Epistemic Courage is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief, which shows why epistemology is no mere academic abstraction - the question of what to believe couldn't be more urgent. Jonathan Ichikawa argues that a skeptical, negative bias about belief is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo.

Intellectual courage requires acting to promote epistemic goods despite significant risk of harm. Courage is distinguished from recklessness and cowardice because the expected epistemic benefit of a courageous action outweighs (in some sense) the threatened harm. Sometimes, however, inquirers pursue theories that are not best supported by their current evidence. For these inquirers, the expected epistemic benefit of their actions cannot be explained by appeal to their evidence alone. The probability of pursuing the true theory cannot contribute enough (...) to the expected epistemic benefit for the action to count as courageous rather than reckless. Thus, there must be some other epistemic consideration which favors their action, besides evidence for their theory. I argue that the proper account of intellectual courage requires recognition of inquisitive reasons: a distinct category of epistemic reasons which concern successful inquiry. This category includes reasons to think a theory itself is promising, e.g., that the theory suggests potentially fruitful new research. It also includes social epistemic reasons, e.g., that pursuing a theory will improve the distribution of cognitive labor. Inquisitive reasons help explain why researchers who pursue improbable theories count as intellectually courageous, rather than reckless. The expected epistemic benefit of an action is partially determined by the inquisitive reasons in its favor. On my account, intellectually courageous inquiry requires acting in a way that is sensitive to inquisitive reasons. (shrink)

We should give courage a more significant place in our understanding of how familiar virtues can and should be reshaped to capture what it is to be virtuous relative to the environment. Matthew Pianalto’s account of moral courage helps explain what a specifically environmental form of moral courage would look like. There are three benefits to be gained by recognizing courage as an environmental virtue: it helps us to recognize the high stakes nature of much environmental (...) activism and to act accordingly; it can make environmental activism more appealing to a broader audience by helping us dismantle stereotypes associated with environmentalism, including sexist and homophobic ones; and it aides in the de-militarization of the concept of courage. (shrink)

Since subjection to harm is an intrinsic feature of our social and epistemic lives, there is a perpetual need for individual and collective agents with the virtue of epistemic courage. In this chapter, I survey some of the main issues germane to this virtue, such as the nature of courage and of harm, the range of epistemic activities that can manifest courage, and the status of epistemic courage as a collective and as a professional virtue.

Deep disagreements are characteristically resistant to rational resolution. This paper explores the contribution a virtue theoretic approach to argumentation can make towards settling the practical matter of what to do when confronted with apparent deep disagreement, with particular attention to the virtue of courage.

Could a Nazi soldier or terrorist be courageous? The Courage Problem asks us to answer this sort of question, and then to explain why people are reluctant to give this answer. The present paper sheds new light on the Courage Problem by examining a controversy sparked by Bill Maher, who claimed that the 9/11 terrorists’ acts were ‘not cowardly.’ It is shown that Maher's controversy is fundamentally related to the Courage Problem. Then, a unified solution to both (...) problems is provided. This solution entails that gutsy people who lack good ends are not courageous. (shrink)

Humanity commonly defines courage through adversity, conflict, danger, sacrifice, or resistance. A person is considered courageous when confronting fear, suffering, social opposition, or physical threat. This paper questions whether such responses truly represent courage or whether they are merely psychological reactions produced by fear, ego, survival instinct, conditioning, or self-image. Through a phenomenological and existential inquiry, this paper argues that authentic courage does not emerge from adversity but exists independently within consciousness itself. Adversity merely exposes the inner (...) condition already present within the individual. Courage originating from fear remains dependent upon conflict and therefore cannot be considered true fearlessness. Real courage is not resistance, aggression, ambition, or psychological defense; it is a state of clarity free from domination by fear, ego, comparison, or external validation. The paper further explores the distinction between reactive bravery and existential courage, examining how society glorifies conflict-based courage while neglecting the silent courage of awareness, truth, vulnerability, and inner freedom. This inquiry positions courage not as a product of external struggle but as an intrinsic quality of undivided consciousness. (shrink)

In this chapter, DeYoung looks at the culturally and historically recognized virtue of courage. She specifically questions how we should think of all the pictures of courage and where we might look for Christlike examples of courage. To do this, DeYoung explores courage as it relates to fear and love and then delves into how courage can be a Christian practice.

In so far as long-range tele-operated weapons, such as the United States’ Predator and Reaper drones, allow their operators to fight wars in what appears to be complete safety, thousands of kilometres removed from those whom they target and kill, it is unclear whether drone operators either require courage or have the opportunity to develop or exercise it. This chapter investigates the implications of the development of tele-operated warfare for the extent to which courage will remain central to (...) the role of the warrior and for the future culture of the armed services in the age of drone warfare. (shrink)

In the evolution of Chinese and Western literatures, the emphasis on the "strength" of "courage" is gradually given to the "mind" of "courage", that is the intention of the Agent. The connotation of Chinese and Western traditional thoughts of "courage" reflected in the distinction between the "physical courage" and "moral courage". Philosophers distinguish moral courage from physical courage, which does not seem to be clear and complete. Moral courage however as moral elements (...) have been distinguished from "courage as a virtue". The behavior of "moral courage" must be "supernormal behavior", which is the embodiment of moral choice and moral practice in a specific situation. The Agent of "moral courage" has particularity, the behavior itself is in a certain situation, and the behavioral consequences show severe. (shrink)

