This chapter contains sections titled: Contact‐Period Indigenous Andean Philosophy Contact‐Era Aztec or Nahua Philosophy Conclusion References.

Latin American and Latinx philosophers have a long and rich history of deep engagement in public life through a variety of different projects and venues. This chapter offers a brief survey of the historical development and practice of philosophy in public life in Latin American and Latinx traditions. Because of their unique histories, it engages public philosophy in Mexico and Argentina separately. The chapter shows that a guiding thread in Argentinian public philosophy is a deep‐rooted concern about (...) the threats created by political and intellectual authoritarianism and strategies for pushing back against this oppression by developing emancipatory practices and democratic alternatives. This work runs through a long line of Argentinian philosophers from José Ingenieros and Alejandro Korn to María Lugones and Diana Maffía. Public philosophy is clearly a vibrant and ongoing enterprise in contemporary Mexico. Argentina also possesses a long and rich tradition of public philosophy. (shrink)

The field of Latin American philosophy has established itself as a relevant subfield of philosophical inquiry. However, there might be good reasons to consider that our focus on the subfield could have distracted us from considering another subfield that, although it might share some geographical proximity, does not share the same historical basic elements. In this paper, I argue for a possible and meaningful conceptual difference between Latin American Philosophy and Indigenous philosophy produced in Latin America. First, I (...) raise what I call Mariátegui’s Solidarity Challenge to show that there might be some neglectful treatment of the philosophical views of different Indigenous groups. I then depart from Mariátegui and engage in a critical exercise to show that even he would be guilty of failing in his own solidarity demands. I follow that by drawing out some implications of the argument. I first sketch how this differentiation would play out against the political project of “Mestizaje,” a project that seems to inform some of the Latin American philosophical tradition. I then speculate about the kinds of duties that the field of Latin American philosophy might have towards the field of Indigenous Philosophy produced in Latin America. (shrink)

This paper aims at surveying the current philosophical issues concerning the climate change crisis in Latin America. The work attempts to analyze some central policies, particularly those that fostered economic progress in the region at the expense of human and environmental depletion. Historically, Latin America remained at the periphery of philosophical inquiry following the long standing multiple manifestations of colonialism. As a result, the systematic philosophical reflections about climate change in the region have been scarce (...) at best. Here, I have addressed three main topics: political ecology, economic development, and indigenous issues. Latin American political ecology generally seeks to identify the ontological schemes necessary to mitigate, cope, and adapt to the climatic crisis. In addition, developmentalism played a significant role in exacerbating the state of Latin American political, economic, and ecological systems. Environmentalists all throughout the region strive to find alternatives to replace the failures of developmentalist policies. Consequently, indigenous concepts such as Sumak Kawsay or ?good living? offer alternate philosophical modes for Latin Americans, with their complex ethnic diversity, to derive their ontological and epistemological foundations on the problems posed by climate change. My work represents a sketch reporting the various inception points of different eco-philosophical views portraying legitimate instances of Latin Americans thinking critically about their own reality and surroundings. These may serve as alternate methods to forge models that could potentially contribute to universal philosophical concepts endowing humanity with broader epistemic tools to tackle the crisis at hand. (shrink)

"When John Dewey died in 1952, he was memorialized as America's most famous philosopher, revered by liberal educators and deplored by conservatives, but universally acknowledged as his country's intellectual voice. Many things conspired to give Dewey an extraordinary intellectual eminence: He was immensely long-lived and immensely prolific; he died in his ninety-third year, and his intellectual productivity hardly slackened until his eighties." "Professor Alan Ryan offers new insights into Dewey's many achievements, his character, and the era in which his (...) scholarship had a remarkable impact. He investigates the question of what an American audience wanted from a public philosopher - from an intellectual figure whose credentials came from his academic standing as a philosopher, but whose audience was much wider than an academic one." "Ryan argues that Dewey's "religious" outlook illuminates his politics much more vividly than it does the politics of religion as ordinarily conceived. He examines how Dewey fit into the American radical tradition, how he was and was not like his transatlantic contemporaries, why he could for so long practice a form of philosophical inquiry that became unfashionable in England after 1914 at the latest."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What inspires action in Global Health?Daniel Palazuelos"Why do all of you want to go to the middle of nowhere and take care of the sickest people even though you won't have half the tools necessary to make the slightest difference?" he asks.I'm sitting in the Intensive Care Unit workroom enjoying one of those rare, calm moments during residency when this question suddenly breaks my peace. A co-resident, my friend (...) from Latin America, makes this inquiry without even looking up, as he clicks nonchalantly through some Internet pages. I look at him and try to understand him within his context; he was born and raised in [End Page E6] what is traditionally considered a "resource-poor setting," but through talent, hard work, luck and privilege he was accepted into one of the best residency programs in one of the best U.S. hospitals. Unprepared, I give some anemic responses about social responsibility and global citizenship.He looks at his screen and clicks on a couple of links. Suddenly, he turns to me and exclaims, "I get it! You guys are going because then you can put your PWAB on your CV!" I give him a blank look.He stands and goes over to the dry erase board to write: "PWAB—Picture With an African Baby."I'm amused for a moment, and then suddenly hurt. What does this mean? Is he questioning our intentions, our moral resolve? I look over to his computer and see that he's been flipping through the "Global Health Residency" pages of all the local residency programs, or the Facebook pages of colleagues who have recently returned from work abroad. My hurt morphs into incredulity—all the pages have a picture of a beaming, healthy doctor holding a beautiful, newly happy, previously sick, African baby. And then, the code bell goes off, and the admissions start. Reflection time is over.Years later, now that I have become a junior faculty member within the same residency program, I divide my year between global health projects in rural Mexico and Guatemala, the classrooms of a U.S. medical school, and the patient rooms of a teaching hospital. The number of undergraduate and medical students who approach me because they want advice about how to work in global health is staggering; their emails fill my inbox and their faces grace my office hours. External observers have even compared the unprecedented rise of this type of interest to "a veritable tsunami," and we often take for granted that this is because the field is "inspiring" (Mallampati & Heintz, 201, p. 22). We still don't know, however, what all this inspiration becomes once it touches down on-site. For many students, the experience with talented mentors on-site opens up for them a life-long career that aims to address the greatest challenges of our day. The PWAB, however, implies that for an important number of other students, global health is becoming a social capital commodity: an edu-vacation, something to make your mother proud, win a mate, maybe even just another mandatory rotation needed to spice up the application for a career in a highly competitive subspecialty.If students are the future of this field, then the way that global health educators like myself manage this issue may ultimately determine the objectives and scope of countless potential projects hoping to help the billions of people barely surviving abject poverty. I have a career in global health that is more than a hobby because of the clear vision and strong leadership of my mentors and our university (Farmer, 2011). When I was hired as faculty, they worked with me to find the right full-time equivalent (FTE) split so that I could both make a living as an attending, and also still have time to teach, think, research, and manage a project abroad pro bono. But it's from this point that my question begins: once the students are inspired, and the investment made, what inspires good, sustained, pragmatic action in global health?A big part of the answer to this question will depend on how we define global health. Global health is growing, but... (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article aims to broaden the scope of Critical Theory beyond the Anglo-American and European sphere by addressing the work of Stefan Gandler. Gandler, who has long advocated for the importance of Mexican philosophers, has also utilized their work to criticize the current iteration of Critical Theory in its second and third generations. Finding them far removed from the first, he considers the work of thinkers like Bolívar Echeverría to be the tradition’s true heirs. By attending to his (...) critique, this article examines rethinking the history of Critical Theory as such and expand its scope. (shrink)

