bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Brotherhoods, Sisterhoods, and Secularization
Authors: Fenn Richard K. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
Radical brotherhoods have been particularly subversive of patriarchal authority because they remain more open than the church or the state to a wide range of possibilities contained in both the past and the future. Radical brotherhoods were not completely successful in their attempts to replace the charismatic and traditional authority of abbots, noble families, and patricians. However, they did institute a commonwealth of time that undermined precedents and claims to priority and made the present open to the past and the future. In complex modern societies, patriarchal authority is diffused through law and administration, and it is far more difficult to identify the sources of repression and the causes of unnecessary suffering. Further steps toward secularization will depend in part on the ability of radical confraternities to break the ties of diffuse obligation that bind the individual to the larger society.
Toward a Theory of a Society Without Idols
Authors: Fenn Richard K. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
As societies secularize, civil religions lose their unique basis in the nation‐state, decompose into public religiosity, and become open to revision and negotiation. Agreement on procedures replaces commitment to national beliefs and participation in national ceremonies, and the religious self‐conceptions of the periphery compete successfully with those at the national center. In societies like the U.S., there are competing forms of the sacred, and public religiosity competes successfully with official or elitist versions of the sacred. Societies with a well‐developed and institutionalized civil religion have a high fascist potential as in France, where civil religion unites popular religiosity with a national ideology internally divided between the secular and the religious and between the Christian and the revolutionary legacies of the past. Advocates of civil religion seek to reinforce the nation's claim to transcendence over the passage of time and to avoid the threat of national decay and disintegration.
Stifling the Sociological Imagination
Authors: Fenn Richard K. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
A secular society makes up its rules and values as it goes along in a process of negotiation among a wide range of parties. A secular society allows free play for the Sacred and thus releases a wide range of otherwise suppressed energy, longings, and capacities for innovation in social life, the arts, and the sciences. Certainly a secular society weakens the tendencies of public religiosity and civil religion to reinforce the sort of chauvinist and expansionist tendencies that dominated the U.S. and Japan during the years leading to the Second World War. Finally, a secular society not only gives free play to religious opinions in the public sphere but also allows public opinion to challenge the relevance and legitimacy of religion in the political arena. Thus, in a secular society contests for public authority focus on the right to give testimony or to withhold information, and the institution of language becomes even more important and contested than religion itself.
Ambiguity, Controversy, and the Limits of Language as The Bearer of The Sacred
Authors: Fenn Richard K. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
Political rhetoric employs references to the religious traditions and providential prospects of the nation and uses religious language to solemnize public oath‐taking. The more that public religiosity and civil religion receive political patronage at the center, the more do marginal or minority groups take religious offense at majoritarian pretenses. Even the political center, however, is divided between those who view the sacred as inhering in a strict interpretation of particular texts and those for whom the sacred has more evanescent, negotiable, and contestable meanings. These divisions surfaced in the Senate debates over the articles of impeachment of President Clinton. Thus, secularization underscores the importance of language while reducing sacred speech to discourse.
Beyond Idolatry
Authors: Fenn Richard K. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
Can a nation‐state survive without a sense of identity that is religious and thus transcends the passage of time? A secular society is agnostic about the boundaries between the real and the unreal, the imaginable and the unimaginable, and the possible and the impossible because it is radically open to its environment. If Christianity is to supply an ethic for such a society, it would be one suitable for a highly complex and open social system, and its norms would be evolutionary, procedural, and self‐referential. It would be suitable for a world in which no nation deems itself obligated to enlighten and emancipate other nations.
Contexts for Hume's Epistemological Projects
Authors: Loeb Louis E. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
Hume assigns a pivotal role to stability in understanding normativity in a variety of theoretical contexts, including the passions, justice, and moral judgment; in epistemology, he seeks to sustain his pretheoretical epistemic intuitions in terms of a stability‐based theory of justification. A distinctive feature of Hume's naturalism is that he tends to ground epistemic obligation in the desire to relieve the discomfort or felt uneasiness in unsettled states. Since he rejects the Pyrrhonian claim that ataraxia or quietude results from an equipollence of opposing arguments where belief is suspended, if tranquillity is to be secured, it will have to be within a system of beliefs. In this regard, a series of hopeful results ultimately give way to a destructive conclusion, a negative assessment of the prospects for stability in belief, and hence for justified belief, at least for the reflective person. This overall interpretive perspective is compared to that of Kemp Smith, MacNabb and Passmore, Garrett, and the reflexive approval interpretation of Baier and Korsgaard.
