Knowing Yourself and Being Worth Knowing

Why should you know yourself? While philosophers have paid ample attention to the epistemological issues surrounding the Delphic Command to ‘Know Thyself’, they have been comparatively quiet on the question of why we ought to care about heeding it. When attention has been paid to the question of why we ought to know ourselves, the answers that it has generated have typically been broadly instrumentalist. Self-knowledge is instrumentally valuable in many ways: we are better moral agents for not being self-deceived, and we are better rational deliberators for knowing what we desire. These sorts of instrumentalist explanations, while compelling, do not fully explain the value that many of us place in self-knowledge. We demand the truth, even when the truth hurts, and we try to understand our motivations for long-ago actions that have few, if any, practical implications for our present-day selves. This non-instrumental commitment to self-knowledge is not just common, but also admirable. There is, after all, something impressive about people who want to see themselves ‘warts and all’. In my dissertation, I explain why we have reasons to value self-knowledge that are independent of the valuable consequences that self-knowledge often helps bring about. I argue that, just as interpersonal love gives us non-instrumental reasons to know its objects, so too does self-love give us non-instrumental reasons to know ourselves. Further, while interpersonal love is not something that we can owe to other people, self-love is something that we can owe to ourselves. This is because self-respect requires us to act in ways that adequately embody our values and honor our commitments. In doing so, we extend to ourselves the sort of partiality that is required by self-love, while at the same time making ourselves into people whom we can love. Thus, to see oneself as worth knowing for the sake of knowing is part of what it is to love oneself, which is something that self-respect demands that we strive to do. To pursue self-knowledge for its own sake, in turn, is to respectfully honor one of the commitments that self-love motivates us to make.Doctor of Philosoph

Books Worth Knowing A Cultural Lecture Series

News release announcing Books Worth Knowing a cultural lecture series at the University of Dayton

"WissensWert - Wert des Wissens": Kooperativer Bericht von der ODOK 2012 - 14. Österreichisches Online-Informationstreffen und 15. Österreichischer Dokumentartag in Wels (12.-14. September 2012)

cooperative report of the Austrian library conference ODOK "worth knowing - the worth of knowledge", September 201

Is democratisation bad for global warming?

Summary: even if democracy and all good things go together the same may not be as true of democratisation. Given the growing number of countries that have attempted democratisation, with varying success, and as the challenge of addressing the causes of climate change becomes increasingly more urgent, it is worth knowing if democratisation makes that challenge more difficult. Similarly it is worth knowing if the political conditions for an effective response to climate instability and its economic and social consequences must impact on the outlook for democratisation. Although contrary to what was once believed, developing countries may not have the dilemma of having to choose between developing the economy and building democracy, the further addition of a requirement to significantly reduce carbon emissions might be just too demanding. The paper offers a framework of analysis as a preliminary to more detailed empirical investigation. It concludes with policy implications for international actors committed to promoting democracy, considering that in developing countries stable authoritarian rule might be better placed than regimes in political transition to mitigate climate change as well as adapt to its effects

Books Worth Knowing Featuring The Confessions of St. Augustine

News release announcing Father John A. Elbert, S.M, will lead a discussion on The Confessions of St. Augustine at University of Dayton lecture series Books Worth Knowing

Moral Worth and Knowing How to Respond to Reasons

It's one thing to do the right thing. It's another to be creditable for doing the right thing. Being creditable for doing the right thing requires that one does the right thing out of a morally laudable motive and that there is a non-accidental fit between those two elements. This paper argues that the two main views of morally creditable action – the Right Making Features View and the Rightness Itself View – fail to capture that non-accidentality constraint: the first because it morally credits agents who make heavy-duty moral mistakes; the second because it fails to generalise and is too conservative – a point which this paper gives renewed defence. The paper then goes on to defend and develop an alternative according to which moral worth is mediated by the agent's knowing how to respond to the reasons of the type which make acting in that way right. It's argued that this view avoids the problems for the alternatives, and it's shown that in order for the view to avoid collapsing into a problematic form of Reliabilism we'll have to think of states of knowing how as essentially successful in character

The Third Annual Cultural Lecture Series on Books Worth Knowing

News release announcing the schedule of speakers and topics covered during the third annual cultural lecture series on Books Worth Knowing