Value, Reality, and Desire

Value, Reality, and Desire PDF Author: Graham Oddie
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191534250
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Value, Reality, and Desire is an extended argument for a robust realism about value. The robust realist affirms the following distinctive theses. There are genuine claims about value which are true or false - there are facts about value. These value-facts are mind-independent - they are not reducible to desires or other mental states, or indeed to any non-mental facts of a non-evaluative kind. And these genuine, mind-independent, irreducible value-facts are causally efficacious. Values, quite literally, affect us. These are not particularly fashionable theses, and taken as a whole they go somewhat against the grain of quite a lot of recent work in the metaphysics of value. Further, against the received view, Oddie argues that we can have knowledge of values by experiential acquaintance, that there are experiences of value which can be both veridical and appropriately responsive to the values themselves. Finally, these value-experiences are not the products of some exotic and implausible faculty of 'intuition'. Rather, they are perfectly mundane and familiar mental states - namely, desires. This view explains how values can be 'intrinsically motivating', without falling foul of the widely accepted 'queerness' objection. There are, of course, other objections to each of the realist's claims. In showing how and why these objections fail, Oddie introduces a wealth of interesting and original insights about issues of wider interest - including the nature of properties, reduction, supervenience, and causation. The result is a novel and interesting account which illuminates what would otherwise be deeply puzzling features of value and desire and the connections between them.

Value, Reality, and Desire

Value, Reality, and Desire PDF Author: Graham Oddie
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191534250
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Get Book Here

Book Description
Value, Reality, and Desire is an extended argument for a robust realism about value. The robust realist affirms the following distinctive theses. There are genuine claims about value which are true or false - there are facts about value. These value-facts are mind-independent - they are not reducible to desires or other mental states, or indeed to any non-mental facts of a non-evaluative kind. And these genuine, mind-independent, irreducible value-facts are causally efficacious. Values, quite literally, affect us. These are not particularly fashionable theses, and taken as a whole they go somewhat against the grain of quite a lot of recent work in the metaphysics of value. Further, against the received view, Oddie argues that we can have knowledge of values by experiential acquaintance, that there are experiences of value which can be both veridical and appropriately responsive to the values themselves. Finally, these value-experiences are not the products of some exotic and implausible faculty of 'intuition'. Rather, they are perfectly mundane and familiar mental states - namely, desires. This view explains how values can be 'intrinsically motivating', without falling foul of the widely accepted 'queerness' objection. There are, of course, other objections to each of the realist's claims. In showing how and why these objections fail, Oddie introduces a wealth of interesting and original insights about issues of wider interest - including the nature of properties, reduction, supervenience, and causation. The result is a novel and interesting account which illuminates what would otherwise be deeply puzzling features of value and desire and the connections between them.

Value, Reality, and Desire

Value, Reality, and Desire PDF Author: Graham Oddie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199273413
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Value, Reality, and Desire is an extended argument for a robust realism about value. The robust realist affirms the following distinctive theses. There are genuine claims about value which are true or false - there are facts about value. These value-facts are mind-independent - they are not reducible to desires or other mental states, or indeed to any non-mental facts of a non-evaluative kind. And these genuine, mind-independent, irreducible value-facts are causallyefficacious. Values, quite literally, affect us.These are not particularly fashionable theses, and taken as a whole they go somewhat against the grain of quite a lot of recent work in the metaphysics of value. Further, against the received view, Oddie argues that we can have knowledge of values by experiential acquaintance, that there are experiences of value which can be both veridical and appropriately responsive to the values themselves. Finally, these value-experiences are not the products of some exotic and implausible faculty of'intuition'. Rather, they are perfectly mundane and familiar mental states - namely, desires. This view explains how values can be 'intrinsically motivating', without falling foul of the widely accepted 'queerness' objection. There are, of course, other objections to each of the realist's claims. Inshowing how and why these objections fail, Oddie introduces a wealth of interesting and original insights about issues of wider interest - including the nature of properties, reduction, supervenience, and causation. The result is a novel and interesting account which illuminates what would otherwise be deeply puzzling features of value and desire and the connections between them.

