Terence Cuneo

Advocates of the so-called New Hume maintain that, contrary to the traditional interpretation, Hume is neither a non-cognitivist nor a moral skeptic. Rather, if these philosophers are correct, Hume is a sentimentalist who defends views very similar to Hutcheson’s. Reid’s attack on Hume’s moral philosophy, however, depends on an interpretation according to which Hume is a non-cognitivist and a moral skeptic. Does this mean that, if advocates of the New Hume are correct, Reid’s objections to Hume entirely fail to make contact with Hume’s views? This chapter argues that, even if proponents of the New Hume are correct, Reid raises objections that make contact with Hume’s views and are worth considering. These objections concern how to square Hume’s commitment to hedonism and rule-utilitarianism with very plausible principles of justice.

Inquiring about God is the first of two volumes of Nicholas Wolterstorff's collected papers. This volume collects Wolterstorff's essays on the philosophy of religion written over the last thirty-five years. The essays, which span a range of topics including Kant's philosophy of religion, the medieval conception of God, and the problem of evil, are unified by the conviction that some of the central claims made by the classical theistic tradition, such as the claims that God is timeless, simple, and impassible, should be rejected. Still, Wolterstorff contends, rejecting the classical conception of God does not imply that theists should accept the Kantian view according to which God cannot be known. Of interest to both philosophers and theologians, Inquiring about God should give the reader a lively sense of the creative and powerful work done in contemporary philosophical theology by one of its foremost practitioners.

In his recent book, The Moral Problem (Basil Blackwell, 1994), Michael Smith presents a number of arguments designed to expose the difficulties with so-called 'extcrnalist' theories of motivation. This essay endeavors to defend externalism from Smith's attacks. I attempt three tasks in the essay. First, I try to clarify and reformulate Smith's distinction between internalism and externalism. Second, I formulate two of Smith's arguments- what I call the 'reliability argument' and 'the rationalist argument' -and attempt to show that these arguments fail to damage externalism. Third, I undertake to expose and question some of the motivations that drive internalism.

Practices of Belief, the second volume of Nicholas Wolterstorff's collected papers, brings together his essays on epistemology from 1983 to 2008. It includes not only the essays which first presented 'Reformed epistemology' to the philosophical world, but also Wolterstorff's latest work on the topic of entitled belief and its intersection with religious belief. The volume presents five new essays and a retrospective essay that chronicles the changes in the course of philosophy over the last fifty years. Of interest to epistemologists, philosophers of religion, and theologians, Practices of Belief should engage a wide audience of those interested in the topic of whether religious belief can be responsibly formed and maintained in the contemporary world.

Capacities for Goodness: A Defense of neo-Aristotelian Moral Realism is an essay in metaethics. Its overarching aim is to develop and defend a distinctively neo-Aristotelian version of moral realism. ;The essay breaks into three stages and seven chapters. The first stage of the dissertation defends a generic brand of moral realism. In the first chapter, I claim that moral realism is any view which defends the claims that some moral judgments are true in the realist sense, and that moral facts irreducibly exist. I contend, in the second and third chapters, that some version of moral realism is true. Therein, I argue that we should reject rival antirealist views, including moral noncognitivism, alethic antirealism, 'error theories' and moral reductionism. ;The second stage of the dissertation develops an account of what it is for humans to flourish. In the fourth chapter, I offer a neo-Aristotelian account of the nature and components of human flourishing. I then proceed, in the fifth chapter, to grapple with what I call the 'Grounding Question'. The Grounding Question asks: what makes it the case that the sorts of activities, functional states and experiential states which we have identified as components of human flourishing are components of human flourishing? The sixth chapter develops a neo-Aristotelian account of intrinsic goodness. Here I claim that participation in the various components of human flourishing gives rise to moral obligations of various sorts for persons to prize such participation in and for itself. ;The third stage of the dissertation sketches a neo-Aristotelian account of the moral virtues. A moral virtue, so I claim, is composed of four components. For any trait that is a virtue, that trait must be an enduring excellence of a sort; dispose its possessor to apprehend a certain range of morally salient features of the world; motivate its possessor to bring about a certain range of valuable ends E; and be such that its possessor cannot ordinarily fail to bring about those valuable ends E which she intends to bring about because of her own incompetence, inattention, etc