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450Suffering and Transformative ExperienceIn Michael S. Brady, David Bain & Jennifer Corns (eds.), Philosophy of Suffering: Metaphysics, Value, and Normativity, Routledge. pp. 165-179. 2019.In this chapter we suggest that many experiences of suffering can be further illuminated as forms of transformative experience, using the term coined by L.A. Paul. Such suffering experiences arise from the vulnerability, dependence, and affliction intrinsic to the human condition. Such features can create a variety of positively, negatively, and ambivalently valanced forms of epistemically and personally transformative experiences, as we detail here. We argue that the productive element of suffe…Read more
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6Values and aims of higher education: The case of Ernst Jünger, 'total mobilisation', and higher educationDiscourse: Learning and Teaching in Philosophical and Religious Studies 10 (1): 225-238. 2010.
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53Mathematical practice and epistemic virtue and viceSynthese 199 (1-2): 407-426. 2020.What sorts of epistemic virtues are required for effective mathematical practice? Should these be virtues of individual or collective agents? What sorts of corresponding epistemic vices might interfere with mathematical practice? How do these virtues and vices of mathematics relate to the virtue-theoretic terminology used by philosophers? We engage in these foundational questions, and explore how the richness of mathematical practices is enhanced by thinking in terms of virtues and vices, and ho…Read more
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548Private Schools and Queue‐jumping: A reply to WhiteJournal of Philosophy of Education 54 (5): 1201-1205. 2020.John White (2016) defends the UK private school system from the accusation that it allows an unfair form of ‘queue jumping’ in university admissions. He offers two responses to this accusation, one based on considerations of harm, and one based on meritocratic distribution of university places. We will argue that neither response succeeds: the queue-jumping argument remains a powerful case against the private school system in the UK. We begin by briefly outlining the queue-jumping argument (§1),…Read more
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285A Pluralist Account of Spiritual ExemplarityIn Victoria S. Harrison & Tyler Dalton McNabb (eds.), Philosophy and the Spiritual Life, Routledge. 2023.This Chapter sketches a pluralist account of spiritual exemplarity. Starting from recent work by Linda Zagzebski, three main kinds of spiritual exemplarity are described, distinguished by their underlying aspiration. I name these the aspirations to allegiance, enlightened insight, and emulation, illustrated with examples from the Western and South and East Asian spiritual dispensations. The Chapter concludes by warning against tendencies either to occlude this plurality or to illicitly privilege…Read more
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14Narratives of Adversity and Wisdom in Ancient Ethical and Spiritual TextsJournal of Value Inquiry 53 (3): 459-461. 2019.
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782Misanthropy and the Hatred of HumankindIn Noell Birondo (ed.), The Moral Psychology of Hate, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 75-98. 2022.One way to think about the philosophical significance of hatred is to consider doctrines that are characterised by feelings of hatred. A good candidate is misanthropy, which is often conceived as an attitude of hatred directed at humankind at large. I start by sketching a working account of misanthropy as a critical verdict or judgment on the contemporary condition of humankind as it has become. The criticism is directed at the array of vices and failings that are ubiquitous and entrenched withi…Read more
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29Science, Realism, and Unconceived Alternatives: Introduction to the Special Issue on Unconceived AlternativesSynthese 196 (10): 3911-3913. 2019.
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141Expanding Transformative ExperienceEuropean Journal of Philosophy 28 (1): 199-213. 2019.We develop a broader, more fine-grained taxonomy of forms of ‘transformative experience’ inspired by the work of L.A. Paul. Our vulnerability to such experiences arises, we argue, due to the vulnerability, dependence, and affliction intrinsic to the human condition. We use this trio to distinguish a variety of positively, negatively, and ambivalently valenced forms of epistemically and/or personally transformative experiences. Moreover, we argue that many transformative experiences can arise gra…Read more
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63Vice Epistemology (edited book)Routledge. 2020.Some of the most problematic human behaviors involve vices of the mind such as arrogance, closed-mindedness, dogmatism, gullibility, and intellectual cowardice, as well as wishful or conspiratorial thinking. What sorts of things are epistemic vices? How do we detect and mitigate them? How and why do these vices prevent us from acquiring knowledge, and what is their role in sustaining patterns of ignorance? What is their relation to implicit or unconscious bias? How do epistemic vices and systems…Read more
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809Epistemic Corruption and Social OppressionIn Ian James Kidd, Quassim Cassam & Heather Battaly (eds.), Vice Epistemology, Routledge. pp. 69-87. 2020.I offer a working analysis of the concept of 'epistemic corruption', then explain how it can help us to understand the relations between epistemic vices and social oppression, and use this to motivate a style of vice epistemology, inspired by the work of Robin Dillon, that I call critical character epistemology.
