Colombia University Press, 2018

Routledge, 2017

Know Thyself: The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge takes the reader on tour of the nature, value, and limits of self-knowledge. Mitchell S. Green calls on classical sources like Plato and Descartes, 20th-century thinkers like Freud, recent developments in neuroscience and experimental psychology, and even Buddhist philosophy to explore topics at the heart of who we are. The result is an unvarnished look at both the achievements and drawbacks of the many attempts to better know one’s own self.

Key topics in this volume include:

• • Knowledge – what it means to know, the link between wisdom and knowledge, and the value of living an "examined life"

• • Personal identity – questions of dualism (the idea that our mind is not only our brain), bodily continuity, and personhood

• • The unconscious — including the kind posited by psychoanalysis as well as the form proposed by recent research on the so-called adaptive unconscious

• • Free will – if we have it, and the recent arguments from neuroscience challenging it

• • Self-misleading – the ways we willfully deceive ourselves, and how this relates to empathy, peer disagreement, implicit bias, and intellectual humility

• • Experimental psychology – considerations on the automaticity of emotion and other cognitive processes, and how they shape us

This book is designed to be used in conjunction with the free ‘Know Thyself’ MOOC (massive open online course) created through collaboration of the University of Connecticut's Project on Humility and Conviction in Public Life, and the University of Edinburgh’s Eidyn research centre, and hosted on the Coursera platform (https://www.coursera.org/learn/know-thyself). The book is also suitable as a text for interdisciplinary courses in the philosophy of mind or self-knowledge, and is highly recommended for anyone looking for a short overview of this fascinating topic.

Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2017

We used to say "seeing is believing"; now, googling is believing. With 24/7 access to nearly all of the world’s information at our fingertips, we no longer trek to the library or the encyclopedia shelf in search of answers. We just open our browsers, type in a few keywords and wait for the information to come to us. Now firmly established as a pioneering work of modern philosophy, The Internet of Us has helped revolutionize our understanding of what it means to be human in the digital age. Indeed, demonstrating that knowledge based on reason plays an essential role in society and that there is more to “knowing” than just acquiring information, leading philosopher Michael P. Lynch shows how our digital way of life makes us value some ways of processing information over others, and thus risks distorting the greatest traits of mankind. Charting a path from Plato’s cave to Google Glass, the result is a necessary guide on how to navigate the philosophical quagmire that is the "Internet of Things."

Oxford University Press, 2017

Abstractionism, which is a development of Frege's original Logicism, is a recent and much debated position in the philosophy of mathematics. This volume contains 16 original papers by leading scholars on the philosophical and mathematical aspects of Abstractionism. After an extensive editors' introduction to the topic of abstractionism, five contributions deal with the semantics and meta-ontology of Abstractionism, as well as the so-called Caesar Problem. Four papers then discuss abstractionist epistemology, focusing on the idea of implicit definitions and non-evidential warrants (entitlements) to account for a priori mathematical knowledge. This is followed by four chapters concerning the mathematics of Abstractionism, in particular the issue of impredicativity, the Bad Company objection, and the question of abstractionist set theory. Finally, the last section of the book contains three contributions that discuss Frege's application constraint within an abstractionist setting.

Oxford University Press, 2016

As children, we learn life is unfair: bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. So, it is natural to ask, "Why play fairly in an unfair world? If being immoral will get you what you want and you know you can't get caught, why not do it?" The answers, as argued herein, begin by rejecting the idea that morality and happiness are at odds with one another. From this point of view, we can see how immorality undermines its perpetrator's happiness: self-respect is necessary for happiness, and immorality undermines self-respect. As we see how our self-respect is conditional upon how we respect others, we learn to evaluate and value ourselves, and others, appropriately. The central thesis is the result of combining the ancient Greek conception of happiness (eudaimonia) with a modern conception of self-respect. We become happy, we live the best life we can, only by becoming virtuous: by being as courageous, just, temperate, and wise as can be. These are the virtues of happiness. This book explains why it is bad to be bad and good to be good, and what happens to people's values as their practical rationality develops.