Al cumplirse doscientos años de la muerte de Immanuel Kant 2004), considerar la vigencia de su pensamiento filosófico, se constituyó en un imperativo categórico, para quienes nos inscribimos en la tradición de la filosofía occidental. En cumplimiento del mismo, el texto que se presenta se ocupa de la vigencia de la filosofía del filósofo de Königsberg a través de la consideración de dos expresiones de la inteligencia filosófica en América Latina: Arturo Andrés Roig y Franz J. Hinkelammert . Los programas (...) de investigación en curso de los dos autores elegidos, en el abordaje y desarrollo de distintos tópicos, proceden argumentativamente desde, contra y más allá de Kant, exhibiendo una singular vigencia de su filosofía al interior de los mismos. En el pensamiento de Arturo Andrés Roig, los tópicos de referencia que se consideran son: la normatividad del pensamiento filosófico, la filosofía de la historia, la fundamentación de una moral emergente y la fundamentación de una estética motivacional. De la producción teórica de Franz J. Hinkelammert, se presentan: la crítica a la razón utópica y el realismo político, la crítica trascendental de los marcos categoriales de los pensamientos sociales, la trascendentalidad del sujeto y el problema del universalismo ético en la tensión entre la ética de la responsabilidad y la ética de principios. Surge de la consideración de los asuntos enumerados, que en relación al universalismo abstracto de Kant, estos dos exponentes de la inteligencia filosófica en América Latina, convergen en la fundamentación de un universalismo concreto.Currency of Kant's philosophy in two recent expressions of the philosophical intelligence in Latin America: Arturo Andrés Roig and Franz J. Hinkelammert. When it is twohundred years of Immanuel Kant´s death , to consider the currency of his philosophical thought means a categorial must, for those who are involved in the tradition of occidental philosophy. Taking this into account, the next introduced is based on the currency of the philosopher of Königsberg from the consideration of two expressions of the philosophical intelligence in Latin America: Arturo Andrés Roig y Franz J.Hinkelammert . The curriculums of investigation of the chosen authors in the search and developement of different topics, come, from the point of view of arguments, from, against and beyond Kant, showing a particular currency of his philosophy within them. In Arturo Andrés Roig´s thought, the topics of reference considered are: normativity of philosophical thought, philosophy of history, the explanation of an emergent morality and of a motivational aesthetics. From the theoretical production of Franz J. Hinkkelammert, we introduce: the criticism to utopical reason and the political realism, the outstanding criticism of the categorical frames of social thoughts, the trascendentality of the subject and the question of ethical universalism in the tension between ethics of responsability and the ethics of principles. It comes out from the previous topics that, in relation to Kant´s abstrac universalism, these two samples of philosophical intelligence in Latin America, are gathered in the foundation of a concrete universalism. (shrink)

In Latin America, institutionalized feminist philosophy is a recent phenomenon, dating for the most part since the 1980s. Historically, the gifted writer/philosopher/poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Mexico, Colonial Period) and the utopian socialist activist Flora Tristán (France and Peru) are especially recognized for their original feminist contributions. The Uruguayan philosopher Carlos Vaz Ferreira wrote the moderately pro‐feminist treatise Sobre feminismo in 1918, during the suffragist phase of the movement. Contemporary feminist philosophy has followed the general theoretical trends established (...) since the 1970s in Western European and Anglo‐American feminist philosophy and theory. Feminist philosophers have challenged traditional androcentric readings of the canon and have pursued alliances with colleagues in Women's Studies programs. As of the mid‐1990s, a firm tradition of feminist studies has been established in several countries. Important feminist journals and publications include Debate feminista (Mexico), Estudos feministas (Brazil), Isis Internacional (Chile), and Feminaria (Argentina); Hiparquía (Argentina) currently publishes feminist and non‐feminist articles by women philosophers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 66.4 (2005) 527-539 [Access article in PDF] Salvatore Camporeale's Contribution to Theology and the History of the Church Mariangela Regoliosi University of Florence Salvatore Camporeale's research, as rich and varied as it was, revolved around several primary axes and was inspired by several fundamental concerns.1 One of the objectives that certainly oriented his cultural effort was a serious, critical, and passionate desire (...) to reform the church, to recuperate its radical and founding truths, to go beyond all superstructure and pseudo-truth. I believe that, for this very reason, Camporeale engaged with Valla (to whom he devoted most of his scholarly work): because the latter had, with extraordinary lucidity, raised issues and proposed solutions in perfect keeping with his own essential needs.Naturally, arriving at such a perception of the innovativevalue and ideological depth of Valla's thoughtinvolved far more than this. We are indebted to Camporeale for having developed the lesson of his mentor, Eugenio Garin: that is, the view that—against the interpretive limitations widely heldby other scholars and other schools—Lorenzo Valla was not onlythe excellentphilological emender of Livy's text, nor simply the "grammarian" restorer of the Latin language, but that such tangible gifts and capacities were sustained by more general philosophical motives and by an organic project of cultural refounding, that would challenge established categoriesin all fields, from language to history to theology.Camporeale was thus able to identify—beginning with his distinguished book published in 1972, Lorenzo Valla. Umanesimo e teologia—the foundations and ultimate scope of Valla's philosophy of language and, consequently, the unifying elements in his apparently heterogeneous works, which range from historiography to historical criticism, from ethics to linguistics, from [End Page 527] logic to rhetoric, from the philological study of classical works to that of the NewTestament. And he was able to see that, also for Valla, the critical revision of the ecclesiastical tradition, and of the "models" of theological discourse, had been a Leitmotiv or, better yet, an arrival point.It is within this specific, though not limited sphere of inquiry that I intend to situate my study, a personal, brief recollection of the friend we lost. Therefore, I will focus on two particular contributions, one from 1977, Lorenzo Valla tra Medioevo e Rinascimento. "Encomion s. Thomae". 1457, the other from 1988, Lorenzo Valla e il "De falso credita donatione". Retorica, libertà ed ecclesiologia nel '400. As their titles openly declare, they investigate two of Valla's works diverging not only in time but in content as well ("De falso credita donatione" dates from 1440, the "Encomion sancti Thomae" from 1457); the one is intended to denounce the so-called "Donation of Constantine" as a forgery, the other to commemorate Saint Thomas on the day of his liturgical anniversary. And yet, Camporeale correctly identifies a peculiar and intrinsic unity in these works, namely the effort to rediscover an authentic Christianity: an authentic "form" of the church on the one hand, and an authentic "form" of Christian theology on the other.I will start with, and devote special attention to, the Encomion sancti Thomae. Camporeale correctly recognized this short text as Valla's "spiritual testament," not only, or not so much because it is his last piece of writing (he died a few months after the Encomion), but because, in a few dense but clear pages, it sums up Valla's entire logico-linguistic program and, consequently, his stance on the expressive potentialities of human language, up to the highest levels of the expressible, those of metaphysics and of theology. The way Camporeale develops his considerations on the "panegyric" is admirable, as he supports it with the experienced philosophical and theological competence (in the history of theology, and especially Thomistic theology) that he, as a Dominican, mastered so well. (In passing, it is worth noting that such competence alone could allow for a thorough assessment of the historical significance of Valla's discourse, too frequently trivialized or misunderstood by readers lacking the necessary tools). The following... (shrink)