This paper defends the existence of a largely overlooked cognitive virtue within the framework of telic virtue epistemology: doxastic courage. Doxastic courage is an exercise of doxastic control that mediates between the vices of excessive doubt and reckless belief. On this view, doxastic courage focuses on one’s own reflective assessment of the strength of the justification for their beliefs, assessing when it is prudent to risk being wrong to achieve truth. I argue that doxastic courage operates (...) as an Aristotelian mean between four vices of belief including: hyperbolic doubt (excessive skeptical suspension), gullibility (deficient skeptical suspension), anti-expertise (deficient self-confidence), and dogmatism (excessive self-confidence). Using lessons from Cartesian methodological skepticism, I demonstrate how doxastic courage enables one to critically assess defeaters without succumbing to skepticism or unfounded ‘certainty.’ I argue that Cartesian and skeptical doubts, in being excessively timid, do not access the aim of cognitive prosperity that is implicit in theories of justified belief. With this telos in mind, doxastic courage is meant to support a nuanced balance that fosters intellectual growth without compromising necessary rigor. (shrink)

The similitude between anxiety and death is the starting point of Paul Tillich's analysis from The Courage To Be, his famous theological and philosophical reply to Heidegger's Being And Time. Not only Tillich and Heidegger are concerned with the connection between anxiety and death but also other proponents of both existentialism and nihilism like Nietzsche, Cioran and Shestov. Tillich observes that "anxiety puts frightening masks" over things and perhaps this definition is its finest contribution to the spectacular phenomenology of (...) anxiety. Moreover, Tillich has some illuminating insights about the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness, which are important for the history of the existential philosophy. It is interesting how the protestant theologian tries to answer to Heidegger: while the German philosopher asserted that we must avoid fear and we have to embrace anxiety as a route to personal authenticity, Tillich notes that we should transform anxiety into fear, because courage is more likely to "abolish" fear. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore Gadamer’s early reflections on Plato’s utopian thought and its potential topicality. In the following section, I will show how areté, understood as a hermeneutical and existential virtue, is dialectically related to ethics and politics in Gadamer’s phenomenological reception of Plato’s philosophy. I argue that, in Gadamer’s eyes, Socratic-Platonic self-understanding enables human beings to be aware of their political responsibilities, to recognize how they are existentially and mutually related to the other, and to (...) clarify dialectically their own existential possibilities in order to transcend their inherited world of values. In the third section, I aim to show how these are the grounds on which Gadamer’s initial thoughts on the utopian dimension of Platonic political philosophy developed, mainly through his further critical account of the works on the German “political Plato” published in Germany between 1927 and 1933, i.e., Kurt Singer’s Platon, der Gründer (1927), Julius Stenzel’s Platon. Der Erzieher (1928), and Kurt von Hildendrandt‘s Platon, Der Kampf des Geistes um die Macht (1933). Then, in the fourth section, I will express my own views on the relevance of reconsidering how the notions of areté, phrónesis, and andreía are already related in Plato’s dialogues, complementing the insights on Gadamer’s interpretation of areté in section two. My purpose is to go beyond Gadamer’s reading and provide us with a more solid ground to address his late reflections on political courage and its relations with his dialectical understanding of Platonic utopia as a myth. Therefore, I will explore the problem of civil disobedience, a topic that was actually not at the centre of Gadamer’s concerns, as a genuine mode of utopian political action which can enact a true deviation from the sophistic pólis and its understanding of power. Finally, in the conclusion, I will characterize Gadamer’s portrait of Platonic utopia as a dialectical myth which enables human beings to recognize when politics are being reduced to mere power abuse by the State and also suggest why Gadamer’s approach to utopias is still relevant today. (shrink)

This chapter interprets Confucius' life of moral action as an expression of a kind of deep courage. This is the courage that sustains a steadfast commitment to a way of life in a world hostile to its values and aspirations. Confucius evinces at least two related aspects of deep courage: (i) the courage to pursue an assailed way of life and (ii) the courage to promote that way of life to other people. This deep virtuous (...) courage is related to Confucius's suffering due to his pursuit of an assailed way of life within a world increasingly hostile to his moral ideals. (shrink)

I present here a case against the evidentialist approach that claims that in so far as our interests are epistemic what should guide our belief formation and revision is always a strict adherence to the available evidence. I go on to make the stronger claim that some beliefs based on admittedly “insufficient” evidence may exhibit epistemic virtue. I propose that we consider a form of courage to be an intellectual or epistemic virtue. It is through this notion of (...) class='Hi'>courage that we can see a weakness in the evidentialist position. Adopting a doxastically courageous approach allows us to acknowledge the role that evidence has in epistemic justification and its connection with promoting epistemic value, but it avoids the narrowness of an evidentialist position. The epistemically courageous agent is not one who disregards the evidence entirely, but she also realizes that taking risks will not necessarily keep her from her epistemic goals. Believing something in the face of insufficient evidence is not always an epistemic vice to be avoided, and the agent that recognizes this is better off for it. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine the usefulness of the somewhat related notions of integrity, moral courage, and Innere Führung (the leadership concept used by the German military) as a means of making military personnel behave ethically. Of these three notions, integrity is mentioned most often within military organizations, and the largest part of what follows is therefore devoted to a description of what integrity is, and what the drawbacks of this notion are for the military. This (...) will lead us to conclude that integrity in its most common meaning is too vague and subjective to be of much use to the military. It is because of these drawbacks that this paper looks into moral courage and Innere Führung as possible alternatives for integrity. (shrink)