The Nature of Desire

The Nature of Desire PDF Author: Federico Lauria
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199370974
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Desires matter. What are desires? Many believe that desire is a motivational state: desiring is being disposed to act. This conception aligns with the functionalist approach to desire and the standard account of desire's role in explaining action. According to a second influential approach, however, desire is first and foremost an evaluation: desiring is representing something as good. After all, we seem to desire things under the guise of the good. Which understanding of desire is more accurate? Is the guise of the good even right to assume? Should we adopt an alternative picture that emphasizes desire's deontic nature? What do neuroscientific studies suggest? Essays in the first section of the volume are devoted to these questions, and to the puzzle of desire's essence. In the second part of the volume, essays investigate some implications that the various conceptions of desire have on a number of fundamental issues. For example, why are inconsistent desires problematic? What is desire's role in practical deliberation? How do we know what we want? This volume will contribute to the emergence of a fruitful debate on a neglected, albeit crucial, dimension of the mind.

Continental Philosophy

Continental Philosophy PDF Author: William McNeill
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1557867003
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
From Immanuel Kant to Postmodernism, this volume provides an unparalleled student resource: a wide-ranging collection of the essential works of more than 50 seminal thinkers in modern European philosophy. Areas covered include Kant and German Idealism, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Marxism and the Frankfurt School, Structuralism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Deconstruction, and Postmodernism. Each section begins with a concise and helpful introduction, and all the texts have been selected for accessibility as well as significance, making the volume ideal for introductory and advanced levels in philosophy, cultural studies, literary theory, and the history of modern thought.

Handbook of Value

Handbook of Value PDF Author: Tobias Brosch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191025984
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
What is value? Where does it come from? How does it impact our emotions, motivations, decisions and experiences? Value is involved in practically every aspect of human life: whether we decide whom to marry or which political candidate to elect, whether we choose between consumer goods, whether we ask ourselves what is morally right, or beautiful, or sacred, value plays a crucial role. Today the investigation of value is central to many disciplines interested in human thinking, feeling, and behavior, such as economics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, or sociology. Interestingly, while these disciplines all investigate value, they use different definitions and focus on different aspects of the phenomenon. The Handbook of Value combines the forces of the many disciplines involved in value research, by integrating the perspectives of distinguished scholars from the different disciplines. To allow for a high degree of interdisciplinarity, the editors assembled a panel of eminent associate editors representing the different disciplines: Professor Ernst Fehr (economics), Professor Patrik Vuilleumier (neuroscience), Professor Julien Deonna (philosophy) and Professor Fabrice Clement (sociology). Contributions cover conceptual issues such as definitions of value, psychological and neurological mechanisms underlying value computation and representation, types and taxonomies of value, interindividual and intercultural value differences, the role of value in emotion, moral judgment, decision-making and behavior, as well as "case studies " of individual varieties of value. The volume contributes to an interdisciplinary dialogue and integration by providing a common reference point that will serve as a resource for disciplinary excellence and interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. At the same time, the volume provides an excellent overview of the academic state of the art for more practically oriented readers, for example from a business background, who want to understand the determinants of value.

Evaluative Perception

Evaluative Perception PDF Author: Anna Bergqvist
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191089206
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 525

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Book Description
Evaluation is ubiquitous. Indeed, it isn't an exaggeration to say that we assess actions, character, events, and objects as good, cruel, beautiful, etc., almost every day of our lives. Although evaluative judgement - for instance, judging that an institution is unjust - is usually regarded as the paradigm of evaluation, it has been thought by some philosophers that a distinctive and significant kind of evaluation is perceptual. For example, in aesthetics, some have claimed that adequate aesthetic judgement must be grounded in the appreciator's first hand-hand perceptual experience of the item judged. In ethics, reference to the existence and importance of something like ethical perception is found in a number of traditions, for example, in virtue ethics and sentimentalism. This volume brings together philosophers working in aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of mind, and value theory to investigate what we call 'evaluative perception'. Specifically, they engage with (1) Questions regarding the existence and nature of evaluative perception: Are there perceptual experiences of values? If so, what is their nature? Are perceptual experiences of values sui generis? Are values necessary for certain kinds of perceptual experience? (2) Questions about epistemology: Can evaluative perceptual experiences ever justify evaluative judgements? Are perceptual experiences of values necessary for certain kinds of justified evaluative judgements? (3) Questions about value theory: Is the existence of evaluative perceptual experience supported or undermined by particular views in value theory? Are particular views in value theory supported or undermined by the existence of evaluative perceptual experience?

Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Volume 8

Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Volume 8 PDF Author: Mark C. Timmons
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192563386
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics is an annual forum for new work in normative ethical theory. Leading philosophers present original contributions to our understanding of a wide range of moral issues and positions, from analysis of competing approaches to normative ethics (including moral realism, constructivism, and expressivism) to questions of how we should act and live well. OSNE will be an essential resource for scholars and students working in moral philosophy.

The Philosophical Imagination

The Philosophical Imagination PDF Author: Richard Moran
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190633794
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
The Philosophical Imagination brings together several of Richard Moran's essays, ranging over a remarkable variety of topics in philosophy of mind and action, aesthetics, and moral psychology. A theme connecting several of the essays is the different ways our capacity for imagination is drawn on in our responsiveness to art, to literature, to the lives of other persons, and in the practice of philosophy itself. Topics explored here include our emotional responses to mimetic works of art, the nature of metaphor as a vehicle of thought and in the work of rhetoric, and the understanding of the concept of beauty, as that is developed in contrasting ways in the work of Immanuel Kant and Marcel Proust. Several of the essays respond to the work of recent and contemporary philosophers such as Bernard Williams, Stanley Cavell, Harry Frankfurt, and Iris Murdoch, in the context of such themes as the philosophical problem of 'other minds', love and practical reason, the legacy of Sartrean existentialism, and the role of history in the disciplinary self-understanding of philosophy. The final group of essays focuses on questions about self-knowledge and the importance of the first-person perspective, developing ideas from Moran's influential book Authority and Estrangement (Princeton 2001). Topics discussed here include the nature of a person's 'practical knowledge' of her own action, the concept of the mental and the differences between self-understanding and the understanding of others, and the ambiguous role of narrative as a form of self-understanding. Throughout there is an attempt to draw out the connections between topics that are often discussed in isolation from each other, and to pursue them in the context of the recognizable human situations and questions which ground them. The essays are written in a vivid, humane, and accessible style which should attract a broad readership, both inside and outside the academic discipline of philosophy.

The Epistemology of Non-Visual Perception

The Epistemology of Non-Visual Perception PDF Author: Dimitria Electra Gatzia
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190648929
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Most of the research on the epistemology of perception has focused on visual perception. This is hardly surprising given that most of our knowledge about the world is largely attributable to our visual experiences. The present volume is the first to instead focus on the epistemology of non-visual perception - hearing, touch, taste, and cross-sensory experiences. Drawing on recent empirical studies of emotion, perception, and decision-making, it breaks new ground on discussions of whether or not perceptual experience can yield justified beliefs and how to characterize those beliefs. The Epistemology of Non-Visual Perception explores questions not only related to traditional sensory perception, but also to proprioceptive, interoceptive, multisensory, and event perception, expanding traditional notions of the influence that conscious non-visual experience has on human behavior and rationality. Contributors investigate the role that emotions play in decision-making and agential perception and what this means for justifications of belief and knowledge. They analyze the notion that some sensory experiences, like touch, have epistemic privilege over others, as well as perception's relationship to introspection, and the relationship between action perception and belief. Other essays engage with topics in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, exploring the role that artworks can play in providing us with perceptional knowledge of emotions. The essays collected here, written by top researchers in their respective fields, offer perspectives from a wide range of philosophical disciplines and will appeal to scholars interested in philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophical psychology, among others.

Reality and Value

Reality and Value PDF Author: Arthur Campbell Garnett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429514174
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Originally published in 1937. This book addresses the importance of the theory of values that rests on a general metaphysical understanding founded on a comprehensive view of all aspects of the world. The author speaks against the absolutist theories with a realistic one encompassing a theory of space and time and considering value as an object of immediate intuition. These great philosophical questions feed into discussions of the philosophy of religion and of science. Garnett distinguishes between spiritual and other values on the ground that the spiritual values are not subjective to satiety, while other values are. He contends that our knowledge of mind is as direct and reliable as our knowledge of the physical world. This is an important early book by an influential 20th Century thinker.