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130Inner VirtuePhilosophical Quarterly 69 (276): 641-644. 2019.Inner Virtue. By Bommarito Nicolas.
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7Suffering as Transformative ExperienceIn Michael S. Brady, David Bain & Jennifer Corns (eds.), Philosophy of Suffering: Metaphysics, Value, and Normativity, Routledge. pp. 165-179. 2019.In this chapter we suggest that many experiences of suffering can be further illuminated as forms of transformative experience, using the term coined by L.A. Paul. Such suffering experiences arise from the vulnerability, dependence, and affliction intrinsic to the human condition. Such features can create a variety of positively, negatively, and ambivalently valanced forms of epistemically and personally transformative experiences, as we detail here. We argue that the productive element of suffe…Read more
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867Pathophobia, Illness, and VicesInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 27 (2): 286-306. 2019.I introduce the concept pathophobia, to capture the range of morally objectionable forms of treatment to which somatically ill persons are subjected. After distinguishing this concept from sanism and ableism, I argue that the moral wrongs of pathophobia are best analysed using a framework of vice ethics. To that end I describe five clusters of pathophobic vices and failings, illustrating each with examples from three influential illness narratives.
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680Daoism, Humanity, and the Way of HeavenReligious Studies 56 111-126. 2020.I argue that Zhuangist Daoism manifests what I label the spiritual aspiration to emulation, and then use this to challenge some of John Cottingham's attempts to confine authentic spiritual experience to theistic traditions.
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400Epistemic Vices and Feminist Philosophies of ScienceIn Kristen Intemann & Sharon Crasnow (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Science, Routledge. pp. 157-169. 2020.I survey some points of contact between contemporary vice epistemology and feminist philosophy of science.
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Feyerabend, Science, and ScientismIn Karim Bschir & Jamie Shaw (eds.), Interpreting Feyerabend: Critical Essays, Cambridge University Press. pp. 172-190. 2021.I argue that we can profitably understanding Feyerabend’s work in at least the latter half of his career in terms of a series of experiments with ways of conceptualising and criticising scientism, under the aegis of a ‘critique of scientific reason’. The critique of science’s self-understanding was the more sophisticated and successful, while the critique of scientific modernity was more erratic and less effective, due mainly to the failure to take up the necessary resources.
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833Admiration, attraction and the aesthetics of exemplarityJournal of Moral Education 48 (3): 369-380. 2019.The aim of this paper is to show that an aesthetics of exemplarity could be a useful component of projects of moral self-cultivation. Using some in Linda Zagzebski's exemplarism, I describe a distinctive, aesthetically-inflected mode of admiration called moral attraction whose object is the inner beauty of a persn - the expression of the 'inner' virtues or excellences of character of a person in 'outer' forms of bodily comportment that are experienced, by others, as beautiful. I then argue that …Read more
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276Mary Midgley on our Need for (Good) PhilosophyWomen in Parenthesis. 2018.Mary Midgley argued that philosophy was a necessity, not a luxury. It's difficulties lie partly in the fact that, when doing it, we are struggling not only against the difficulty of the subject matter, but also certain tendencies within ourselves. I focus on two - one-way reductionism and myopic specialisation.
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202Review of Nicolas Bommarito, "Inner Virtue"Philosophical Quarterly 69 (276): 641-644. 2019.A review of Nicolas Bommarito's book, "Inner Virtue", which argues persuasively that our "inner states" - emotions, pleasures, attentional habits - can be virtuous if they manifest what he calls our "moral concerns".
