Prasanna Satgunarajah

The article considers the problem of actions–beliefs link. As author shows, the widespread approach in social science, those origins can be traced back to Hume and Mill and which tries to reveal the causal relations between beliefs and actions, is mistaken. It is mistaken because it proposes that, firstly, beliefs and actions are distinct and separately identifiable social phenomena and, secondly, causal connection consists in constant conjunction. MacIntyre, instead, proposes, taking as a starting point the distinction between physical movement and human action, to consider the actions–beliefs link in terms of the descriptions which the action should correspond to. If we, on being asked for an explanation of what we have done, refer it to an antecedent condition of a Humean kind, we precisely remove it from the class of actions and assign it to, most probably, the class of physical movements. To explain behavior as a genuinely human action, an explanation must refer to the customarily recognized rules of a particular social order. This presupposes that action must fall under some description which is socially recognizable as the description of an action; an action must fall under a description and my actions under a description available to me; and agent can do only what he/she can describe. As an illustration of his approach, author examines the role of Stalin’s philosophical work “Dialectical and historical materialism” in the process of the ideological “closing” of Soviet society

Richard Rorty argues that the present state of analytic Philosophy is the result of the collapse of the logical empiricist program. But most of the characteristics of analytic philosophy which Rorty ascribes to that collapse predated logical empiricism. The historical explanation of the present state of philosophy must begin not later than with the schism between philosophy and the other disciplines in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To begin then leads to a different view of how philosophical problems are generated

Cultural pluralism has caused disturbing problems for philosophers in applied ethics. If moral sanctions, theories, and applications are culturally bound, then moral conflicts ensuing from cultural differences would seem to be irresolvable. Even human nature, good or evil, is not free from cultural determination. One way out of this pluralistic impasse is the expansion of the moral mind. It is the outlet taken by religion, the arts, and philosophy from the earliest time in human culture. In philosophy we find an authentic example of this in Socrates. Following the practice of Socrates, we can try to expand the moral mind philosophically, that is, by working on various forms of reasoning, both deductive and non-deductive, including induction, abduction, dialectics, analogy, and pragmatics.

The political philosophy of recent American liberalism has been designed to answer three questions: how to justify egalitarian principles of distributive justice that should be compelling to any rational individual; how to defend a view of government according to which it is required to be neutral between rival conceptions of the human good, while guaranteeing the liberties of the adherents of each to pursue the achievement of their good, as they understand it; and how to elaborate an idea of public reason that restricts the kinds of argument that are permissible within the political sphere to those that appeal to principles shared by all reasonable citizens, so excluding appeal to comprehensive religious or philosophical doctrines of the human good. John Rawls has of course made the single most important contribution to answering these questions and it is therefore unsurprising that Michael J. White’s book, which aims to undermine each of these projects, is a notable addition to the body of philosophical writing devoted to Rawls’ work. Yet it is a good deal more than this.