Wiley, 2015

What is a virtue, and how are virtues different from vices? Do people with virtues lead better lives than the rest of us? Do they know more? Can we acquire virtues if so, how?

In this lively and engaging introduction to this core topic, Heather Battaly argues that there is more than one kind of virtue. Some virtues make the world a better place, or help us to attain knowledge. Other virtues are dependent upon good intentions like caring about other people or about truth. Virtue is an original approach to the topic, which carefully situates the fields of virtue ethics and virtue epistemology within a general theory of virtue. It argues that there are good reasons to acquire moral and intellectual virtues virtuous people often attain greater knowledge and lead better lives. As well as approaching virtue in a novel and illuminating way, Battaly ably guides the reader through the dense literature surrounding the topic, deftly moving from important specific and technical points to more general issues and questions. The final chapter proposes strategies for helping university students acquire intellectual virtues. Battaly’s insights are complemented by entertaining examples from popular culture, literature, and film, really bringing this topic to life for readers.

Virtue is the ideal introduction to the topic. It will be an equally vital resource for students who are encountering the topic for the first time, and for scholars who are deeply engaged in virtue theory.

Wiley, 2010

Virtue and Vice, Moral and Epistemic presents a series of essays by leading ethicists and epistemologists who offer the latest thinking on the moral and intellectual virtues and vices, the structure of virtue theory, and the connections between virtue and emotion.  

• Cuts across two fields of philosophical inquiry by featuring a dual focus on ethics and epistemology
• Features cutting-edge work on the moral and intellectual virtues and vices, the structure of virtue theory, and the connections between virtue and emotion
• Presents a radical new moral theory that makes exemplars the foundation of ethics; and new theories of epistemic vices such as epistemic malevolence and epistemic self-indulgence
• Represents one of the few collections to address both the moral virtues and the epistemic virtues
• Explores a new approach in epistemology - virtue epistemology - which emphasizes the importance of intellectual character traits

University Press of America, 2007

This work reexamines Sartre's phenomenology from the perspective of contemporary debates in political theory with particular attention to the reemergence of theories of human nature. For Sartre, any construct that stood between the self and its direct encounter with the world was suspect. Sartre's version of direct realism is a strong refutation of the "new essentialism" that has emerged in recent years as a back-door invocation of theories of human nature. This book provides an account of the major ideas that inform the new essentialism and that serve to further identify it as other than what it claims to be, a scientific grounding of human behavior. Instead, from the perspective of Sartre's realism it is exposed as an abstract ideology. One aspect of this new essentialism has been its encouragement of ideological claims about human essences, historically and culturally derived attributes of individuals that, it is alleged, define individual human existence itself. Thus human freedom is diminished even while essentialist categories such as male aggression become an overlooked underpinning for political ideology.

Sartre's later philosophical account of why essentialist theories of human nature are particularly damaging in relation to political theory is explained with an eye towards the current global danger wherein ideologies of human nature are increasingly masked as religion. Sartre's philosophy insists that the full exposition of human freedom and agency must be established first for only then can the life of history and culture enhance and not detract from the actualization of humanist goals. It explicates this concept first, through a study of Sartre's early article on Intentionality, and then the larger work, Transcendence of the Ego. A detailed account is given of Sartre's direct realism in which the intentional structure of consciousness emerges as evidence against essentialist claims of human nature.

Oxford Academic, 2006

Oxford University Press, 2004

This book motivates and develops a novel view of avowals and self-knowledge that attempts to give systematic answers to standing questions concerning our ability to know our own minds. Drawing on resources from the philosophy of language, the theory of action, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, the author offers original and systematic answers to these questions. She proposes a Neo-Expressivist view according to which an avowal is an act through which a person directly expresses, rather than merely reports, the very mental condition that it tells of. She argues that this expressivist idea, coupled with an adequate characterization of expression and a proper separation of the semantics of avowals from their pragmatics and epistemology, explains the special status we assign to avowals. As against many expressivists and their critics, she maintains that an expressivist explanation is consistent with a non-deflationary view of self-knowledge and a robust realism about mental states. The view that emerges preserves many insights of the most prominent contributors to the subject, while offering a fresh perspective on our special relationship to our own minds.