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47Mystery and Humility (edited book)European Journal for Philosophy of Religion. 2012.This guest-edited special section explores the related themes of mystery, humility, and religious practice from both the Western and East Asian philosophical traditions. The contributors are David E. Cooper, John Cottingham, Mark Wynn, Graham Parkes, and Ian James Kidd.
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384Review of David E. Cooper, "Animals and Misanthropy" (Routledge, 2018) (review)Philosophy. forthcoming.A review of David E. Cooper's book, "Animals and Misanthropy", which argues that reflection on awful treatment of animals justifies a negative critical judgment on human life and culture.
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701‘Following the Way of Heaven’: Exemplarism, Emulation, and DaoismJournal of the American Philosophical Association 6 (1): 1-15. 2020.Many ancient traditions recognise certain people as exemplars of virtue. I argue that some of these traditions incorporate a 'cosmic' mode of emulation, where certain of the qualities or aspects of the grounds or source of the world manifest, in human form, as virtues. If so, the ultimate objection of emulation is not a human being. I illustrate this with the forms of Daoist exemplarity found in the Book of Zhuangzi, and end by considering the charge that the aspiration to cosmic emulation is in…Read more
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442Martial Metaphors and Argumentative Virtues and VicesIn Alessandra Tanesini & Michael P. Lynch (eds.), Polarisation, Arrogance, and Dogmatism: Philosophical Perspectives, Routledge. pp. 25-38. 2021.This chapter challenges the common claim that vicious forms of argumentative practice, like interpersonal arrogance and discursive polarisation, are caused by martial metaphors, such as ARGUMENT AS WAR. I argue that the problem isn’t the metaphor, but our wider practices of metaphorising and the ways they are deformed by invidious cultural biases and prejudices. Drawing on feminist argumentation theory, I argue that misogynistic cultures distort practices of metaphorising in two ways. First, the…Read more
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622Animals, Misanthropy, and HumanityJournal of Animal Ethics 10 (1): 66-72. 2020.David. E. Cooper’s claim in Animals and Misanthropy is that honest reflection on the ways human beings treat and compare with animals encourages a dark, misanthropic judgment on humankind. Treatment of animals manifests a range of vices and failings that are ubiquitous and entrenched in our practices, institutions, and forms of life, organized by Cooper into five clusters. Moreover, comparisons of humans and animals reveals both affinities and similarities, including a crucial difference that an…Read more
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411Humility, Contingency, and Pluralism in the SciencesIn Mark Alfano, Michael Patrick Lynch & Alessandra Tanesini (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Humility, Routledge. pp. 346-358. 2021.A chapter exploring the relations between humility and the sciences.
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1031Deep Epistemic VicesJournal of Philosophical Research 43. 2018.Although the discipline of vice epistemology is only a decade old, the broader project of studying epistemic vices and failings is much older. This paper argues that contemporary vice epistemologists ought to engage more closely with these earlier projects. After sketching some general arguments in section one, I then turn to deep epistemic vices: ones whose identity and intelligibility depends on some underlying conception of human nature or the nature of reality. The final section then offers …Read more
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198Review of Paul Feyerabend, Philosophy of NatureJournal of the Philosophy of History 13 (2): 281-285. 2019.
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18PaulFeyerabend, Against Method, 4th ed. (London: Verso, 2010). 296, price $22.95 pb.PaulFeyerabend, The Tyranny of Science, ed. EricOberheim (London: Polity, 2011). 153, price $13.18 pb (review)Philosophical Investigations 36 (1): 90-94. 2013.
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29Pierre Duhem’s epistemic aims and the intellectual virtue of humility: a reply to IvanovaStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 42 (1): 185-189. 2011.David Stump has recently argued that Pierre Duhem can be interpreted as a virtue epistemologist. Stump’s claims have been challenged by Milena Ivanova on the grounds that Duhem’s ‘epistemic aims’ are more modest than those of virtue epistemologists. I challenge Ivanova’s criticism of Stump by arguing that she not distinguish between ‘reliabilist’ and ‘responsibilist’ virtue epistemologies. Once this distinction is drawn, Duhem clearly emerges as a ‘virtue-responsibilist’ in a way that complement…Read more