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Longino, Helen. Circles of Reason: Some Feminist Reflections on Reason and Rationality
2005, Episteme, 2 (1): 79-88

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Added by: Franci Mangraviti and Viviane Fairbank
Abstract:
Rationality and reason are topics so fraught for feminists that any useful reflection on them requires some prior exploration of the difficulties they have caused. One of those difficulties for feminists and, I suspect, for others in the margins of modernity, is the rhetoric of reason - the ways reason is bandied about as a qualification differentially bestowed on different types of person. Rhetorically, it functions in different ways depending on whether it is being denied or affirmed. In this paper, I want to explore these rhetorics of reason as they are considered in the work of two feminist philosophers. I shall draw on their work for some suggestions about how to think about rationality, and begin to use those suggestions to develop a constructive account that withstands the rhetorical temptations.

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Piper, Adrian M. S.. Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception
2008, APRA Foundation Berlin.

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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Adrian M. S. Piper

Publisher's Note: The Humean conception of the self consists in the belief-desire model of motivation and the utility-maximizing model of rationality. This conception has dominated Western thought in philosophy and the social sciences ever since Hobbes' initial formulation in Leviathan and Hume's elaboration in the Treatise of Human Nature. Bentham, Freud, Ramsey, Skinner, Allais, von Neumann and Morgenstern and others have added further refinements that have brought it to a high degree of formal sophistication. Late twentieth century moral philosophers such as Rawls, Brandt, Frankfurt, Nagel and Williams have taken it for granted, and have made use of it to supply metaethical foundations for a wide variety of normative moral theories. But the Humean conception of the self also leads to seemingly insoluble problems about moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification. Can it be made to work?

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Tiberius, Valerie. Humean Heroism: Value Commitments and the Source of Normativity
2000, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 81(4) 426-46.

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Added by: Graham Bex-Priestley

Abstract: This paper addresses the question "In virtue of what do practical reasons have normative force or justificatory power?" There seems to be good reason to doubt that desires are the source of normativity. However, I argue that the reasons to be suspicious of desire-based accounts of normativity can be overcome by a sufficiently sophisticated account. The position I defend in this paper is one according to which desires, or more generally, proattitudes, do constitute values and provide rational justifications of actions when they are organized in the right way.

Comment: A good defence of desire-based accounts of value, tackling some of the most intuitive objections (such as being "too subjective" and having no foundation in reason).

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