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This paper offers an account of why prenatal harms seem particularly objectionable. It identifies structural similarities between key cases of prenatal harm and the recently characterized "all-or-nothing" problem from Joe Horton. According to the account defended by the paper, a willingness to parent incurs a duty to protect the fetus from harm. This implication provides independent support for so-called "voluntarist" or "intentionalist" accounts of parental role obligations, according to which, roughly, a mother's autonomous choice to parent a child suffices for having the obligations distinctive of parenthood toward the child.

Philosophers have recently come to focus on explaining the phenomenon of bad beliefs, beliefs that are apparently true and well-evidenced but nevertheless objectionable. Despite this recent focus, a consensus is already forming around a particular explanation of these beliefs’ badness called moral encroachment, according to which, roughly, the moral stakes engendered by bad beliefs make them particularly difficult to justify. This paper advances an alternative account not just of bad beliefs but of bad attitudes more generally according to which bad beliefs’ badness originates not in a failure of sufficient evidence but in a failure to respond adequately to reasons. I motivate this alternative account through an analogy to recent discussions of moral worth centered on the well-known grocer case from Kant’s Groundwork, and by showing that this analogy permits the proposed account to generalize to bad attitudes beyond belief. The paper concludes by contrasting the implications of moral encroachment and of the proposed account for bad attitudes’ blameworthiness.

I argue that Davidson’s conception of motivating reasons as belief-desire pairs suggests a model of normative reasons for action that is superior to the orthodox conception according to which normative reasons are propositions, facts, or the truth-makers of such facts.

In turning prophecy into a form of literature, the authors of ancient Israelite prophetic books repeatedly addressed the nature of prophecy itself. This preoccupation suggests that the phenomenon of prophecy was by no means a simple and known concept to the authors of this literature, but rather one in need of discursive construction. The authors of Jeremiah explored theories of prophecy from a variety of perspectives. While all the Jeremiah traditions assume a basic definition of prophecy as the mediation of a divine message through an intermediary, they also move beyond this conception in a number of ways. Though prophetic literature ostensibly presents disembodied prophecy, the authors of Jeremiah frequently direct their attention to the essentially embodied nature of prophecy. The prophet’s bodily experience, for these authors, cannot be separated from his capacity to transmit the divine message. Other parts of the Jeremiah tradition negotiate a history of prophecy in relation to Moses and Deuteronomy. For these texts, prophecy has to be understood as an unfolding history that begins but does not end with Deuteronomy. Finally, a distinct thread of tradition imagines Jeremiah’s words as carrying an almost magical efficacy. Rather than merely transmitting a message, Jeremiah’s speech has the effect of bringing about the divine judgment on Judah. In each case, the ancient authors navigate the innovative contours of prophetic literature by actively exploring the potencies of prophecy.

Muito se tem escrito sobre a relação entra as comunidades minoritárias e o domínio cristão nos reinos hispânicos medievais. Contudo, a questão sobre a convivência social entre judeus e mudéjares tem sido objeto de um tratamento menos frequente, geralmente orientado para a ideia de uma relação caracterizada pelo conflito. O presente texto pretende sublinhar a necessidade de um estudo mais aprofundado sobre esta questão, de modo a permitir uma visão mais clara do ambiente subjacente aos espaços partilhados por estes dois grupos. Much has been written about the relationship between the minority communities of the medieval Spanish kingdoms and the ruling Christian community, however, how the Jews and Mudejars related to each other on a social level has not been so adequately developed. The work that has been done has been carried out with an assumption of bad blood between these two confessional minorities, and it is my intention to demonstrate that perhaps a deeper study is required to have a clearer understanding of what ambience dominated the spaces these two people groups shared.

Some have attempted to explain why it appears that action based on deferential moral belief lacks moral worth by appealing to claims about an attitude that is difficult to acquire through testimony, which theorists have called “moral understanding”. I argue that this state is at least partly non-cognitive. I begin by employing case-driven judgments to undermine the assumption that I argue is responsible for the strangeness of deferential moral belief: the assumption that if an agent knows that some fact gives them a moral reason to act in some way, then they’re in a position to act that way for the moral reason given by that fact. I then argue that cases from non-moral epistemology concerning properly-based belief give us independent reason to reject this assumption and conclude by sketching a Davidson-inspired account of normative reasons that explains why acting for moral reasons requires the right non-cognitive state, which is worth calling a kind of moral understanding.

Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct Hilary Kornblith’s (2002) argument for excluding conceptual analysis from epistemological inquiry, and then provide three objections to it. More specifically, Kornblith argues that epistemological properties such as ‘knowledge’ reduce to natural kinds (with a constitutive essence) which can only be discovered and investigated using the a posteriori methods of the natural sciences. Thus, he continues, conceptual analysis can’t properly illuminate the target domain. The three objections to Kornblith’s argument which I present are as follows: (i) Multiple Realizeability, (ii) Psychological Explanation, (iii) Starting Points. On strength of these objections, I conclude that Kornblith’s brand of a posteriori epistemology both eliminates our ability to make epistemic evaluations in general, and also implies a strong form of scepticism. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

Roger White has argued that the assumptions required to support a simplicity favoring principle are far more modest than it first seems. I criticize White's arguments and show that White requires assumptions for his arguments that are at least as controversial as the simplicity favoring principle he wishes to support.