Mengyao Yan

Ted A. Warfield reviews the history of epistemology and argues that epistemologists mistakenly take for granted the inference that the failure of closure of some necessary condition on knowledge is sufficient for the failure of epistemic closure. So he concludes that epistemologists should avoid using this inference to explain the failure of epistemic closure. However, I will defend the inference that epistemologists often employ in their discussions. My thesis is that although this inference is invalid, one can still legitimately conclude the failure of epistemic closure from the failure of closure of some necessary condition on knowledge

In Section 41 of Feuerbach’s Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, three forms of sensible intuition are discussed, which attracted the attention of Marx and Engels and is centrally reflected in their co-authored work The German Ideology. Among these, the references to “higher philosophical intuition” and “the highest intuition” in The German Ideology have sparked lively debate among Chinese scholars. Through a comparative analysis of the texts of Marx, Engels, and Feuerbach, we find that “higher philosophical intuition” is Marx and Engels’ generalization of the highest form of sensible intuition in Feuerbach, specifically referring to the intuition of art, religion, and thought as pointed out by Feuerbach himself in Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. Marx and Engels’ method of observing the external world did not discard intuition; rather, their transcendence over Feuerbach’s sensible intuition lies in their establishment of: an empirical intuition rooted in historical materialism, an active intuition grounded in practical materialism, and a dialectical intuition imbued with materialist dialectics.

Role ethics, broadly speaking, is a normative ethical theory that has a prominent emphasis on roles. Although it was prominent in ancient cultures, such as in China and Greece, role ethics waned during the Enlightenment era. Not until very recently has role ethics been articulated in its own terms. Among current discussions on roles, the most systematic role ethics are Confucian role ethics, Epictetus’ role ethics, Sarah Harper’s rolecentered morality and Jeremy Evans’ role ethics. They are my primary interlocutors as I develop and defend an alternative approach to understanding, examining and guiding our ethical life. By arguing that our ethical life is pervasively structured by roles, and drawing on the lights that my primary interlocutors have shed, I propose a role-structured ethics or role ethics that addresses some central issues regarding the nature of roles, the self, role identification, role fulfillment, role conflicts, and changing roles. Importantly, I emphasize the place of traditions in constructing a complete normative role ethics. So throughout the dissertation, I outline and defend the basic structure of any plausible specific role ethics, which is neutral among various traditions. I call such a structure “Role Ethics.” In particular, I investigate the nature of roles and its relation to the self, role fulfillment and its relation to the concept of duties, virtues and skills, as well as the nature of role conflicts and how to approach them. Along these lines of exploration, I also argue that they have important implications on the dignity of persons, moral education, and the notion of practical wisdom. Last but not the least, due to the universality of roles in various traditions, I propose that Role Ethics can serve as a platform to bring various traditions into meaningful dialogue.