Causal Inference, Associationism, and the Understanding
Authors: Loeb Louis E. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
Locke confines ”sensitive knowledge” to objects we presently perceive or that we remember perceiving. Hume's causal theory of assurance, the claim that the relation of causation extends assurance beyond memory and present perception, is a constructive attempt to remedy this severe limitation in the scope of Locke's third degree of knowledge. Throughout Part iii and well into Part iv of Book I, Hume endorses causal inference and also distinctions among degrees of probabilistic evidence. As even Beattie recognized, Hume is not advancing the skeptical problem of induction in Treatise I.iii.6; rather, Hume's objective is to show that inferences about unobserved causes and effects of objects that have been perceived are due to a faculty of association, not to ”reason” construed as a nonassociative faculty. Distinctions between justified inferences (such as causal inference) and unjustified ones are in turn drawn within the imagination or faculty of association.
Integrating Hume's Accounts of Belief and Justification
Authors: Loeb Louis E. 
Published: October 2003

AbstractIn Treatise I.iii.5–10, Hume's claim that association by the relation of cause and effect produces belief is often intertwined – though without his remarking on this fact – with the claim that belief based on causal inference is justified. To explain this, I offer the hypothesis that, in Hume's view, stability plays a double role: whether belief is justified depends upon considerations of stability, and fixity, a species of stability is also essential to belief itself. Hume identifies belief with steadiness, an infixed disposition, rather than (as tradition has it) vivacity or a lively idea. To establish that a state is a belief is thus to establish that it is stable, other things being equal. In one version of this stability‐based interpretation, the justification of a belief is a matter of its stability in the belief system of a fully reflective person; in a second version (which I favor), justification is to be assessed in terms of the degree to which the person who holds the belief is reflective.
Unphilosophical Probability and Judgments Arising from Sympathy
Authors: Loeb Louis E. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
Attributing the stability‐based theory to Hume explains his equation of degree of belief with degree of evidence in his treatment of philosophical probability. In his discussion of the fourth kind of unphilosophical probability, Hume uncovers contradictions that arise from accidental or rash generalizations; his response, that stability can be restored by appeal to higher‐order generalizations or general rules, facilitates his analysis of causation. Hume's first three kinds of unphilosophical probability involve variation in degrees of confidence that parallels variation in moral judgments due to the operation of sympathy. Such variation and fluctuation in sentiment and degree of confidence feel like contradictions in that they give rise to uneasiness or discomfort that we seek to relieve. Hume thus identifies psychological pressures that motivate corrections to variable judgments about probability and virtue and vice, resulting in more stable judgments that have normative standing.
The Propensity to Ascribe Identity to Related Objects
Authors: Loeb Louis E. 
Published: October 2003

AbstractIn Treatise I.4, Hume appeals to a propensity to ascribe identity to related objects to explain the belief in the continued existence of perceptions (insofar as it arises from ”constancy”), in material substances or substrata, in souls, and in the double existence of perceptions and objects. The propensity contributes to contradictions, and hence uneasiness that we seek to relieve, resulting in conflicted and unstable doxastic states. For this reason, beliefs produced by the propensity are unjustified, due merely to the ”imagination.” Further, although the metaphysical beliefs do not satisfy the constraints of Locke's meaning empiricism, they are not entirely devoid of content; they involve ”fictions” or conceptual confusions that obscure underlying conflicts. Unfortunately, the propensity is characterized by irresistibility and unavoidability in producing the belief in body, whereas it is weak and avoidable in producing the belief in material substrata.
Constancy and Coherence in I.iv.2
Authors: Loeb Louis E. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
Insofar as the vulgar belief in body arises from the ”constancy” of perceptions, it is due to the propensity to attribute identity to related objects; insofar as it arises from ”coherence,” it is produced by custom and the galley, mechanisms allied with causal inference. Since constancy is a special case of coherence, Hume could have avoided this bipartite account, subsuming constancy under custom‐and‐galley. Convinced, however, by double vision and perceptual relativity that the vulgar belief is false, Hume sought to consign it to the ”imagination” in a pejorative sense. Hume was also in the grip of a thesis about causation, that only changes have causes, so that he could not contemplate a role for causal inference in cases of constancy or unchanging objects. ”Of scepticism with regard to the senses” can be amended to provide a more positive account of the belief in body, as well as a more coherent account of the propensity to ascribe identity.