This book offers the first systematic reading of Plato’s Laches in English after three decades of scholarly silence. It rekindles interest in this much-neglected dialogue by providing a fresh discussion of the major issues that arise from the text. Among these issues, pride of place is taken by the virtue of courage, for the definition of which Socrates is depicted as engaging in some long-winded dialectical exchange with his interlocutors. Yet, although there is no room for doubt that the (...) Laches is Plato’s most explicit treatment of courage, this dialogue ends in perplexity and is thus traditionally thought of as an unsuccessful attempt to define what courage is. The present study challenges this suggestion. This book proposes a new paradigm for the interpretation of Plato’s Laches. In fact, it constitutes the first systematic attempt to study the dialogue in light of the idea that its composition could well have formed part of Plato’s overall plan to establish a well-defined and rigorous justification of the life of philosophical inquiry The book will be of key interest to classicists, philosophers, and intellectual historians, but will also appeal to students or anyone interested in ancient Greek philosophy. (shrink)

Europe's leading existential thinkers -- Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus -- all felt that Americans were too self-confident and shallow to accept their philosophy of responsibility, choice, and the absurd. "There is no pessimism in America regarding human nature and social organization," Sartre remarked in 1950, while Beauvoir wrote that Americans had no "feeling for sin and for remorse" and Camus derided American materialism and optimism. Existentialism, however, enjoyed rapid, widespread, and enduring popularity among Americans. No less (...) than their European counterparts, American intellectuals participated in the conversation of existentialism. In Existential America , historian George Cotkin argues that the existential approach to life, marked by vexing despair and dauntless commitment in the face of uncertainty, has deep American roots and helps to define the United States in the twentieth-century in ways that have never been fully realized or appreciated. As Cotkin shows, not only did Americans readily take to existentialism, but they were already heirs to a rich tradition of thinkers -- from Jonathan Edwards and Herman Melville to Emily Dickinson and William James -- who had wrestled with the problems of existence and the contingency of the world long before Sartre and his colleagues. After introducing this concept of an American existential tradition, Cotkin examines how formal existentialism first arrived in America in the 1930s through discussion of Kierkegaard and the early vogue among New York intellectuals for the works of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus. Cotkin then traces the evolution of existentialism in America: its adoption by Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison to help articulate the African-American experience its expression in the works of Norman Mailer and photographer Robert Frank its incorporation into the tenets of the feminist and radical student movements of the 1960s and its lingering presence in contemporary American thought and popular culture, particularly in such films as Crimes and Misdemeanors , Fight Club and American Beauty . The only full-length study of existentialism in America, this highly engaging and original work provides an invaluable guide to the history of American culture since the end of the Second World War. (shrink)

Latin American philosophy is best understood as a type of applied philosophy devoted to issues related to the culture and politics of Latin America. This introduction provides a comprehensive overview of its central topics. It explores not only the unique insights offered by Latin American thinkers into the traditional pre-established fields of Western philosophy, but also the many 'isms' developed as a direct result of Latin American thought. Many concern matters of practical ethics and social and political philosophy, such as (...) Lascasianism, Arielism, Bolívarism, modest and immodest feminisms, republicanism, positivism, Marxism, and liberationism. But there are also meta-philosophical 'isms' such as originalism and perspectivism. Together with clear and accessible discussions of the major issues and arguments, the book offers helpful summaries, suggestions for further reading, and a glossary of terms. It will be valuable for all readers wanting to explore the richness and diversity of Latin American philosophy. (shrink)

This book demonstrates the vast range of philosophical approaches, regional issues and problems, perspectives, and historical and theoretical frameworks that together constitute feminist philosophy in Latin America and Spain.This is important while feminist philosophy was long dominated by Anglo-American authors. It makes available recent feminist thought in Latin America and Spain to facilitate dialogue among Latin American, North American, and European thinkers.

B a c k g r o u n d. The article examines the philosophical and worldview foundations and specifics of the functioning of cultural strategies within the framework of the "One Belt, One Road" (BRI) Initiative, as well as their potential and risks for Ukraine in the context of possible implementations. It was revealed that the theoretical basis of the formation of the cultural strategy of the BRI is the idea of a new democracy, which provides for the (...) creation and development of a "new culture". This idea includes preserving the traditional priorities of Chinese civilization and introducing new aspects that take into account both the Marxist considerations of the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and contemporary global trends. M e t h o d s. The research methodology includes content analysis of official documents and strategies, critical discourse analysis of scientific articles and studies, as well as comparative analysis of cultural strategies in different regions. These methods make it possible to deeply study and evaluate the specificity and effectiveness of cultural initiatives in the context of the BRI. R e s u l t s. It is revealed that modern researchers in China focus on a number of strategies for cultural development within the framework of the BRI, including increasing the level of spiritual culture formation, ensuring the long-term development and inheritance of cultural values, increasing the overall level of state power through cultural promotion, forming a state with "strong" culture, the transmission of cultural values from generation to generation, the promotion of the building of a harmonious society through cultural initiatives, the use of foreign experience for the benefit of China, the expansion of influence outside the country through cultural initiatives, the development of "cultural" product brands, and the use of historical heritage for development of modernity. It is substantiated that for the effective and full implementation of these cultural strategies within the framework of the BRI, the Chinese authorities have formulated a powerful state policy for the training of personnel in the field of culture, developed and identified key challenges and tasks for their implementation. Particular attention is paid to the peculiarities of the implementation of China's cultural strategies both in countries culturally close to China (regions of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean), and in countries that are significantly different from the traditions and customs of China, which is the founder of the BRI Initiative (countries of Europe, Latin America and the Persian Gulf). C o n c l u s i o n s. It is proven that for the possible implementation of the BRI cultural strategies in Ukrainian realities, it is necessary to understand both risks and advantages. If among the key advantages it is possible to single out the spread of the network of Institutes of Ukrainian Studies (such as the Confucius Institutes), which will contribute to the dissemination of authentic information about Ukrainian culture, tradition and language, then among the risks insufficient attention to cultural differences may cause misunderstandings between partners from different countries, which may lead to breaches of contracts or non-fulfillment of the terms of the agreement. This can affect the trust between the parties and cause conflicts. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name (...) for threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

