rationality. The account of possession provides novel contributions to debates about what determines what we ought to do, and the account of correctly responding to reasons provides novel contributions to debates about causal theories of reacting for reasons. After defending views about possession and correctly responding, Lord shows that the account of rationality can solve two difficult problems about rationality. The first is the New Evil Demon problem. The book argues that the account has the resources to show that internal duplicates necessarily have the same rational status. The second problem concerns the deontic significance of rationality. Recently it has been doubted whether we ought to be rational. The ultimate conclusion of the book is that the requirements of rationality are the requirements that we ultimately ought to comply with. If this is right, then rationality is of fundamental importance to our deliberative lives.

Value Reasoning

Value Reasoning PDF Author: Nicholas Rescher
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319541390
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
This book is a survey of key issues in the theory of evaluation aimed at exhibiting and clarifying the rational nature of the thought-procedures involved. By means of theoretical analysis and explanatory case studies, this volume shows how evaluation is—or should be—a rational procedure directed at appropriate objectives. Above all, it maintains the objectivity of rational evaluation.

Autonomy, Rationality, and Contemporary Bioethics

Autonomy, Rationality, and Contemporary Bioethics PDF Author: Jonathan Pugh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198858582
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Personal autonomy is often lauded as a key value in contemporary Western bioethics, and the claim that there is an important relationship between autonomy and rationality is often treated as an uncontroversial claim in this sphere. Yet, there is also considerable disagreement about how we should cash out the relationship between rationality and autonomy. In particular, it is unclear whether a rationalist view of autonomy can be compatible with legal judgments that enshrine a patient's right to refuse medical treatment, regardless of whether ". . . the reasons for making the choice are rational, irrational, unknown or even non-existent". In this book, I bring recent philosophical work on the nature of rationality to bear on the question of how we should understand autonomy in contemporary bioethics. In doing so, I develop a new framework for thinking about the concept, one that is grounded in an understanding of the different roles that rational beliefs and rational desires have to play in personal autonomy. Furthermore, the account outlined here allows for a deeper understanding of different form of controlling influence, and the relationship between our freedom to act, and our capacity to decide autonomously. I contrast my rationalist with other prominent accounts of autonomy in bioethics, and outline the revisionary implications it has for various practical questions in bioethics in which autonomy is a salient concern, including questions about the nature of informed consent and decision-making capacity.

Essays on Values and Practical Rationality

Essays on Values and Practical Rationality PDF Author: António Marques
Publisher: Lisbon Philosophical Studies ¿ Uses of Languages in Interdisciplinary Fields
ISBN: 9783034330589
Category : Aesthetics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book discusses values and the exercise of practical rationality. The main feature of the research is the multiplicity of approaches of the exercise of practical rationality and the consideration of different spheres of values, that is the ethical, political and aesthetic ones.

Rationality and Religious Commitment

Rationality and Religious Commitment PDF Author: Robert Audi
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191619523
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Rationality and Religious Commitment shows how religious commitment can be rational and describes the place of faith in the postmodern world. It portrays religious commitment as far more than accepting doctrines—it is viewed as a kind of life, not just as an embrace of tenets. Faith is conceived as a unique attitude. It is irreducible to belief but closely connected with both belief and conduct, and intimately related to life's moral, political, and aesthetic dimensions. Part One presents an account of rationality as a status attainable by mature religious people—even those with a strongly scientific habit of mind. Part Two describes what it means to have faith, how faith is connected with attitudes, emotions, and conduct, and how religious experience may support it. Part Three turns to religious commitment and moral obligation and to the relation between religion and politics. It shows how ethics and religion can be mutually supportive even though ethics provides standards of conduct independently of theology. It also depicts the integrated life possible for the religiously committed—a life with rewarding interactions between faith and reason, religion and science, and the aesthetic and the spiritual. The book concludes with two major accounts. One explains how moral wrongs and natural disasters are possible under God conceived as having the knowledge, power, and goodness that make such evils so difficult to understand. The other account explores the nature of persons, human and divine, and yields a conception that can sustain a rational theistic worldview even in the contemporary scientific age.

A Justification of Rationality

A Justification of Rationality PDF Author: John Kekes
Publisher: Suny Press
ISBN: 9780873953504
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
The aim of this book is to defend rationality against skepticism fideism, and irrationalism. Rationality is an ideal which represents the best in our civilization. The ideal, however, must be reaffirmed from time to time and this is done here by expressing it in a contemporary idiom and by defending it against new doubts. Professor Kekes justifies rationality most convincingly at the same time he demonstrates how important philosophy is for the preservation of the finest in Western tradition.

Rationality and Freedom

Rationality and Freedom PDF Author: Amartya Sen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674013513
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 756

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Book Description
Rationality and freedom are among the most profound and contentious concepts in philosophy and the social sciences. In this, the first of two volumes, Amartya Sen brings clarity and insight to these difficult issues.

Brute Rationality

Brute Rationality PDF Author: Joshua Gert
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139454153
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
This book presents an account of normative practical reasons and the way in which they contribute to the rationality of action. Rather than simply 'counting in favour of' actions, normative reasons play two logically distinct roles: requiring action and justifying action. The distinction between these two roles explains why some reasons do not seem relevant to the rational status of an action unless the agent cares about them, while other reasons retain all their force regardless of the agent's attitude. It also explains why the class of rationally permissible action is wide enough to contain not only all morally required action, but also much selfish and immoral action. The book will appeal to a range of readers interested in practical reason in particular, and moral theory more generally.