In the 1990s, Laurie Shrage critiqued dominant semiotic and psychoanalytic approaches to film, advocating instead for a contextual analysis attentive to audience reception. Drawing on Christopher Strong (Arzner, 1933), Shrage highlighted its capacity to “disturb patriarchal sensibilities,” particularly in its portrayal of women and marriage. This paper revisits Shrage’s thesis to explore how the film addresses issues that remain relevant today, including female agency within and beyond the institution of marriage. I argue that while the film has been recognized for (...) its narrative and dialogue, its engagement with themes such as women’s employment, motherhood, and caregiving remains critically underexplored. Through a close reading that incorporates cinematic elements, such as costume design, I examine how these themes shape the protagonist’s sense of autonomy and complicate traditional narratives of romantic drama. By situating the film within both its historical and contemporary contexts, I aim to demonstrate its enduring relevance and the significance of returning to questions of spectatorship—what we are meant to see and what we might learn to see anew through a critical, feminist lens. (shrink)

The contours of Nietzsche’s socio-moral framework are idiosyncratic when compared to contemporary neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics. Nietzsche starts with a naturalistic conception of drives, instincts, and types of people. He then moves in a normative direction by identifying some drives and instincts as virtues – at least for certain types of people in particular social and cultural contexts. Much of Nietzsche’s understanding of virtue must therefore be understood relative to a type of person and the context in which they find themselves. (...) Nietzsche pays special attention to his own type in his own context, emphasizing the virtues of curiosity, courage, the pathos of distancepathos of distance, the sense of humor, and solitude. These instincts-become-virtues are held together by conscience and integrity. For Nietzsche, drivesdrive are act-directed motivational and evaluative dispositions. An agent’s drives move her to engage in and positively evaluate a range of characteristic actions regardless of the consequences that may eventuate from those actions. Drives thus differ from preferences and desires in being associated primarily with the processes of agency rather than with teleologically-specified states of affairs. In addition, Nietzsche thinks that instinctsinstinct are innate drives, though other drives can be acquired. Moreover, instincts and other drives are mutable on several dimensions, including their intensity, their objects, and the structural interrelations. And an agent’s instincts and other drives constitute her psychological typetype. This in turn makes it possible to say what a Nietzschean virtue is: namely, a well-calibrated instinct or other drive. What it takes for a drive to be well-calibrated involves both internal and external (social) integration, or at least non-interference. In particular, a drive is a virtue to the extent that it is conducive to lifelife, does not systematically or reliably induce negative self-directed emotions that respond to fixed aspects of the self, and does not systematically or reliably induce reactions from the agent’s community that are liable to be internalized as negative self-directed emotions that respond to fixed aspects of the self. In Nietzsche’s framework, exemplars of different types elicit different discrete emotions in people with fine-tuned affective sensitivity. While some exemplars inspire admirationadmiration that leads to emulation, others incite envy and the motivation to agonistic one-upsmanship. Exemplars of bad or deplorable types provoke contempt and disgust, which serve as signposts of what to avoid. Nietzsche also pays special attention to the role of community in fostering virtues. For him, one’s community and the language used by that community play a constitutive role in the cultivation of virtuevirtue. This is because part of what it means for a person to be of a certain type is that she is susceptible to social determination of her character. (shrink)

Is there a sense in which we exercise direct volitional control over our beliefs? Most agree that there is not, but discussions tend to focus on control in forming a belief. The focus here is on sustaining a belief over time in the face of ‘epistemic temptation’ to abandon it. It is argued that we do have a capacity for ‘doxastic self-control’ over time that is partly volitional in nature, and that its exercise is rationally permissible.

In the 1930s, the Bengali philosopher K. C. Bhattacharyya proposed a new theory of rasa, or aesthetic emotion, according to which aesthetic emotions are feelings that have other feelings as their intentional objects. This paper articulates how Bhattacharyya’s theory offers a novel solution to the puzzle of how it is both possible and rational to enjoy the kind of negative emotions that are inspired by tragic and sorrowful tales. The new solution is distinct from the conversion and compensation views that (...) dominate the existing literature, and it derives its significance from how it ties aesthetic experience to self-awareness. (shrink)

When we think of courage, we imagine bravery in war. But is there other courage? A beautiful, attractive woman asks you to make love to her but you refuse: do you lack courage? Let us leave this aside. Is there such a thing as courage in philosophy? A philosopher challenges you and you refuse? Are you lacking courage? This question must have first and last occurred to me when observing Derek Parfit speak. Parfit appeared to (...) challenge me, but I didn’t take him seriously. But is that a lack of courage? I present some excuses for not taking up the challenge. But what if you have none of these? You have to accept that you lack courage then, by the local standards anyway. (shrink)

One of the most overlooked and underappreciated modern philosophers—and someone engaged with much more than politics—Voegelin wrote in dense, meditative prose about consciousness, order, and the structure of reality. Yet at the heart of his philosophy lies a remarkably simple insight: societies fall apart when the souls of their citizens are disordered.