"Notes toward a metaphysic of wonder" is the outcome of a "Reciprocal Inquiry" in which Leoni Henning and I participated. In our correspondence, we moved very fast: I thought each of us surprised the other. As a result, I found myself writing about astonishment more elaborately than I'd intended to. Before long I was involved not only with wondering but with awe and bewilderment and amazement, and eager to connect it all with philosophy in Latin America. So these (...) "Notes..." are just a foretaste of what I hope will someday be a more extensive article, but which is only hinted at in the present version. Leoni Maria Padillha Henning’s thoughtful and informative paper, “Pragmatism in Matthew Lipman and its influence in Latin America” is singularly helpful in showing the relevance of Philosophy for Children to Latin-American education. Indeed, the intellectual momentum it generates is a powerful invitation to other educators and scholars to take up the issues where she leaves off. I’d like to take up just one of these issues, one that, on the surface at least, seems to be particularly unpromising. I’m referring to the near-unanimity that exists among scholars with regard to the tradition, descended from Aristotle, that philosophy begins in wonder. My intention is not to attempt to refute this claim, but to show its complicity in defending the traditional non-reflective paradigm of education, which has sturdily resisted the introduction of philosophy into the schools, just as it resists the conversion of the classroom into a community of inquiry. With the proper pedagogy, philosophy can readily be taught to children, and the teaching of philosophy for children can readily be taught to teachers. It is not essential that wonder precede philosophy: it can just as well follow it. (shrink)

Comparative philosophy is an important site for the study of non-Western philosophical traditions, but it has long been associated with “East-West” dialogue. Comparative Studies in Asian and Latin American Philosophies shifts this trajectory to focus on cross-cultural conversations across Asia and Latin America. A team of international contributors discuss subjects ranging from Orientalism in early Latin American studies of Asian thought to liberatory politics in today's globalized world. They bring together resources including Latin American feminism, Aztec teachings (...) on ethics, Buddhist critiques of essentialism, and Confucian morality. Chapters address topics such as educational reform, the social practices surrounding breastfeeding, martial arts as political resistance, and the construction of race and identity. Together the essays reflect the philosophical diversity of Asia and Latin America while foregrounding their shared concerns on issues of Eurocentrism and coloniality. By bringing these critical perspectives to bear on the theories and methods of cross-cultural philosophy, Comparative Studies in Asian and Latin American Philosophies offers new insights into the nature and practice of philosophical comparison. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore the merit, feasibility, and possible scope of equality-biased academic research agendas in Latin America. First, it discusses the merits of university research agendas as tools in the fight against inequality. Second, it analyzes the feasibility of defining such research agendas in Latin American public universities, taking into account their long tradition of institutionalized social commitment. Third, it comments on two Uruguayan examples of research programs that may make contributions to the reduction (...) of inequality. Finally, it assesses the possible impact of such programs in the light of inadequacies in Latin American national systems of innovation. (shrink)

