In the preface to Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick wonders why philosophical writings seem so arrogant:...the usual manner of presenting philosophical work puzzles me. Works of philosophy are written as though their authors believe them to be the absolutely final word on their subject. But it's not, surely, that each philosopher thinks that he finally, thank God, has found the truth and built an impregnable fortress around it. We are all actually much more modest than that. For good reason.Having thought long and hard about the view he proposes, a philosopher has a reasonably good idea about its weak points; the places where great intellectual weight is placed upon something perhaps too fragile to bear it, the places where the unraveling of the view might begin, the unprobed assumptions he feels uneasy about. 1 Although Nozick does not use these words, we might say that, by his lights, most philosophical writings display an astounding lack of intellectual humility.In her widely-acclaimed book, I Don't Know, Leah Hager Cohen relates a conversation with her students about a -well-read‖ and -incredibly smart‖ colleague named -Mary‖. Mary routinely exhibits an unusual response when -she's having a conversation and the other person mentions a book or author in that way that assumes she's familiar with the work.‖ Cohen elaborates:You know when you're with people you want to impress, people you find a little intimidating? Maybe you're feeling kind of dumb, like you don't really belong with them. You're worried you'll be found out.And someone mentions a writer or the title of a book in this tone like, Naahh-turally you know what I'm talking about. And even though you have no clue, you do that little thing where you narrow your eyes and purse your lips and give this thoughtful nod. 2Mary has a quite different response in such situations, says Cohen. -She says, ‗I don't know that book.' She says, ‗I've never heard of that person.'‖ We all know people like Mary in this respect, people who easily accept or expose their ignorance rather than deny or cover it up. This too looks like behavior characteristic of intellectual humility. 2 But what is intellectual humility? What is it that Nozick suggests philosophical writings tend to display a lack of? What is it that Mary seems to exhibit in her behavior? We aim to answer these questions. Toward that end, we will (i) state and assess some current views about the nature of intellectual humility (IH, for short), (ii) propose and explain an alternative, (iii) give reasons for that alternative, (iv) address two objections to our proposal and show how our view solves a well-known puzzle about humility. Before we get down to work, four preliminary remarks are in order. Preliminary remarksWe can approach our first three remarks by way of June Tangney's account of humility. She writes: the key elements of humility seem to include: an accurate assessment of one's abilities and achievements (not low self-esteem, self-deprecation), an ability to acknowledge one's mistakes, impe...
This seems coherent: a morally unsurpassable and omnipotent being (Jove) is faced with a choice of which world to actualize where for any he might actualize there is a better. He creates a device that randomly selects from amongst the worlds he can actualize. The world that is chosen is, of course, surpassable, and yet, he seems not. We defend this conclusion against three versions of the claim that since someone could produce a world which surpassed Jove's, that being could morally surpass Jove. The first is that a superior being confronted with Jove's choice would not create at all; the second is that he would use Jove's device and it would select a superior world; the third is that he would create a superior world without using Jove's device. We argue that none of these ways of behaving would show that he was morally superior to Jove. Imagine that there exists a good, essentially omniscient and omnipotent being named Jove, and that there exists nothing else. No possible being is more powerful or knowledgeable. Out of his goodness, Jove decides to create. Since he is all-powerful, there is nothing but the bounds of possibility to prevent him from getting what he wants. Unfortunately, as he holds before his mind the host of worlds, Jove sees that for each there is a better one. Although he can create any of them, he can't create the best of them because there is no best. Faced with this predicament, Jove first sorts the worlds according to certain criteria. For example, he puts on his left worlds in which some inhabitants live lives that aren't worth living and on his right worlds in which every inhabitant's life is worth living; he puts on his left worlds in which some horrors fail to serve an outweighing good and on his right worlds in which no horror fails to serve an outweighing good. CWe encourage the reader to use her own criteria.) Then he orders the right hand worlds according to their goodness and assigns to each a positive natural number, the worst of the lot receiving '1,' the second worst '2,' and so on. Next, he creates a very intricate device that, at the push of a button, will randomly select a number and produce the corresponding world. Jove pushes the button; the device hums and whirs and, finally, its digital display reads '777': world no. 777 comes into being. We see no incoherence in this story. Now, consider the proposition that Jove is not only good but essentially unsurpassably good. Suppose we add
On doxastic theories of propositional faith, necessarily, S has faith that p only if S believes that p. On nondoxastic theories of propositional faith, it's false that, necessarily, S has faith that p only if S believes that p. In this article, I defend three arguments for nondoxastic theories of faith and I respond to published criticisms of them.
Do we rightly expect a perfectly loving God to bring it about that, right now, we reasonably believe that He exists? It seems so. For love at its best desires the well-being of the beloved, not from a distance, but up close, explicitly participating in her life in a personal fashion, allowing her to draw from that relationship what she may need to flourish. But why suppose that we would be significantly better off were God to engage in an explicit, personal relationship with us? Well, first, there would be broadly moral benefits. We would be able to draw on the resources of that relationship to overcome seemingly ever present flaws in our character. And we would be more likely to emulate the self-giving love with which we were loved. So loved, we would be more likely to flourish as human beings. Second, there would be experiential benefits. We would be, for example, more likely to experience peace and joy stemming from the strong conviction that we were properly related to our Maker, security in suffering knowing that, ultimately, all shall be well, and there would be the sheer pleasure of God's loving presence.
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