M. V. Dougherty

In recent years, Alasdair MacIntyre and others have observed an increasing interest on the part of contemporary ethicists regarding the question of whetherinnocent agents ever find themselves in moral dilemmas. This present-day support for the existence of moral dilemmas for innocent agents has spawned a re-reading of canonical ethical texts in the history of philosophy. The point of departure for the present paper is one particularly contentious battleground of this ongoing historical retrieval, namely, the ethical writings of Thomas Aquinas. I contend that Aquinas is not an ally of those who defend the existence of moral dilemmas for innocent agents. However, Aquinas does present what is in my view a valuable contribution to the discussion of moral dilemmas as such. I show that a close textual reading of one of Aquinas’s examples leads to some rather interesting consequences for his moral theory, and that, surprisingly, this example could be of interest to contemporary ethicists who argue for the existence of moral luck.

This volume is the most recent addition to the relatively new series Contemporary Philosophy in Focus published by Cambridge University Press. Previous volumes have focused on Stanley Cavell, Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, Thomas Kuhn, and Robert Nozick. The series is patterned after the well-respected Cambridge Companion series, with the difference between the two appearing to be merely that the former treats of living or recently living philosophers, while the latter for the most part deals with major philosophers who have been deceased for some time. The present volume under review is dedicated to the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre, and a commissioned team of seven scholars has presented a helpful collection of essays on diverse aspects of his thought. The volume is not a history of MacIntyre’s lengthy philosophical odyssey, but rather it focuses more narrowly on what is referred to in the volume as the “After Virtue project,” namely, the massive ongoing and developing project initiated with MacIntyre’s critically-acclaimed After Virtue and continued with Whose Justice? Which Rationality, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, and Dependent Rational Animals. Thus, the volume for the most part does not treat of MacIntyre’s earlier works in philosophy that do not appear within the trajectory of the “After Virtue project,” for example, works in the field of philosophical theology.

Individuals discovered to have engaged in serial plagiarism in philosophy are few, but the academic publishers falling victim to them are many. Some of the most respected publishing houses in philosophy have recently dealt with the problem of having published plagiarized material. The various responses by these publishers to an instance of serial plagiarism, one that involves forty-three articles and book chapters, provides a real-time snapshot of the practices for correcting the scholarly record. The analysis offered in this article yields a twofold conclusion: first, there is relatively little uniformity among publishers in philosophy for responding to plagiarism; and second, in comparison with the natural sciences the discipline of philosophy often falls short of the accepted practices for correcting the scholarly record. The article considers only public, documented cases of academic plagiarism in philosophy and makes no new allegations of plagiarism.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is best known for his Oratio, one of many works containing his promise to prove that the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle are in agreement. Pico never fulfilled this promise, however, and commentators have at times derided Pico’s concordist project. The present paper argues that Pico’s notion of concordia was at least partly inspired by a jurisprudential habit derived from his early training in canon law. After examining Pico’s explicit but dispersed statements on concordia, I then consider the circumstantial evidence for a jurisprudential origin to Pico’s project. As the habits and dispositions of Renaissance exegetes differed significantly from those of present-day interpreters of the history of philosophy, there is merit in looking beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries to understand Pico’s attempted concordia of Plato and Aristotle. An appreciation of this context mitigates the negative assessments of his enterprise.

The history of moral dilemma theory often ignores the medieval period, overlooking the sophisticated theorizing by several thinkers who debated the existence of moral dilemmas from 1150 to 1450. In this book Michael V. Dougherty offers a rich and fascinating overview of the debates which were pursued by medieval philosophers, theologians and canon lawyers, illustrating his discussion with a diverse range of examples of the moral dilemmas which they considered. He shows that much of what seems particular to twentieth-century moral theory was well-known long ago - especially the view of some medieval thinkers that some forms of wrongdoing are inescapable, and their emphasis on the principle 'choose the lesser of two evils'. His book will be valuable not only to advanced students and specialists of medieval thought, but also to those interested in the history of ethics.

Ghazālī’s The Incoherence of the Philosophers is an unusual philosophical work for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the author’s explicit disavowalof any of the conclusions contained within it. The present essay examines some of the hermeneutical challenges that face readers of the work and offers anexegetical account of the much-neglected Third Discussion, which examines a key point of Neoplatonic metaphysics. The paper argues that Ghazālī’s maintaining of the incompatibility of metaphysical creationism and Neoplatonic emanationism should not be viewed as simply a rhetorical or dialectical argument, but rather is best understood, to use Ghazālī’s words, as a philosophical “proof.” Essential to this proof in the solution to the argument of the Third Discussion is an implicit theory of metaphorical predication that can be pieced together from several of Ghazālī’s remarks as well as a reductio ad absurdum argument about the very possibility of ethical discourse.