Augustine’s insights into the will and its free decision have long been a focus of controversy since his lifetime. Nonetheless, in modern scholarship, little effort has been made to clarify the actual function of the will as a psychological force in the life of mind. It has often been taken for granted that the will is an independent faculty which underlies our moral responsibility by its free choice. Accordingly, much ink has been spilled over issues such as necessity and (...) freedom, grace and free will, sin and evil will etc. This philosophical inquiry distinguishes itself from its antecedents by adopting a psychological focus on the function of the will. It attempts to explicate why uoluntas, and not other psychological activities, is the locus of moral responsibility in Augustine’s philosophical psychology. The work is thus split into two parts, each consisting of four chapters: the first part devoted to the will’s operation as a psychological dynamism, and the second to the traditional consideration of the will as a moral faculty. In the first part, the dissertation systematically investigates the psychological phenomenon of the will in its relationship to other psychological activities, from irrational affection to intellectual cognition. This phenomenological approach starts with Augustine’s unusual conception of concupiscentia carnis in his debates with Julian of Eclanum. According to Augustine’s philosophical interpretation of this biblical term, concupiscentia carnis as an uncontrollable tendency defines the essential infirmity of the will and forms the starting-point of further affective expressions of the soul. Then, the analysis advances to the role of the will in the formation of affection. It reveals the implicit approval that is entailed in the unvoluntary pre-volitional movements of the soul. This explains the superficial discrepancy between Augustine’s accounts of affection as can be found in Books IX and XIV of De ciuitate Dei. This general account of Augustine’s theory of emotion is followed by an in-depth examination of the feeling of shame so as to display the will’s actual contribution in a reflective affection. Augustine convincingly proves that shame reflects the powerlessness of the will in confrontation with concupiscentia carnis as well as the will’s effort to regain its dignity. To complete the foray into Augustine’s philosophy of the soul, his reflections on intellect and will in the process of moral decision are called into question. By reconsidering Augustine’s account of his own conversion and his reflections on our journey to the happy life, my analyses show that neither intellectualitic nor voluntaristic interpretations do justice to his understanding of moral decision. The voluntaristic interpretation overlooks the intellectual perspective of happy life and Augustine’s emphasis on the necessity of a knowledge of the good for our moral behaviour. On the other hand, the intellectualistic account unjustly ignores Augustine’s insights into the severe destructiveness of the failure of the will and the dilemma of two wills at war. To summarize, the phenomenological approach in Part I reveals the omnipresent feature of the will in mental life. The implications of this psychological feature of the will are twofold. It indicates the independence of the will as well as the limitations of the will by its actual conditions. The second part of this work investigates the moral significance of Augustine’s psychological insights into the function of the will. What bridges the gap between uoluntas as a psychological power and uoluntas as a moral faculty is Augustine’s most controversial conception of freedom. The dissertation first scrutinizes Augustine’s arguments for the independence of the will as reconstructed and assumed in the first part. By metaphysical arguments, Augustine reveals that nothing external, neither inferior nor superior being, can force the will to attain a particular disposition. For this cannot happen in a world governed by the divine order. In his analyses of the phenomenon of two contradictory wills, Augustine shows that the will is conditioned but not compelled by other internal forces. However, this merely represents the negative aspect of the will’s freedom, or libertas a coactione. At the same time, the positive aspect of Augustinian uoluntas has frequently been misinterpreted as a faculty of choice, or libertas indifferentiae. A careful reading shows that the free decision of the will is essentially a capacity to pursue one’s own happiness. In accord with this eudemonistic emphasis, the genuine freedom is the freedom to will and to accomplish the good, which alone guarantees the happy life. This original interpretation of freedom offers powerful support to Augustine’s account of moral agency. One is not only held responsible for his voluntary evildoings which he could have avoided, but also for the necessary conditions of life, i.e., ignorantia and difficultas as effects of original sin. For as argued earlier, even the presence of concupiscentia carnis as the inherent infirmity of the will contains the least assent of the will. This assent establishes the moral agency in evil willing. To account for our agency in the good will, the dissertation addresses the problem of compatibility between divine grace and freedom of will. My analysis shows that Augustine’s rigid position in the last years of his life is also philosophically defensible. An internal function of the grace upon the faculty of the will will not destroy its freedom to attain its own disposition. This philosophical analysis concludes by highlightling the close affiliation between the will and the self in Augustinian uoluntas. “I know nothing I could call my own if the will by which I’m willing or unwilling is not my own.”. By consent or dissent of the will, we identify ourselves with mental images, affective movements, practical reasoning and other psychological activities, either implicitly or explicitly. Augustine’s realistic conceptions of the will and its conditioned freedom provide a subtle and rich picture of human nature, which is still relevant to our own theoretical reflections on the self. 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continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 489 universe enjoys as an ordered whole. What happens if the model does not present a universal order, as seems to have been the case for the last three centuries? Should we then remove the corresponding perfection from our idea of universe's perfection? Or is there some metaphysical reason for asserting that the universe is an ordered whole, regardless of any particular model? If the latter, it (...) would be interesting to have at least a sketch of how we would arrive at this position. On the whole, certainly, the book provides an invaluable overview of the Thomistic universe for anyone working on Aquinas's cosmology, metaphysics, or even ethics. Blanchette is to be commended for his clear and orderly presentation of the material, especially the many subdivisions within the chapters. The quotations of Thomistic texts are almost all in English, well translated by Banchette himself. The placing of key phrases in Latin within parentheses helps in some measure to overcome the lack of the original text in the footnotes. Finally, the book's selected bibliography as well as its indices (index of names, analytical index, and index of citations) render the book an even more useful tool. The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. DAVID M. GALLAGHER Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions. By DAVID B. BURRELL, C.S.C. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993. Pp. xi + 225. $29.95 (cloth). According to the author, this book, Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions, is a comparative work designed "to illustrate the worth of explicitly tradition-directed inquiry, as well as the fruitfulness of comparative inquires in philosophical theory" (6). In addition, among other things, the author contends that, "because the pressure of comparative perspectives demands that we mine hitherto unsuspected reaches of what we have thought we know," not only the author but also the "traditional disciplines of philosophy and theology may each be enriched by the forays of such inquiry" (6). Specifically, the three traditions to which Burrell is referring are the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian; and, as the title of this book suggests, the central topics of consideration used as the basis for a comparison among these traditions are the respective notions of freedom and creation. In order to achieve his goals, Burrell places his discussion within the general context of the notion of creation, which, as he rightly observes, "is notoriously difficult to classify" (7). In so doing, he divides the work into nine chapters; which he entitles as follows: 1) "The Context: Creation"; 2) "On 490 BOOK REVIEWS Characterizing the Creator"; 3) "On Characterizing Creation"; 4) "On Characterizing the Relation: Jewish, Christian, Muslim"; 5) "God's Acting in the World God Creates"; 6) "Creatures Acting in a Created World"; 7) "On the Relations between the Two Actors"; 8) "Sin and Redemption"; 9) "The God Realized in Renewed Creation." Having placed his discussion within the general context of the notion of creation, Burrell begins his analysis by comparing and contrasting this notion in St. Thomas and Moses Maimonides vis-a-vis the necessitarianism of Aristotle as interpreted by lbn Sina. In so doing, Burrell stresses that what predominates in both Maimonides and Aquinas is a notion of God as a "free originator" of all creation not in relation to an "exegesis of the opening chapters of Genesis" but in relation "to the rest of the Bible and the subsequent tradition of Judaism and Christianity" (12). This "distillation" having been noted, Burrell then examines the distinctive features of the notion of creation as this is influenced by the "faith assertion " of the three respective religious traditions-Jewish, Christian, and Islamic. Within Judaism Burrell finds emphasis placed upon the need to interpret creation against the background of the "covenant" with Israel (19). In Aquinas and Barth he understands this activity to be interpreted against the background of the relation of the Father to His Eternal Word (19-21); and within Islam he finds the regulating theme in the conviction of God's absolute sovereignty vis-a-vis the created order. In chapter 2, Burrell goes into more precise detail regarding the specific ways in which God is characterized as a creator within the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Gary Borjesson A SOUNDING OF WALDEN'S PHILOSOPHICAL DEPTH It is hard to make up one's mind about Waiden. One expects die spiritual landscape to be familiar, so familiar perhaps diat you need not read die book to feel you know it. But Waiden disappoints this expectation. Having read it, one may wonderjust what is so familiar or American about Thoreau's sensibility. And righdy so. Waiden is long (...) on observation and short on plot, as tedious in its detail as it is devoid of action. It is a wondrously slow, contemplative work and would be demanding enough for this reason alone, to say nothing of the enormous vocabulary, the abundant allusions to classical mythology, and die Latin and Greek scattered tiiroughout—all of which hint that despite his democratic rhetoric, Thoreau addresses himself to a rather small audience. Like the lusty chanticleer, "standing on his roost, ifonly to wake his neighbors up," Waiden speaks to the best part of the soul, to that in us which is divinely awake or mindful.1 Such speeches necessarily transcend not only America's borders, but common-sense understanding as well, "the sense ofmen asleep, which they express by snoring" (p. 325). As Thoreau puts it: "I desire to speak somewhere widiout bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in dieir waking moments" (p. 324). This desire "to speak somewhere without bounds" is philosophical. Waiden witnesses to die philosophical experience of the world. Originating in wonder and die desire to understand, Waiden moves dirough die senses, experience, the arts, and science. But its specifically philosophical character lies in Thoreau's evident desire to situate all tilings, including himself, in dieir ultimate context. Recognizing the integrity of this desire means appreciating that the full realization of one's nature requires discovering one's place in die cosmos. Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 287-308 288Philosophy and Literature The tiiree parts of this essay articulate what I take to be philosophical about Thoreau's sensibility. The first part considers Thoreau as a surveyor of the whole of things, a traditionally philosophical endeavor. The second part examines Thoreau's desire for truth and shows how it must be distinguished from the tenets of transcendental philosophy generally and Emerson's transcendentalism in particular. Contrary to a common opinion, a true estimation of Walden's philosophical depth hinges on seeing why Thoreau is not a transcendentalist. Some may worry that attention to these universal, theoretical features ofThoreau's workjeopardizes doingjustice to his famously idiosyncratic individualism. But Thoreau does not ask one to choose either allegiance to oneself or to universal laws: such a dichotomy is false and must be sublated. Thus the final part of this essay explicates how Thoreau envisions the web of particular and universal, the alignment of individual and cosmos. I conclude by framing my disagreement with Stanley Cavell's reading of Waiden. As the only well-known philosopher to have devoted a book-lengtii study to Waiden, his influence has been great, and on central points his reading sanctions the common emphasis on subjectivity.2 Two last prefatory remarks. First, Waiden is not a work in philosophy, at least not a treatise, for Thoreau does not explain his insights thematically. Nevertheless, the work has a distinct philosophical character, one I shall try to sketch with die degree of precision appropriate to it. This raises my second point. Precision does not sit easily with comprehensiveness or with the need to praise. All three are relevant to philosophical understanding, yet Thoreau evidently felt that synoptic contemplation and all its fruits, including "any memorable praise of God," were in die shorter supply (p. 78). As Thoreau tells it, he wished to "cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms," "to front only the essential facts," "and if [life] proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to die world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion" (pp. 90—91). If Thoreau is right... (shrink)