Difficulties—Contrived and Suppressed
Authors: Loeb Louis E. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
Hume's claim in ”Of the modern philosophy” that causal inference is implicated in an ineliminable, ”manifest contradiction” draws on a highly artificial version of an argument from perceptual relativity. Hume's statement of a ”very dangerous dilemma” draws on a mistaken argument in ”Of scepticism with regard to reason” for the conclusion that all probability, including evidence based on causal inference, reduces to zero. Contrary to Hume's own assessment, his stability‐based theory of justification has little to fear from these episodes. At the same time, Hume's theory of justification requires an account of the conditions under which contradictory beliefs either continue to oscillate or lead to a conflicted resolution, rather than canceling out. Hume's treatments of the probability of causes, the direct passions, education, and contradictions involving demonstration and other belief‐forming mechanisms show that this is a matter Hume does not satisfactorily address.
Spain and the Golden Age of Mysticism
Authors: Haliczer Stephen 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
Contrary to the growing influence of science and rationalism upon intellectual discourse throughout much of Europe, Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remained firmly entrenched in a belief system of unquestioning acceptance of divine intervention in everyday life. This was expressed in the form of miraculous events, visionary experience, judgment and punishment. Within this context, Catholic mystical movements flourished, touching all sectors of society, including the aristocracy, and exerting a strong influence on medicine, industry, economics, and politics. In particular, women mystics were frequently consulted regarding matters of illness and disease, and politicians from all levels of government, including monarchs, developed ongoing communication with these spiritual women.
Women and the Saintly Ideal
Authors: Haliczer Stephen 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
In response to fears of heterodoxy arising from Protestant, Jewish, and Islamic influences, the Spanish Counter‐Reformation sought, through education and indoctrination, to create a new vernacular culture of religion. This led to a surge in interest in the lives of saints and mystics and a proliferation of the publication of hagiographies, which became readily available to the literate middle and upper‐middle classes as well as to the less educated. The monarchy openly supported canonization movements for many of these saints when it was perceived to be politically expedient. Study of the spiritual biographies of female saints and mystics became especially popular among both educated and less‐privileged women, leading to their imitation of devotional lifestyles and inspiring their own new mystical experiences. Although concerned with the need to control such female religious fervor, male theologians did not wish to diminish the growing Catholic enthusiasm.
Women Mystics in a Male‐Dominated Culture
Authors: Haliczer Stephen 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
Concerned that educated women would threaten male authority in religion and politics, a misogynous culture of male domination emerged to subordinate and restrict women's lives. Still concerned with potential heterodox threats, the church found itself in the paradoxical position of needing to enforce a conservative orthodoxy while at the same time not wanting to alienate those followers of popular religious trends who were also devoutly Catholic. As such, many women mystics who were prominent in popular movements were supported and even canonized. The spiritual piety of these women achieved greater and greater recognition and their writings flourished. Many, however, were wholly dependent upon their male spiritual advisors who had the power to determine their success or failure as mystics.
The Officially Approved Woman Mystic and Her Supporters
Authors: Haliczer Stephen 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
As the convent increasingly became a venue of ‘aristocratization’, those mystics who received ‘official’ approval tended to be women from privileged and educated families. Further, convents themselves began to mirror the existing social class hierarchy. While women from poorer backgrounds could achieve an ‘official’ mystic status, only rarely could they attain the position of convent abbess. Also, their educational achievements were attributed to divine intervention rather than natural intellectual gift. Approved mystics, especially those women of high social standing, had a well‐developed support system and knew that to maintain their positions it was necessary to staunchly uphold orthodox tenets and to uncompromisingly support the church's hierarchy, particularly the authority of bishops.
Sainthood Denied
Authors: Haliczer Stephen 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
In a society that valued social status, lower‐class mystics tended to be regarded as ‘false.’ They were frequently subjected to the Inquisition, and, as many were uneducated and thus illiterate, they were not well acquainted with orthodox catechism and were often accused of heresy. Further, these ‘false’ mystics rarely benefited from the instruction and support of an elite spiritual advisor. Rather, the poorer mystics tended to have an unstable relationship with their confessors, who often were not well educated themselves. While some ‘false’ mystics found supporters within the aristocracy, they rarely secured support from the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
An Uncertain Sword
Authors: Haliczer Stephen 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
Without questioning the existence and validity of genuine divine revelation, the Inquisition nonetheless concerned itself with the problem of fraudulent mystical experiences, which were understood to be demonic in origin. Women were especially vulnerable to ‘false’ mysticism because of their perceived emotional frailty and temptation to the sin of pride. To distinguish between ‘false’ and authentic divine communication, the Inquisition created a set of criteria by which to judge a visionary's claim. Women who were charged with ‘false’ mysticism were subjected to a process of imprisonment, trial, and sentencing by the Inquisition, although generally, those found guilty were not severely punished but rather subjected to corrective education and curtailment.
