absolutism The view that there are some types of action that are strictly prohibited by morality, no matter what the specific facts are in a particular case. Some have held, for example, that the intentional torturing or killing of an innocent person is morally impermissible no matter what bad consequences could be prevented by such an action. Absolutism is an especially strict kind of deontolo...

Two years ago, the distribution of the world’s people reached the point at which over half now live in cities. Some social scientists and urban planners (but few political leaders other than those of large municipalities) had seen this change coming. With one group of exceptions, philosophers have paid less attention to the subject. I would like to advance some ideas about how to think philosop...

Thus boldly declares Euphranor, one of the defenders of Christian faith in Berkley’s Alciphron (Berkeley, (1732), Dialogue 1, Section 5, Paragraph 6/10). Evidently, information has been an object of philosophical desire for some time, well before the computer revolution, Internet or the dot.com pandemonium (see for example Dunn (2001) and Adams (2003)). Yet what does Euphranor love, exactly? Wh...

Dr. Joseph Black had at one time, a house near us to the west. He was a striking and beautiful person; tall, very thin, and cadaverously pale; his hair carefully powdered, though there was little of it except what was collected in a long thin queue; his eyes dark, clear and large, like deep pools of pure water. He wore black speckless clothes, silk stockings, silver buckles, and either a slim g...

We start this overview by discussing the place of emotions within the broader affective domain-how different are emotions from moods, sensations, and affective dispositions? Next, we examine the way emotions relate to their objects, emphasizing in the process their intimate relations to values. We move from this inquiry into the nature of emotion to an inquiry into their epistemology. Do they p...

[120-150 words] Fitness plays many roles throughout evolutionary theory, from a measure of populations in the wild to a central element in abstract theoretical presentations of natural selection. It has thus been the subject of an extensive philosophical literature, which has primarily centered on the way to understand the relationship between fitness values and reproductive outcomes. If fitnes...

In recent years it has become more and more difficult to distinguish between metaethical cognitivism and non-cognitivism. (Dreier 2004; van Roojen 2004) The distinction most often used to separate the two camps, until recently at least, was their position on the meaningfulness of moral statements and the applicability of truth-predicates to those statements. Cognitivists are said to hold that m...