Throughout, Latin America retained its primacy in global planning. As Washington was considering the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile in 1971, Nixon's National Security Council observed that if the US cannot control Latin America, it cannot expect "to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world." That policy problem has become more severe with recent South American moves towards integration, a prerequisite for independence, and establishment of more varied international ties, while also beginning to address severe internal disorders, (...) most importantly, the traditional rule of a rich Europeanized minority over a sea of misery and suffering. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond Revisionism:The Bicentennial of Independence, the Early Republican Experience, and Intellectual History in Latin AmericaElías José PaltiLatin America's Revolution of Independence was an event of world-historical importance. Citizens of different regions simultaneously created new nation states and established republican systems of government. This occurred at a time when the very meaning of the notions of "nation" and "republic" remained ill-defined. In such a context, a number of debates naturally (...) emerged regarding the tenets of modern politics, and the kind of dilemmas and problems contained therein.Yet the assessment of the historical relevance of these disputes has been precluded by the teleological assumptions which have informed traditional approaches in the history of ideas. These assumptions have led historians to interpret these disputes as mere expressions of local prejudices that prevented the correct understanding of the true meaning of the modern liberal concept of representative democracy. According to this traditional view, the concerns of Latin American commentators were seen as "deviations" from the rational path of conceptual development and understanding. It was necessary to undermine this traditional teleological prejudice before the debates around these notions produced in Latin America in the nineteenth century could reveal their historical significance and become matters for systematic analysis. The rise of a "new intellectual history," insofar as it has [End Page 593] questioned the assumed rationality and logical consistency of the putative models and disclosed the contingent nature of their foundations, has opened the door to an entirely new universe of problems and issues for scholarly research in the field of Latin American politico-intellectual history.The great wave of new studies on the crisis of the Spanish and Portuguese empires and the emergence of new national states, triggered by the approach of the Bicentennial of Independence, has been greatly influenced by this new set of questions.1 Historians from different countries in Latin America have revisited that fundamental event, and have sought to revise established perspectives in the field. This has made room for the development of a self-defined "revisionist" position. However, what is to be revised has not always been clear.The revisionists seek to dislocate an epic narrative of independence as the epiphany of long-lasting struggles of oppressed nations to recover their rights to self-determination.2 They argue that the teleological, nationalistic biases of traditional approaches led their authors to see as already present at the point of departure an entity (the nation) which actually could be perceived only at the point of arrival. If understood in this way, however, the revisionists' contributions are hardly innovative. In the decade of the 1960s, a series of studies, propelled by the spread in Latin America of Marxist thought and social history, as well as by the increasing presence of American and European historians in the field, had already destabilized Manichean emplotments of the Revolution of Independence as a struggle between liberty and oppression.3 These studies introduced a number of nuances that questioned the objective basis of the states that emerged from the rupture of colonial ties. Instead, they demonstrated that the new states were the result of the contingent process of formation rather than its premise. [End Page 594] Yet it is not here that the profound transformation of the discipline has occurred. Revisionists do concentrate their criticism on the contents of nationalistic narratives, but leave untouched the theoretical premises on which these narratives rest. They fail to penetrate and undermine the sets of antinomies on which those teleological perspectives are grounded: enlightenment / romanticism; rationalism / nationalism; "liberty of the Modern" / "liberty of Ancient;" modernity / tradition; individualism / organicism, etc. In the following pages I will trace the origins of revisionism in Latin American, its contributions to the field of politico-intellectual history, and the kind of problems that it raises in turn.The Tradition of History of "Ideas" in Latin AmericaMany scholars consider Charles Hale to be the key figure in the emergence of the revisionist critique. As Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo remarks, for the case of Mexico (which has served as the exemplary case for the entire region): "Up to the moment Charles Hale came to intervene, we could recount to ourselves a delicious... (shrink)

These papers originated as lectures, three each by Stephan Kröner, [[sic]] Martinus Versfeld, A. J. Ayer, Stephen Pepper, and O. K. Bouswma, [[sic]] in a year-long series at the University of Notre Dame. Kröner [[sic]] and Pepper see philosophy in terms of conceptual structures, Kröner [[sic]] as the production of "categorial frameworks" and Pepper as the systematization of an intuition he calls a "root metaphor." Versfeld says philosophy is Socratic dialectic, that is, the light-hearted testing of hypotheses. For Ayer, (...) philosophy is analysis aimed at reconstructing the unsatisfactory presuppositions of common sense. Bouswma [[sic]] offers three demonstrations of how philosophical problems are dissolved by showing them to be instances of the misuse of words. Interested readers may wish to look at papers on this topic by Rorty, MacQuarrie, Harris, and Johann, read at Notre Dame in the spring of 1967 and published in the Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.--L. G. (shrink)