I offer a reading of the two conceptions of the good found in Plato’s Protagoras: the popular conception—‘the many’s’ conception—and Socrates’ conception. I pay particular attention to the three kinds of goods Socrates introduces: (a) bodily pleasures like food, drink, and sex; (b) instrumental goods like wealth, health, or power; and (c) virtuous actions like courageously going to war. My reading revises existing views about these goods in two ways. First, I argue that the many are only ‘hedonists’ in a (...) very attenuated sense. They do not value goods of kind (b) simply as means to pleasures of kind (a); rather, they have fundamentally different attitudes to (a) and (b). Second, the hedonism that Socrates’ defends includes a distinction between kinds of pleasures: (a) bodily pleasures and (c) the pleasures of virtuous actions. This distinction between kinds of pleasures—some that do and some that do not exert the ‘power of appearance’—allows Socrates to address one of the central beliefs in the popular conception of akrasia, namely that it involves a special kind of unruly desire: non-rational appetites for pleasures like food, drink, or sex. Socrates replaces the motivational push of non-rational appetites with the epistemic pull of the appearance of immediate pleasures like food, drink, and sex. (shrink)

What qualities do we need in order to be good philosophers? Wittgenstein insists that virtues of character – such as honesty, humility, courage, and strength – are more important for our philosophizing than the relevant intellectual talents and skills. These virtues are essential because doing good philosophy demands both knowing and overcoming the deep-seated desires and inclinations which lead us astray in our thinking, and achieving such self-knowledge and self-overcoming demands all of these virtues working in concert. In this (...) paper I draw together many of Wittgenstein’s seemingly offhanded remarks on these issues in order to reconstruct his understanding of philosophy’s ‘difficulties of the will’ and the virtues needed to overcome them. (shrink)

In both the Laches (191d-e) and the Laws (1.633c-d, 1.634a-b, and 1. 635d), Plato has his protagonist defend the claim that courage (andreia) is not simply a matter of resisting pain and fear but about overcoming pleasure and desire as well. In this paper, I argue that Plato took the expansive view of courage seriously and that there are several reasons why we should too.

This paper examines whether breaking the law can be morally justified—and at times morally required—when legal systems perpetuate injustice rather than constrain it. Challenging the assumption that legality and morality are synonymous, the analysis situates resistance within moral philosophy, political theory, and historical practice, arguing that ethical legitimacy depends not on obedience alone but on the alignment between law, dignity, and justice. Through engagement with theories of civil disobedience, conscience, and responsibility, the paper demonstrates that refusal is not inherently anarchic (...) when grounded in ethical reasoning, proportionality, and accountability. It further explores historical and contemporary forms of justified lawbreaking, including resistance to racialized violence, whistleblowing against state harm, and the criminalization of protest, showing how power often weaponizes legality to suppress dissent. The paper also delineates the limits of moral justification, rejecting indiscriminate violence and moral absolutism in favor of restraint and responsibility. By situating resistance within the ethical conditions of 2025, the analysis concludes that when law ceases to protect dignity, moral courage may require refusal—not as heroism, but as obligation. (shrink)

Jonathan Ichikawa contends that many mainstream ideas about what to believe prioritize negative epistemic norms, revealing a negative epistemic bias that reinforces the status quo. The idea that our intellectual practices problematically prioritize negative epistemic norms implies there is an alternative to negative epistemic norms that the negative bias obscures from view. Ichikawa dubs this alternative “positive epistemology”. In this paper, I argue that it would be helpful for Ichikawa’s project if there were further resources—ones independent of his larger ideology (...) critique—to bring to bear on positive epistemology. My aim is to offer such independent resources. I do so by connecting Ichikawa’s discussion of positive epistemic norms to recent work on epistemic blame and the interpersonal dimension of our epistemic lives. (shrink)