A Counter‐Reformation Childhood
Authors: Haliczer Stephen 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
Families during the Counter‐Reformation were characterized by intense piety and harsh discipline. Frequently motivated by economic restraints, parents subjugated children to a home life resembling the convent where strict religiosity and punishment were enforced and deprivation far outweighed affection. This context provided a psychological breeding ground for young girls to escape into a world of religious fantasy and mystical experience.
Adolescence and the Struggle for Self‐Assertion
Authors: Haliczer Stephen 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
Throughout their lives, adolescent women often continued to be subjected to the abuse they endured in their younger years. Their behavior was closely monitored on account of their sexual maturity, and many were forced into convent life against their will, especially if financial conditions restricted a family's ability to pay a dowry. Other young women voluntarily sought lives of spiritual growth and freely made the choice to enter the convent. Given that homes frequently modeled themselves after convent life, such choices were not very surprising. Convents also could be venues of abusive behavior.
Adulthood
Authors: Haliczer Stephen 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
Despite the restraints placed on women in the Counter‐Reformation era, many women mystics developed strategies to achieve recognition as leaders. These included exercising harsh moral authority, using their visions to gain power and instill fear, and becoming adept at performing the sufferings of Christ and the perils of demonic possession. Once leadership was attained, the women sought to gain a positive reputation with the aristocracy through assuming a life of severe austerity and writing autobiographies and devotional works. Even with their success, however, many women suffered from intense self‐loathing, possibly associated with their repression of sexuality, and developed serious illnesses. The mystical life was understood to be one that detached itself from the world and helped ensure a good death.
The Perception of Sanctity
Authors: Haliczer Stephen 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
In order to ensure that canonization would be a possibility, woman mystics intentionally created a cult of veneration, which acknowledged that they were indeed recipients of God's favor. This was achieved by demonstrating, for instance, that they had experienced the pain of suffering of Christ's passion and could effect miraculous deeds, including healings. Further, it was necessary to build support networks within their communities and among politicians and ecclesiastical authorities. Upon their deaths, their communities would continue the quest through elaborate funerals and public veneration. Still, it was those who did not threaten the male‐hierarchy who were most likely to achieve canonization.
Introduction
Authors: Mele Alfred R. 
Published: October 2003

AbstractProvides a preview of the book's four main parts: (1) “Motivation and Action”; (2) “Motivation and Normativity”; (3) “Strength and Control” (more precisely, motivational strength and self‐control); and (4) “Decision, Agency, and Belief.” The chapter also identifies popular theses in motivational psychology, identifies a central element of the causal theory of agency to be defended, and explains why behavioral flexibility is a mark of motivation.
Reasons for Action and Action for Reasons
Authors: Mele Alfred R. 
Published: October 2003

AbstractInvestigates the connection between motivation and reasons for action. It begins with a sketch of Donald Davidson's influential version of the view that reasons for action are states of mind. It then undermines some criticisms of a broadly Davidsonian view of action explanation, including objections by Rosalind Hursthouse and T. M. Scanlon. Finally, it builds a theoretical bridge between work on its central topic by two groups of theorists: those guided primarily by a concern with the evaluation of actions or their agents (“evaluators”), and those primarily guided instead by an interest in the explanation of intentional actions (“explainers”). Motivational and normative notions of reasons for action are distinguished.
The Motivational Power of Practical Reasoning
Authors: Mele Alfred R. 
Published: October 2003

AbstractExamines the motivational power of practical reasoning. Two views are distinguished: “the antecedent motivation theory,” according to which, in actual human beings, all motivation nonaccidentally produced by practical reasoning issuing in a belief favoring a course of action derives, at least partly, from motivation already present in the agent; and “the cognitive engine theory,” according to which, in actual human beings, some instances of practical evaluative reasoning nonaccidentally produce motivation that does not derive at all from motivation already present. The former view is defended and the latter is criticized. Bernard Williams's defense of the former view is argued to be unsuccessful; alternative arguments for it are advanced.
Moral Motivation and Moral Ought‐Beliefs
Authors: Mele Alfred R. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
This chapter's topic is moral motivation. It is argued – against John McDowell, David McNaughton, Thomas Nagel, and others – that no plausible cognitivist moral theory will include the strong “internalist” thesis that moral ought‐beliefs essentially encompass motivation to act accordingly or even Jonathan Dancy's more modest thesis that some such beliefs are “intrinsically motivating.” The argument features an examination of depression or listlessness. An alternative, causal view of the connection between moral judgments and motivation is proposed. It is argued that this view supports the practical function of morality.