Compared to philosophers, the leading Latin American novelists, poets, and playwrights are relatively well known in the United States and many of their works are available in English translations. The Latin American philosophers, however, are an unknown quantity--not only to the reading public at large, but also to practically all U.S. philosophic and scholastic communities. Yet, Latin America contains a number of important original thinkers whose works would reward study here. Philosophical concepts developed in an ambient of young and (...) not yet fully-formed nations, without a long national cultural tradition of their own and struggling to overcome semi-primitive economic and political conditions, are bound to add some interesting dimensions to what is commonly called the "philosophy of the western world." This is particularly true when the philosophizers are distinguished--as they are in many cases--by a personal moral commitment to social and political involvement and activity. Jose Vasconcelos was such a figure. The volume under review gives us our first English summary of Vasconcelos' whole philosophical system: his metaphysics, his epistemology, his ethics and his aesthetics. It also ties in his social and political philosophy and some biographical details. The full impact of Vasconcelos' aesthetic monism comes through clearly, concisely and forcefully in nine carefully-chosen selections in the Appendix. It is to be hoped that this little volume portends a new trend toward making available in English the works of other outstanding Latin American philosophers.--H. B. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the evolution of the philosophical analysis of sport in Latin America from the nineteenth century to the present. To do so, this paper identifies the main themes and the leading works that emerged throughout this period as well as their relation to regional philosophical traditions. Likewise, to situate the philosophical analysis of sport in Latin America in a broader perspective, this paper makes reference to its relation to the (...) philosophy of sport in parts of the English-speaking world and the Iberian Peninsula . This paper also includes an account of the character and extent of philosophical thinking in relation to sport in contemporary Latin America and speculations about the future of the discipline in the region. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Contemporary Varieties of Religious Experience: James's Classic Study in Light of Resiliency, Temperament, and TraumaSami PihlströmLynn Bridgers Contemporary Varieties of Religious Experience: James's Classic Study in Light of Resiliency, Temperament, and Trauma. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. viii + 227 pp. Foreword by James W. Fowler.Scholars of pragmatism have for a long time insisted that William James—like most classical American philosophers—is "our contemporary", a thinker highly (...) relevant to our problems, not only to the problems of the past. Theologian and scholar of religious education Lynn Bridgers argues that James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, in particular, is not only an historically influential treatise on the psychology of religious experience but a work which continues to speak to us, offering crucial insights to what religious life amounts to a century later.James might have enjoyed Bridgers's personal way of opening the discussion. In the introduction, she refers to her own conversion, her "heartfelt [End Page 454] encounter with the Divine", her own "powerful religious experience" (2–3). It is in the context of her own religious life that she finds it rewarding to return to James's discussion of the types of religious temperament and to compare his classification to contemporary psychological accounts of religious experience, particularly in studies of resiliency and posttraumatic spirituality. This certainly is one way of emphasizing that James indeed is our contemporary and should not be neglected in attempts to understand the place of religion in human life today. Not only is a return to James important academically; Bridgers also recommends that religious institutions follow James in supporting a "more varied range of religious offerings in recognition of documented varieties in religious temperament and development" (7).Bridgers offers an interesting selection of evidence, "1902 to 2002", for the existence of the three basic categories of religious temperament James distinguishes in Lectures IV–XI of the Varieties,1 namely, the "healthy-minded" prophet (ch. 4), the "sick soul" leading a monastic life in order to find unification for her/his "divided self" (ch. 5), and the "mystic" experiencing a dramatic conversion (ch. 6), before going on to explore, in her concluding chapter 7, some theological analogies of these categories (viz., the prophetic theology of Irenaeus, the monastic tradition as established by Augustine, and the spontaneity of radical "spiritual innovators"). Before laying out this empirically rich—and somewhat confusing—material, Bridgers introduces, in the first three chapters, James's basic themes and methodology (ch. 1), his pluralism and experiential perspective, as articulated in the Varieties and the works leading up to it (ch. 2), and the comparison of his conversion typology to recent empirical studies by Jerome Kagan and others (ch. 3).The author's own method is largely Jamesian: she quotes at length from the sources she finds illuminating, just as James does in the Varieties. Philosophically, the crucial parts of the book are the ones in which she interprets James's method (and, hence, her own) as "phenomenological". Surveying "religious feelings and religious impulses", or the "developed subjective phenomena" finding their expression "in works of piety and autobiography", James "undertook what today we recognize as a phenomenological description of religious experience" (6).2 The phenomenological method, for him as well as for Bridgers, is above all "experiential" and focuses on "extremes in experience", especially on the fruits of those experiences (8).This phenomenological reading of James—of James's ways of reading the sources he uses in the Varieties—could have been defended in a more detailed manner, although James's "phenomenology" has already been emphasized by others, especially James Edie, to whom Bridgers refers (8–9, 12, 29).3 In this context, it is natural to compare James's method with the approach known as the phenomenology of religion, represented by Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade, among others. These thinkers are mentioned by Bridgers (9), but she prefers to connect James with the main figures of the [End Page 455] philosophical movement of phenomenology, especially its founder Edmund Husserl and further developers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, plausibly arguing that James to some extent influenced these philosophers' method of describing experience directly "as it is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy by John InglisMark D. JordanJohn Inglis. Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, volume 81. Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 1998. Pp. x + 324. Cloth, $99.50.Modern philosophers have shown themselves quite unphilosophical about the academic history of their own discipline. Content with grand stories that move (...) from Plato to themselves, they have treated institutional histories, recent histories, and bibliographical histories as unworthy of attention. John Inglis sets out to change all that for the study of medieval philosophy. He demonstrates by the book’s end that we have failed to recognize our historiographical procedures as conventions—with very particular histories of their own.The first part of the book traces the genealogy of the dominant (one might say, hegemonic) model in recent studies of medieval philosophy. The genealogy is prefaced with two chapters that show how various were the motives for reconstructions of medieval thought before 1850 in authors such as Billuart, Goudin, and Brucker or Hegel, Ritter, and Hauréau. These chapters might be dismissed by contemporary scholars as so much antiquarianism. There can be no dismissing the relevance to contemporary work of Inglis’s main genealogy, which runs with surprising directness from Joseph Kleutgen (1811–1883) and Albert Stöckl (1823–1895) to Norman Kretzmann and Anthony Kenny.It adds to the piquancy of Inglis’s argument that most specialists in medieval philosophy will not even recognize the names of Kleutgen and Stöckl, much less feel kinship with them. But Inglis shows convincingly what Kleutgen and Stöckl did to make the study of medieval philosophy possible in modern universities. Kleutgen mapped the medieval texts onto a system of “spheres,” of fields or topics, recognizable to professors of philosophy. This means that he necessarily privileged epistemology, as he necessarily connected a medieval thinker’s views across the “spheres” into a system—or a failed attempt at one. Kleutgen then emphasized the reason/revelation dichotomy and an allegiance to what he understood as the system of Thomas Aquinas. Put these elements together and you have a surprisingly familiar story. It remained for Stöckl to write it up as an erudite and monumental narration.Inglis follows this „Kleutgen-Stöckl model” through a number of more familiar authors, including De Wulf, Gilson, Boehner, Weinberg, and the editors of the Cambridge [End Page 530] History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Of course, in reducing the genealogy to a list of famous names I ignore two of its great virtues. The first is the detail with which it retells the institutional circumstances and the forgotten intermediaries of the scholarly tradition. Behind the genealogy, around its borders, there stands Inglis’s enormous effort of original research, much of it archival. The genealogy’s second virtue is the dialectical subtlety with which it locates continuities under contradictions. Gilson is usually touted as the antithesis of De Wulf, and Kretzmann of Gilson. Inglis makes such antitheses seem superficial by comparing them with an abiding if tacit agreement about how medieval texts can be appropriated within modern philosophy. To seal the comparison, Inglis suggests in the book’s second part what a real antithesis to the Kleutgen-Stöckl model might be. He reconstructs, in his last two chapters, Thomas’s accounts of human knowledge and of theology’s relations to philosophy in opposition to that model’s prescriptions.No review can represent—or even adequately praise—the enormous learnedness of this book. Moreover, since the book already discusses so much, it must seem ungrateful to suggest that it ought to discuss anything else. Let me end then rather by posing two questions beyond the book’s end. First, does Inglis’s genealogy mean to suggest that the Kleutgen-Stöckl model is now chiefly received in English-speaking philosophy departments? I wonder, for example, how far Inglis might judge Alain de Libera’s Penser au Moyen Age (Paris: Éds. de Seuil, 1991) an alternative to that model. Certainly de Libera shows more self-consciousness about the culturally determined history behind our historiography. His emphasis on the thirteenth-century recovery... (shrink)