The object of the study is to introduce an innovative approach to the long-lasting theoretical discussion about the meaning and extent of political liberty in a modern democratic society. The suggested way to explain why the democratic political order as such might give rise to considerable challenges for political liberty introduces the classical virtue of courage as a possible key explanatory factor underlying the major tensions that emerge between democracy and liberty. Such approach provides some new insights into the (...) debate about the origins, limits, and political perspectives of modern democracies. The analysis starts by conceptualizing modern democracy as a political form which expresses a specific ethical idea about the natural equality of people. Generally, it means that egalitarianism is the founding idea and moral purpose of a democratic political system, which tends to develop into a modern type of representative government and civil society. The second part of our analysis emphasizes the fact that liberty is by nature a political fact achieved only by practical participation of an individual in public life, and which cannot be reduced to formal, legal, economic or moral categories. Liberty, being a principle of public action, requires the capacity of a person to risk his personal wealth and safety for the sake of the common good. The third part of the analysis explains the crucial importance of the virtue of courage to the whole political life, as it is an ethical idea which aims at building such a character of a person that is capable and motivated to live an active public life. It is the virtue of courage that makes an individual morally fit and eager to practice liberty, as well as ready to defend it against any acts of despotism. Finally, the analysis assesses the diminishing role of courage due to the egalitarian public order of a democracy, resulting in adverse effects on liberty. The conclusions of the article highlight several points which are noted below. In a democratic society, courage loses its status as a virtue; thus, individuals become less capable and less motivated to live an active public life. Democracy rests on the principle that implies establishing and protecting the equality of its citizens, while the virtue of courage expresses an implicit distaste for egalitarianism and encourages people to strive for an ethically superior status than that of all the rest, i.e. it makes a clear hierarchical distinction between cowards, conformists, and heroes. That’s why democracy banishes courage from its equality favoring public life, depriving it of its ethical status. The decline of this virtue makes the practice of liberty more complicated as individuals lose interest in risking their private wealth and safety for the sake of the common good. The diminishing capacity and interest of citizens in democracy to live an active public life, while giving preference to social equality which requires no personal effort, is a major problem for political liberty. As people become indifferent to the pursuit of the common good, liberty becomes inactive, and the political community becomes less immune to various manifestations of despotism. (shrink)

This paper examines the philosophical implications of Little My’s iconic utterances in Tove Jansson’s Moomin series through the theoretical framework of Load Minimization Theory (LMT). By analyzing three representative quotes, the author demonstrates how Little My embodies key LMT concepts — Respectful Re-Tagging Operator (ℛ), An-soku (peaceful harmony), and Tier-1 self-establishment. The study argues that Little My’s unapologetic authenticity offers a practical model for reducing Unnecessary Load (U) and Friction (F) while enhancing Energy/Coherence (E). -/- .

This paper contrasts Johan Liebert, the “nameless monster” in Naoki Urasawa’s MONSTER, with Little My from Tove Jansson’s Moomin series through the lens of Load Minimization Theory (LMT). While Little My embodies light, respectful Re-tagging and Tier-1 stability with her small courage, Johan represents the heavy cost of abandoning one’s name — a quiet yet profound manifestation of the Third Type of Nihilism. By analyzing key utterances and scenes alongside the Czech picture book The Nameless Monster, this study reveals (...) how the pursuit of perfect freedom without a name collapses the Wavy Equal and leads to a deep deficit of An-soku. (shrink)

Rollo May’s The Courage to Create (1975) frames creativity as an existential act of courage confronting uncertainty, anxiety, and non-being. It positions anxiety as generative rather than pathological. While philosophically rich, May’s individual-focused account under-engages social-structural forces that shape creative agency and recognition, including identity, power, performativity, relational support, and intersectional constraint. This manuscript presents an existential-intersectional rearticulation of May’s framework through a hermeneutic spiral, audited in Table 1 and operationalized in Table 2. It synthesizes May’s core claims (...) dialogically with Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir, Nietzsche, Butler, Crenshaw, and hooks. Iterative interpretive cycles employ a dual-register strategy that articulates ontological abstraction alongside phenomenological-social concretization. This approach reveals creativity as both existential necessity and socially distributed practice. Amid late-modern therapy culture’s pathologization of emotional life, this synthesis reframes creativity as negotiation between freedom and constraint, advancing theoretically integrated insights for authentic expression under inequality. (shrink)

I examine whether patients can inculcate the virtue of courage through the practice of assisted suicide. I explicate Thomas Aquinas’ account of courage, adapted to include all kinds of death, understood as the spiritual battle of the soul—a concept developed in the late medieval ars moriendi tradition. Applying this account to assisted suicide, I find that the practice does not stimulate courage in the agent. To die with dignity and autonomy, patients must embrace the battle rather than (...) cede to suicide. In this way, they demonstrate the marks of the courageous man and pursue a noble end. (shrink)

Quelle est la nature de la vertu ? Quels sont les ingrédients psychologiques nécessaires pour qualifier un agent de vertueux ? La réponse de Sreenivasan dans Emotion and Virtue (à paraître) suggère que l’émotion constitue la vertu et est essentielle à la psychologie des individus considérés comme vertueux. Si un sujet manque de sympathie, il ne peut être qualifié de véritablement compassionné. La raison ? Il n’est pas disposé à voir et à juger qu’une autre personne est dans le besoin (...) et fait appel à son aide. L’émotion oriente ainsi l’attention de l’agent sur les données externes pertinentes et sur les réponses comportementales appropriées. Mais si l’émotion exerce bien un contrôle cognitif sur la motivation, par la sélection d’informations, cela suffit-il à entrainer l’action ? Selon l’auteur, oui, mais son explication du cas de la vertu de courage, faisant appel au désir, suggère l’inverse. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the Kauśīdyavīryotsāhanāvadāna of the Ratnamālāvadāna presents six key aspects of the development of Buddhist thought from the Pāli canon to the Sarvāstivāda tradition: childlessness, the arrival of a fetus through the propitiation of gods, presence of heretics, the impact of Buddha’s intervention and a child bodhisattva, soteriological elements of the story’s didactics, and the Buddha’s peculiar smile. These six key aspects were chosen to reflect and explore the content of Sarvāstivādin society and teachings concerning (...) its source narratives of the Kusīdāvadāna of Avadānaśataka and the Pāli canon. This helps us to understand the composition of Sarvāstivāda doctrine as recounted in the Kauśīdyavīryotsāhanāvadāna, which varies from its source the Kusīdāvadāna of Avadānaśataka. It also aids in the identification of the avadāna and avadānamālā forms of Sarvāstivāda, as well as the impact of the Pāli canon and Brahmanical thought on them. The Kusīdāvadāna of Avadānaśataka, which is the source of the Kauśīdyavīryotsāhanāvadāna and the Pāli canon, will be utilized to examine the six aspects of the societal and doctrinal development of the Buddhist thought of Kauśīdyavīryotsāhanāvadāna. The final portion is the very first annotated translation of Kauśīdyavīryotsāhanāvadāna based on Takahata’s 1954 original version. (shrink)

