Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
25,751
result(s) for
"Relativism"
Sort by:
I—The Virtues of Relativism
What is it about relativism that justifies, or at least explains, its continued appeal in the face of relentless attacks through the history of philosophy? This paper explores a new answer to this old question, casting the response in metaphilosophical terms. §i introduces the problem. §ii argues that one part of the answer is that some of the well-known defences of relativism take it to be a philosophical stance—that is, a broad perspective or orientation with normative consequences—rather than a doctrine or a thesis. §iii draws attention to an assumption, not always explicitly stated by its proponents, that the relativist stance leads to the cultivation of some key intellectual virtues. Open-mindedness, tolerance, intellectual humility, and curiosity are examples of the intellectual virtues that relativism can foster. §iv argues that the defence of relativism on the basis of the virtues that are assumed to follow from it, at best, is only partially successful. Moreover, there is a range of epistemic vices, resulting from the stance, that undercuts the virtue-based defence presented in §iii.
Journal Article
I—The Presidential Address
The neglected Platonic dialogue Euthydemus is peculiar in many ways. It is, apparently, an extensive catalogue of bad arguments by disgraceful sophists; but its complex composition suggests that this focuses attention on the shape and nature of argument—attention that some think Plato is incapable of giving. He uses the idiom of games, and of seriousness and play, to provoke reflection on logical and syntactic structure and their normative features; but to see how he does so we need to consider the complex background of the fiction of a Platonic dialogue, and its use of surprise and humour. Comparison with the bbc Radio 4 game ‘Mornington Crescent’ might help.
Journal Article
Relativistic fatalism
In this article, I will argue that the argument for fatalism based on the relativity of simultaneity (RoS) fails. The original proponents of the argument (Rietdijk 1966, Putnam 1967 and Penrose 1989) called the thesis in terms of ‘determinism', but Levin (Levin 2007) refers to it as ‘relativistic fatalism'. Relativistic fatalism is a view supported by the alleged dependence of the property of being future on an arbitrary choice of some coordinate system. First I will try to explain the classic argument, attributed to it a dialectic that justified to call it in the same terms as Levin did. Subsequently, I will refuse the relativistic fatalism using many strategies to deal with it.
Journal Article
Relativism and Intracultural Conflict
A number of arguments against moral relativism are based on the reality of intracultural conflict or the related possibility of sliding down a slippery slope and out the door of morality altogether. The first batch of arguments draws upon the evident fact that cultures are not unitary or homogenous but contain subgroups at odds with each other. The second batch is based on the claim that if moral truth is relativized to a culture, consistency demands that it eventually be relativized to the individual, and with that comes the end of morality. In this paper, (A) moral relativism is first defined, clarified, and defended—these preliminaries being necessary, given what follows—and (B) the common but infrequently discussed arguments mentioned above are distinguished, exposed, explained, evaluated, and ultimately rejected.
Journal Article