Joshua Glasgow

A long-standing and passionate divide among sports fans concerns whether the team’s success or failure can justifiably impact the fan’s loyalty. May one be a fair-weather fan or even a foul-weather fan, or one must be a more loyal, “all-weather” fan who will root for the team regardless of whether it experiences success or failure? Recent arguments contend that fair- and foul-weather fandom are virtuous in certain ways that all-weather fandom is not. This article defends the all-weather fan along two dimensions. First, it argues that the virtues of the fair- and foul-weather fan, including moral resistance, humility, and resilience, are also available to the all-weather fan. Second, all-weather fandom is shown to enjoy special virtues. In addition to already established virtues such as loyalty, this article articulates a previously unexplored virtue of the all-weather fan: by aligning the fan’s first-order allegiance to the team with a second-order commitment to the first-order allegiance itself, the all-weather fan’s vulnerabilities are vertically integrated. In this way, all-weather fandom looks much like the fullest forms of friendship and love.

Many think that, in addition to what happens to us in any given moment, our overall well-being can also be affected by what happens to us across individual moments. One explanation of this phenomenon is that things simply getting better for us is good for us, while things getting worse for us is itself bad for us. While this view has received earlier defenses, it has also received a series of criticisms over roughly the last decade. This chapter responds to those critiques in defense of the view that the “mere shape” of a life or other episode has value or disvalue for us. Topics discussed include how to make room for narrative and hedonic value on such a picture; whether to locate the value of the overall episode in one particular moment or holistically; which episodes of this sort are relevant for lifetime well-being; and how this view is compatible with temporally neutrality.

This chapter investigates how we can be responsible for actions and attitudes from which we are fully alienated. Such attitudes include the implicit biases that many good-hearted people wholeheartedly disavow but nonetheless seem to harbor. Several theories are examined, including among others the real-self theory proposed by Harry Frankfurt, the views of T. M. Scanlon, and Nomy Arpaly’s account. Extant theories seem unable to accommodate certain compelling intuitions. To accommodate these considered judgments, the variantist thesis advanced in this chapter is that responsibility can shift depending on the content of the action or attitude, and more fundamentally on the harm done in or by the act or attitude in question.

Die fünf Bände enthalten die überarbeiteten Fassungen aller Haupt- und Sektionsvorträge des IX. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, der im März 2000 an der Berliner Humboldt-Universität stattfand. Die Beiträge gliedern sich in die folgenden Sektionen: Der vorkritische Kant, Kants Theoretische Philosophie, Kants Praktische Philosophie, Kants Ästhetik, Kants Religionsphilosophie, Kants Geschichtsphilosophie, Kants Rechts-, Staats- und Politische Philosophie, Kants Anthropologie, Kants Naturphilosophie und das Opus postumum, Kants Logik, Kant und die Aufklärung, Kant, Deutscher Idealismus und Neukantianismus, Kant und die Folgen. Zu den Autoren zählen u.a. Manfred Baum, Mario Caimi, Konrad Cramer, Jean Ferrari, Eckhardt Förster, Michael Friedman, Simone Goyard-Fabre, Paul Guyer, Gary Hatfield, Agnes Heller, Dieter Henrich, Otfried Höffe, Wolfgang Kersting, Béatrice Longuenesse, Onora O'Neill, Robert Pippin, Gerold Prauss und Michael Wolff.

Why should we strive to be important? Does it make our lives go better if we are especially significant? This book argues that the common impulse to seek exceptionally high levels of significance is misguided. One reason why is that we cannot reach cosmic significance. We do not have the size, duration, or power that would allow us to be that important. Even the value that we do contribute to the universe, our loving and rationality and pain and pleasure, are in short supply. So our significance has built-in limitations. What is more, being exceptionally significant would not be to our personal benefit: it does not advance our well-being, our meaning in life, or any other of our interests. In fact, we have ample reason to embrace our modest levels of mattering: if we do not matter very much, then we are liberated to go about our lives without worry, to the same extent. We should thus feel good about our unexceptional lives. This book is a celebration of being ordinary.

This article summarizes the main arguments of the book The Solace: Finding Value in Death through Gratitude for Life. The main themes discussed include how death can be bad, in a concurrentist-deprivationist way, for the one who dies, and how gratitude can sometimes be holistic and target even bad objects, when those bad objects are part of what are identifiedas meaningful goods. Since life is one of those meaningful goods, and since death is a part of life, we can find value in death. Rationally affirming that value takes the form of solace rather than of other affirmations like gratitude.

It is widely thought that we have good reason to try to be important. Being important or doing significant things is supposed to add value to our lives. In particular, it is supposed to make our lives exceptionally meaningful. This essay develops an alternative view. After exploring what importance is and how it might relate to meaning in life, a series of cases are presented to validate the perspective that being important adds no meaning to our lives. The meaningful life does need valuable projects, activities, and relationships. But no added meaning is secured by those projects, activities, and relationships being especially significant. The extraordinary life has no more meaning than the ordinary life.