This book examines the role of military virtues in today's armed forces. -/- Although long-established military virtues, such as honor, courage and loyalty, are what most armed forces today still use as guiding principles in an effort to enhance the moral behavior of soldiers, much depends on whether the military virtues adhered to by these militaries suit a particular mission or military operation. Clearly, the beneficiaries of these military virtues are the soldiers themselves, fellow-soldiers, and military organizations, yet there (...) is little that regulates the behavior of soldiers towards civilian populations. As a result, troops trained for combat in today's missions sometimes experience difficulty in adjusting to the less aggressive ways of working needed to win the hearts and minds of local populations after major combat is over. It can be argued that today's missions call for virtues that are more inclusive than the traditional ones, which are mainly about enhancing military effectiveness, but a convincing case can be made that a lot can already be won by interpreting these traditional virtues in different ways. -/- This volume offers an integrated approach to the main traditional virtues, exploring their possible relevance and proposing new ways of interpretation that are more in line with the military tasks of the 21st century. -/- The book will be of much interest to students of military ethics, philosophy, and war and conflict in general. (shrink)

Introduction 1 Précis 2 Methodology: Introducing digital humanities to the history of philosophy 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Core constructs 2.3 Operationalizing the constructs 2.4 Querying the Nietzsche Source 2.5 Cleaning the data 2.6 Visualizations and preliminary analysis 2.6.1 Visualization of the whole corpus 2.6.2 Book visualizations 2.7 Summary Nietzsche’s Socio-Moral Framework 3 From instincts and drives to types 3.1 Introduction 3.2 The state of the art on drives, instincts, and types 3.2.1 Drives 3.2.2 Instincts 3.2.3 Types 3.3 The semantic neighborhood of (...) drive, instinct, and type 3.4 A theory of (the relations among) instincts, drives, and types 3.4.1 Drives are act-directed rather than outcome-directed dispositions 3.4.2 The reflexive turn in Nietzsche’s drive psychology 3.4.3 Triggers of drive-displacement 3.4.4 Instincts are innate drives 3.4.5 Types are constellations of instincts and other drives 3.4.6 To what extent are types, instincts, and drives fixed? 3.5 Summary 4 From types to virtues 4.1 Introduction 4.2 The state of the art on virtues and values 4.2.1 Virtues 4.2.2 Values 4.3 The semantic neighborhood of virtue and value 4.4 On (the relations among) instincts, drives, types, values, virtues, and values 4.4.1 Virtues are well-calibrated drives 4.4.2 Nietzsche’s type-relative unity of virtue thesis 4.4.3 The type of the criminal 4.4.4 Nietzschean exemplarism and his ad hominem attacks 4.5 Summary 5 Socializing Nietzschean virtues 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Higher-order types 5.2.1 Social character construction 5.2.2 Reflexive character construction 5.3 Eponymous trait terms and Nietzschean summoning 5.3.1 Eponymous trait terms 5.3.2 Nietzschean summoning 5.4 Summary Nietzschean virtues 6 Curiosity 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Curiosity in virtue epistemology 6.3 Curiosity and its affiliated emotions 6.4 Curiosity, perspectivism, and inquiry 6.5 Curiosity as a virtue 6.5.1 A preliminary characterization 6.5.2 Curiosity in the middle through late works 6.6 Summary 7 Courage 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Intellectual courage in contemporary virtue epistemology 7.3 Courage as a virtue 7.3.1 A preliminary characterization 7.3.2 Courage in the middle through late works 7.4 Summary 8 Pathos of distance 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Contempt and disgust in contemporary moral psychology 8.3 The semantic neighborhood of contempt, disgust, and the pathos of distance 8.4 Nietzsche on contempt 8.4.1 Spernere mundum 8.4.2 Spernere neminem 8.4.3 Spernere se ipsum 8.4.4 Spernere se sperni 8.4.5 Nietzsche aims to induce what he considers fitting contempt in receptive readers 8.5 Nietzsche on disgust 8.5.1 The use of disgust: detaching from an ideal 8.5.2 The danger of disgust 8.6 The pathos of distance 8.7 Prospects for a Nietzschean democratic ethos 8.8 Summary 9 Sense of humor 9.1 Introduction 9.2 The semantic neighborhood of laughter, humor, and comedy 9.3 The Nietzschean sense of humor and its functions 9.3.1 From episodic laughter to the sense of humor 9.3.2 Affirmation and inquiry 9.3.3 Negation and inquiry 9.3.4 Affiliation with like-minded inquirers 9.4 Summary 10 Solitude 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Solitude in virtue theory and Nietzsche scholarship 10.3 The semantic neighborhood of solitude 10.4 An account of Nietzschean solitude 10.5 Summary Conclusion 11 Conscience & integrity 11.1 Introduction 11.2 Conscience and integrity in contemporary moral psychology and Nietzsche scholarship 11.2.1 Conscience and integrity in contemporary moral psychology 11.2.2 Conscience and integrity in Nietzsche commentary 11.3 The semantic neighborhood of conscience and integrity 11.4 Distinguishing conscience, good conscience, bad conscience, and intellectual conscience 11.4.1 Conscience 11.4.2 Good conscience 11.4.3 Bad conscience 11.4.4 Intellectual conscience and integrity 11.5 Summary 12 Prospectus 12.1 Future directions in moral psychology 12.2 Future directions in Nietzsche scholarship 12.3 Future directions in digital humanities and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Russell (1911/12) argued that perceptual experience grounds a species of non-propositional knowledge, “knowledge by acquaintance,” and in recent years, this account of knowledge has been gaining traction. I defend on its basis a connection between moral and epistemic failure. I argue, first, that insufficient concern for the suffering of others can be explained in terms of an agent’s lack of acquaintance knowledge of another’s suffering, and second, that empathy improves our epistemic situation. Empathic distress approximates acquaintance with another’s suffering, and (...) empathic agents who are motivated to help rather than disengage exhibit an important epistemic virtue: a variety of intellectual courage. A key upshot is that an independently motivated account of the structure and significance of perceptual experience is shown to provide theoretical scaffolding for understanding a famously elusive idea in ethics—namely, that the failure to help others stems from a kind of ignorance of their situation. (shrink)

