Katherine Sweet Moses

18th-century philosophy David Hume thought that our most basic methods of reasoning are fundamentally flawed. In his book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume argues for skepticism concerning induction - the process of observing the world, gaining knowledge via perception, and then drawing conclusions about things we have not observed. In this article, I examine Hume’s skepticism, taking a detailed look at his criticisms of induction and his claim that we cannot assume there are uniform regularities and principles in nature.

The ancient Greek philosopher and teacher Aristotle was the founder of the Lyceum, a school in Athens dedicated to the study of nature and philosophical inquiry for over a hundred years. In opposition to his own teacher, Plato, Aristotle developed a metaphysical and ethical theory based on the view that human beings are embodied creatures, not merely thinking things. In doing so, he clarified and expanded the concept of virtue, developing a theory of virtue that has impacted how we think about mental states, states of wellbeing, and states of moral character. In Book II of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle explains how we learn good (or bad) habits through experience, education, and training. Pleasure and pain provide starting points for us, because they help orient us toward the good, but eventually our primary motivation should be to do good because it is good. Excellent habits are those that cause us to react in neither excessive nor deficient ways to the things around us. Once we have the right motivation to do good because it is good, and once our habitual righteous action exemplifies our stable character, we are virtuous and thriving people.

In this paper, I answer the question,how do we collaborate well with others?I first look at cases of good collaboration, contrasting them briefly with some cases of poor collaboration; I then describe the similarities between the good cases, such as shared aims, shared planning of projects, shared norms among collaborators. The conclusion is that collaborating well involves shared norms, derived both from societal norms and from a well‐ordered relationship between participants; a shared vision derived from shared knowledge and open communication grounded in relationship; and open‐mindedness and thoughtful disagreement, which depend on mutual respect and trust between participants.

Collaborative research is quite common in contemporary society; indeed, it may be thought that scientists cannot live without it. Yet, it seems difficult to engage in good interdisciplinary collaboration when research methods and background assumptions often differ widely. I suggest in this paper that a disposition to inquire into another person is essential to good collaborative research. I first explain what I mean by “empersonal inquisitiveness” and why it is important in interdisciplinary collaboration. Inquiring into a person serves as an important precursor to engaging in interdisciplinary collaboration, because it allows researchers to form shared frameworks and develop a shared plan for the research project. I then discuss social-cognitive mechanisms and their ability to generate knowledge of other persons. In the final section of the paper, I explain how social cognition can allow persons to engage in truly collaborative projects, in particular by way of shared mental models and shared reasoning. The result is that empersonal inquisitiveness, when employed by potential research partners, produces important empersonal knowledge that advances collaborative research.

Arguments from divine hiddenness attempt to show that God, as understood by traditional Christianity, does not exist.Eleonore Stump has argued that, contrary to a key premise in such arguments, it is possible for God to have a personal relationship with human beings who do not believe that he exists. I describe Stump’s account of the will and describe its connection to her explanation of divine hiddenness. Specifically, I show that her account of the knowledge of persons cannot solve the problem of divine hiddenness. I also argue that Stump’s account of the will commits her to the claim that lacking belief in God’s existence entails resistance to God’s grace.