This chapter examines when a word’s meaning can change. On the view explored here, the meaning of a term is fixed by language users having certain dispositions to use the term in certain ways. Consequently, meanings change—concepts shift—when the relevant dispositions change. After the view is articulated, it is put to use defending descriptivism from some recent objections. Finally, this chapter examines the extent to which terms really replace meanings at all—conceptual revolution—or just have their meanings and references change shape—conceptual evolution.

Mourning the loss of loved ones can be one of the hardest things we go through. But what if we changed the way we thought about it, and learned to find positive value in death as part of life? This book examines how we can take solace in the fact that we and our loved ones will die, surprising or impossible as that may seem. Along the way, it investigates the nature of gratitude, how good and bad relate, and enduring theories surrounding death. Based on philosopher Joshua Glasgow's experience confronting his mother's battle with cancer, and his search for a meaningful, comforting way to think about it, the book will appeal to readers who confront the loss of loved ones and those who worry about their own death--in other words, everyone.

© Mind Association 2018This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...It starts when someone, often a highly visible someone, challenges a widely used and commonly accepted idea. In stage two, defenders of conventional wisdom recruit complicated and unexpected theories to save common sense. Statistics may be involved. Jargon is likely. In the third stage, the common-sense-preserving theories are themselves critiqued. At this point, some may rekindle the proposal to eliminate the idea. Others recommend previously unnoticed compromises.And then it happens. In the tangled woods of mature academic discourse, one or two lonely thinkers howl above the blowing winds: ‘Wait!’ they cry, ‘That original, basic folk theory wasn’t so bad to begin with!’A few decades ago, the idea of race entered this familiar cycle. K. Anthony Appiah and Naomi Zack argued, for very different...

Supervenience has provided a way for nonreductive materialists to explain how the mental can be physically irreducible but still physically respectable. In recent years, doubts about this research program have emerged from a number of quarters. Consequently, Terence Horgan has argued that nonreductive materialists must appeal to an upgraded "superdupervenience," if supervenience is to do any materialist work. We argue that nonreductive materialism cannot meet this challenge. Superdupervenience is impossible

Many hold that ordinary race-thinking in the USA is committed to the 'one-drop rule', that race is ordinarily represented in terms of essences, and that race is ordinarily represented as a biological (phenotype- and/or ancestry-based, non-social) kind. This study investigated the extent to which ordinary race-thinking subscribes to these commitments. It also investigated the relationship between different conceptions of race and racial attitudes. Participants included 449 USA adults who completed an Internet survey. Unlike previous research, conceptions of race were assessed using concrete vignettes. Results indicate widespread rejection of the one-drop rule, as well as the use of a complex combination of ancestral, phenotypic, and social (and, therefore, non-essentialist) criteria for racial classification. No relationship was found between racial attitudes and essentialism, the one-drop rule, or social race-thinking; however, ancestry-based and phenotype-based classification criteria were associated with racial attitudes. These results suggest a complicated relationship between conceptions of race and racial attitudes.

Analyzing racial concepts has become an important task in the philosophy of race. Aside from any inherent interest that might be found in the meanings of racial terms, these meanings also can spell the doom or deliverance of competing ontological and normative theories about race. One of the most pressing questions about race at present is the normative question of whether race should be eliminated from, or conserved in, public discourse and practice. This normative question is often answered in part by appealing to the ontological status of race: if race is an illusion, then it should be eliminated, and if it is real, then it can be conserved. 1 Thus, for..

Kant's ethics is traditionally categorized and defended as deontological. Recent scholarship has left this tradition, arguing variously that Kantians should leave deontology behind, or that Kant had a teleological ethics, or that the best Kantian position is a consequentialist one. In this dissertation, I articulate and defend a middle path between these interpretations and defenses. I argue that Kant's ethics is, and Kantian ethics ought to be, a value-based deontology. In Part One, I argue that contrary to conventional discussion, deontology can be value-based. In Part Two, I interpret Kant's ethics as a value-based deontology, and I defend it as such, both against the traditional and more contemporary alternates. Finally, in Part Three, I defend Kantian value-based deontology from various attacks that might be posed against it

Moral phenomenology has enjoyed a resurgence lately, and within the field, a trend has emerged: uniform rejection of the idea that the experience of making ‘direct’ moral judgments has any phenomenal essence, that is, any phenomenal property or properties that are always present and that distinguish these experiences from experiences of making non-direct- moral judgments. This article examines existing arguments for this anti-essentialism and finds them wanting. While acknowledging that phenomenological reflection is an unstable pursuit, it is maintained here that phenomenological essentialism about a certain domain of direct moral judgment, namely direct judgment of obligation and prohibition, is more credible than has been recognized. The positive proposal is to rehabilitate something close to Maurice Mandelbaum’s essentialism, specifically to maintain that direct moral judgment ’s phenomenal essence is arguably its felt categorical demand. The key to making this argument is to assume a ‘rich view’ of moral consciousness, the view that phenomenal features of moral judgment might be present even when they are not attended to. This assumption is controversial, but it is warranted by two considerations. First, though controversial, the rich view is intuitively plausible. Second, it reveals that the existing arguments against the kind of essentialism defended here appear to tacitly presuppose an equally controversial – and arguably less intuitive – rejection of the rich view