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is an invisible disability. It is a condition of overwhelming fatigue that can last for years with various other symptoms including, most importantly, post-exertion malaise. I offer my own experience with CFS and the experience of others to explain its staggering deprivations: CFS greatly reduces the scope of access to objective goods; it greatly diminishes autonomy about their realization; it creates hardships that tend to end or diminish friendships; it tends to habituate in ways that mitigate (...) inner peace and corrupt good character; and it diminishes bodily health. With those serious deprivations in view, I explain how various virtues can recapture some degrees of well-being lost from CFS and how their corresponding vices magnify its deprivations. The virtues of humility, patience, prudence, courage, and hope mitigate the deprivations of CFS and promote well-being. The vices of pride, impatience, impulsiveness, thoughtlessness, inconstancy, rashness, cowardice, presumption, and despair compound its deprivations. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that Aristotle holds that the best moral education involves habituation in the proper pleasures of virtuous action. But it is rarely acknowledged that Aristotle repeatedly emphasizes the social and political sources of good habits, and strongly suggests that the correct law‐ordained education in proper pleasures is very rare or non‐existent. A careful look at the Nicomachean Ethics along with parallel discussions in the Eudemian Ethics and Politics suggests that Aristotle divided public moral education or law‐ordained habituation (...) into two types. One type is a defective form practiced by the Spartans, producing civic courage and similar defective virtue‐ like states motivated by external incentives. By contrast Aristotle endorses the law‐ordained musical education described in Politics 8. The chapter argues that Aristotle considers the well‐habituated state of proper pleasures in virtue to be best cultivated by this kind of musical education; and that this explains both his emphasis on good laws and on their scarcity. (shrink)

This article deals with the notion of honor and its relation to the willingness to make sacrifices. There is a widely shared feeling, especially in Western countries, that the willingness to make sacrifices for the greater good has been on a reverse trend for quite a while both on the individual and the societal levels, and that this is increasingly problematic to the military. First of all, an outline of what honor is will be given. After that, the Roman honor-ethic, (...) stating that honor is a necessary incentive for courageous behavior and that it is something worth dying for, is contrasted with today's ruling view in the West, which sees honor as something obsolete and archaic and not as a legitimate motive for courageous behavior. The article then addresses the way honor continues to have a role in today's military, despite its diminishing role in Western society at large. (shrink)

Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh Guru, is celebrated for his profound teachings on faith, courage, justice, and unity. This article explores the timeless lessons from his life and works, emphasizing the key values he instilled in his followers. Guru Gobind Singh's unwavering faith in God, despite facing immense personal losses, highlights the importance of inner resilience and spiritual commitment. His courage to defend truth and justice, especially in the face of oppression, teaches the significance of standing up (...) for what is right. The Guru’s emphasis on self-discipline, personal responsibility, and sacrifice for a higher cause guides ethical living and community service. His advocacy for the equality of all people, regardless of caste, gender, or religion, underscores the relevance of inclusivity and social justice. Additionally, Guru Gobind Singh’s promotion of education, both intellectual and spiritual, reinforces the need for lifelong learning and moral development. His leadership style, rooted in humility and empowerment, offers valuable lessons for modern leaders. Through the teachings of Guru Gobind Singh, individuals are encouraged to lead lives of integrity, compassion, and unity, making his legacy a timeless source of inspiration for the world today. (shrink)

This paper extends Self-Contained Ethics (2025) by formalizing the ethical and ontological mechanism of the Breathing of Reason through the concept of Enshiai (Philosophia). It unifies courage and love as structural movements of reason striving for internal coherence. Ethics is redefined as the dynamic equilibrium through which reason maintains itself by accepting its own imperfection as love — a self-contained process in which being itself becomes ethical.

