Is Ethics Based on Character?: Importance of Character and Narrative in Virtue Ethics
Kantian and Utilitarian theories tend to isolate moral decisions in the present moment and separate them from personal histories. In contrast, virtue ethics emphasizes the long-term nature of basic ethical choices and th..
Is Ethics Based on Character?: Using Virtue Ethics in Complex Situations
In contrast to utilitarianism and Kantianism, virtue ethics is helpful in making sound judgments in complex situations. The virtue at work here is what Aristotle calls phronesis-- practical intelligence or wisdom. You le..
Is Ethics Based on Character?: Virtue Ethics and Modern Psychology
Virtue ethics parallels many features of modern psychology. One such characteristic is a high regard for emotion, considered to be in close alliance with reason. Virtue ethics recognizes how we become who we are through ..
Is Ethics Based on Character?: Virtue Ethics--A Learned Skill
In ancient philosophy, virtues are often compared to skills. Each of the basic parts of human nature has its own special virtue or standard of how people ought to be. As a guideline Aristotle recommends seeking the mean ..
Is Mind Distinct from Body?: Distinctions Between Computers and the Human Mind
In his 1972 book What Computers Still Can't Do Hubert Dreyfus points out capacities of the mind computers fail to match such as a sense of relevance and common sense. What computers can do is spread the computational loa..
Is Mind Distinct from Body?: Gilbert Ryle and Logical Behaviorism
With the emergence of the science of psychology in the 20th century, it is believed that thoughts and feelings can be translated into objective units scientists can observe. One advocate, British philosopher Gilbert Ryle..
Is Mind Distinct from Body?: Hobbesian Materialism and the Mind
Seventeenth century materialists, led by British philosopher Thomas Hobbes, object to the idea of mind as a non-physical substance. For Hobbes the universe consists of "matter in motion," nothing else. If dualism struggl..
Is Mind Distinct from Body?: Reductionism and Consciousness
The subjective first-person nature of conscious experience resists being explained in objective third-person terms. There may be objective things going on in the brain, but what is truly interesting is what happens subje..
Is Mind Distinct from Body?: Reductionists' Accounts of Mental Activity
Materialists argue that "the mystery of the mind" is an illusion that science will clear up once we understand all of the neurophysiological aspects of how the brain functions. Even in science, this reductionist view poi..
Is Mind Distinct from Body?: Renes Descartes and the Mind-Body Problem
Descartes maintained that the entire universe consists of two substances, matter which exists in space and mind which has no spatial or physical properties. This doctrine becomes known as Cartesian dualism. Perhaps the h..