The courage to use one's own reason is an invitation to take more actions---implicating excessive use of agency, even under rampant false consciousness manufactured by mass media and technological priorities. If one does nothing and gains nothing by doing nothing, one is not subject to any evaluation or interpretation. Modernity is an ongoing incessant festival of cruel hermeneutic sacrificial.

Moore is a skeptic and Descartes is the ultimate social epistemologist. Jonathan Ichikawa misses this, and as a result he inherits the problems of insularity and exclusion that plague other Moorean skeptics.

Synopsis The book The Reflexivity Trap: Language, Prophecy, and the Perils of the Open Society develops a theory of reflexivity not as a neutral sociological insight, but as a governing technology of late modern societies. What began in the work of W. I. Thomas, Robert K. Merton, Karl Popper and later George Soros as a caution about fallibility and self-fulfilling prophecy has, the argument claims, transformed into an operational script. Reflexivity no longer merely describes how beliefs influence outcomes; it actively (...) engineers the loop between expectation and reality. In contemporary political, financial and media systems, forecasts, narratives and moral framings do not anticipate events — they pre-structure them. At the centre of this transformation stands language. Words are treated not as reflections of institutions but as infrastructural forces. A prediction, once circulated at scale, reorganises incentives, emotions and behaviour. A warning produces precaution; a promise mobilises investment; a moral accusation reshapes alliances. The sentence returns as structure. Under conditions of digital acceleration, reflexive loops become scalable, rapid and self-reinforcing. The future is no longer awaited but rehearsed in advance. The book argues that the open society — historically associated with pluralism, fallibility and peaceful correction of error — contains an internal paradox. Openness amplifies reflexivity. As media saturation increases and predictive narratives multiply, actors continuously adjust to anticipated reactions. Hyper-coordination replaces spontaneity. The more transparent the system becomes, the more its participants anticipate one another’s anticipation. The result is not liberation but compression: unpredictability shrinks, novelty becomes costly, and meaning thins. Control expands while history stalls. A central thesis is that reflexivity cannot reflex itself without entering a logical and cultural loop. A system that attempts to manage the future through predictive language eventually erodes the very contingency that gives historical movement significance. When every deviation is anticipated and every narrative pre-scripted, society risks cultural deadlock. Reflexive governance generates motion — outrage, volatility, feedback — but not direction. It produces noise without transformation. The rise of digital moral outrage intensifies this condition. Outrage becomes the primary energy source of public life, simulating courage and conflict without genuine risk. Emotional mobilisation replaces shared purpose. What appears as engagement is often a reflexive performance sustained by media infrastructures that profit from agitation. Under these conditions sincerity becomes structurally untenable. Open belief invites naïveté; open resistance is absorbed into the spectacle; loud withdrawal becomes another role in the drama. The individual who survives is neither the believer nor the rebel but the conscious pretender — one who performs required scripts without internalising them. The analysis extends to institutional reflexivity, including financial markets, philanthropy and media networks influenced by large-scale actors. The operationalisation of reflexivity in finance demonstrates how belief can become a driver of fundamentals. In politics and civil society, the attempt to preserve openness through institutionalised fallibilism generates counter-reactions and rival narratives. Interventions designed to defend pluralism are themselves interpreted as exercises of power, producing further loops of suspicion and antagonism. Reflexivity, the book argues, guarantees feedback, not benign outcomes. At the civilisational level, the saturation of reflexive mechanisms leads to what is termed the “post-open society.” Here openness no longer binds but fragments. Instead of a shared horizon, there is a territory populated by parallel scripts and incompatible predictions. The danger is not tyranny in its classical form but exhaustion: a society permanently reacting, permanently forecasting, permanently correcting, yet unable to generate genuine novelty. The concluding argument proposes that the survival of human community may require rebalancing openness with cohesion. After sincerity and after illusions, what matters is not infinite transparency but the recovery of shared limits, memory and responsibility. Reflexive sovereignty — the capacity to withhold emotional energy from scripted outrage — becomes a strategy of preservation. Unpredictability, once feared as entropy, is reframed as the condition of renewal. Without contingency, there is no history; without shared bonds, there is no society. The book therefore offers neither a rejection of openness nor a defence of closure. It presents a warning: when reflexivity becomes total, progress collapses into repetition. The task is not to eliminate feedback but to prevent it from sealing the loop. Meaning depends on deviation. Society depends not only on being open, but on remaining united. -/- . (shrink)