David Hume's contributions span every branch of human inquiry: ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, political philosophy, aesthetics, religion, and economics. While reams of scholarship have been devoted to Hume's thought, his work on economics is still relatively unexplored. In this book, philosopher Margaret Schabas and intellectual historian Carl Wennerlind provide the definitive account of Hume's "worldly philosophy." Hume, they show, was intent on getting out of the armchair and ensuring that his philosophy had practical implications-to subdue superstition, soften religious zealotry, and (...) promote harmonious relations in modern society. Part of this endeavor involved material betterment, and Hume brought to his economic thought a richly astute understanding of human agency, of how our minds work and prompt our actions. The authors paint him as the quintessential proponent of liberalism and a dedicated supporter of commercial modernization. However, they note that he was not an unqualified enthusiast-he saw the potential of modern commerce to increase debt, fuel runaway inflation, and feed factionalism in political rule, for example, and he fretted over the potential for international conflicts to spiral out of control. Given Hume's friendship with Adam Smith, and his influence over nineteenth-century thinkers as prominent as Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx, a serious appraisal of this side of his oeuvre is long overdue. As two of Hume's closest readers, Schabas and Wennerlind offer just that in this delightfully wide-ranging exploration of the history of philosophy and modern economic thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Anthony J. Palmer, “Music Education for the Twenty-First Century: A Philosophical View of the General Education Core”Ana Lcuía FregaI would like to discuss three themes related to Tony Palmer's paper: (1) my agreement with the content of his paper in general, (2) some remarks on elements of what he deals with, including notions about the concept or a vision of what music education should be in (...) the USA and in the rest of the world and an approach to training music teachers at university level in the USA and in the rest of the world, and (3) my personal conclusions.Music is a particular medium of expression, irreplaceable, not interchangeable with any other. It is also a natural medium of human communication. We do not think or propose that schools should create musicians, but that they should aid in the improvement of all humankind.1This quotation of mine allows me to introduce my general agreement with the main content of the first part of Palmer's paper. Neither of us argues against the importance of teaching music within the general system of education. We both promote this and work to make this a fact in our different parts of the world.We both view the tasks known as "music education" as a part of the teaching of the humanities as a way to maintain a certain level of civilization and of a culture; that is, to keep alive the rich tradition in each culture, to develop skills, to listen to, perform, and create music, and to become acquainted with the wealth of masterpieces.Also, as I have said,"I can only give what I have," and "a teacher does not teach what he/she knows but what he/she is."2 I agree with Palmer on the relevance and importance of the task of music educators. There should be a correlation between the school's mission and the quality of the training for prospective teachers for them. This is consistent with Palmer's thinking about the university task when training future music teachers.George Steiner articulated some of the difficulties, limitations, and new possibilities brought into university classrooms by the technology of the global village when he wrote:[Those artifacts] determine a new way to organize human knowledge and to connect contemporary research with previous books. All taxonomies are essentially [End Page 194] philosophical, any library... represents a formalized vision of how the world is structured, and what are the optimum views about both the human mind and the phenomenological whole.3He also adds, "We will not be able to avoid the illusion-and so it is when talking about Humanities-that knowledge is cumulative, that there is an improvement and an unavoidable teleology needed when expressing sentiments and ideas."4By introducing Steiner's ideas, I am opening a line of critical thinking about a kind of "universalization" of both Palmer's concept of whatmusiceducationmeans as well as whether and then how there should be a world-wide dissemination of the training model that he describes for music teachers. I have doubts about the underlying assumptions of these notions and their feasibility.The examples Palmer gives of listening would require an inordinate amount of time and effort. Although this may be a valuable expenditure of resources in some parts of the world, in other parts the focus would be better directed elsewhere. In some places many people do not complete their basic education, do not have access to good nutrition, and have not acquired basic language and communication skills. The big question is, "What should we really teach them?"My point here is that if Michael Murphy's model is indeed an inspiring framework, it may be useful for people belonging to a part of the so-called First World only. Palmer's work should be understood with that consideration in mind. Africa, Latin America, and the Arab world are certainly not looking for these kinds of skills from the music taught at the general level if there happens to be any music taught at all in schools.Multiculturalism is another significant issue in Palmer's paper. I understand the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:222 Reviews A RUSCELLO ON RUSSELL I. GRATTAN-GUINNESS Faculty ofScience, Engineering and Mathematics Middlesex Polytechnic Enfield, Middlesex l!N3 4SF, England Michele di Francesco. Introduzione a Russell (I Filosofi, Vol. 53.) Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1990. Pp. viii, 200. 16,000 Lire. -. II Realismo analitico: logica, ontologia e significato nel primo Russell (Saggi, Vol. 28.) Milan: Guerini, 1991. Pp. 269. 30,000 Lire. Italy has long enjoyed a tradition of (...) work in the history of philosophy. Russell featured well recently in R. Simili, ed., L'Epistemologia di Cambridge I85O-I950 (1987), and here he is the leading figure in two books by an Italian scholar, who has just been appointed to the University of Palermo. The first book is a small-format volume in a series ofintroductory texts on philosophers; so Russell's social, educational and political writings are not treated, although a short biographical summary is furnished. While the centre of attention falls upon epistemological concerns, other aspects of Russell's philosophy are noted. A chronological line is followed, beginning with the idealist phase and proceeding to logicism and the early philosophy of language. Then comes logical atomism and the later doctrines through works such as The Analysis ofMindand The Analysis ofMatter to Human Knowledge (rather briefly handled). A very good survey and selection of Russell writings (including Papers) is given, followed by a fine classified bibliography of secondary literature; ~ut unfortunately no indexes then follow. Reviews 223 The second book, which belongs to a series of "essays" on scholarly subjects, is aimed at a more academic audience. As its title indicates, it is primarily concerned with the philosophical aspects of Russell's thought from his neo-Hegelian phase before 1910. After a quire lengthy thematic introduction, the chapters concentrate, in turn, upon Bradley and Frege; the MooreRussell reform; the ontology of propositions in The Principles; "significato", denotation and paradoxes there; the background to "On Denoting"; Meinong (with a welcome appendix on K. Twardowski, a figure normally known only to students of Polish thought); the theory ofdescriptions in "On Denoting "; and finally a general survey of the problem of meaning in analytic philosophy. As in the other book, no indexes are furnished, but the bibliography of secondary literature is very rich, and is well cited in the text (which is admirably parsimonious in the use of footnotes). However, there are some gaps in. the primary literature outside Russell. In particular, it is'a surprise that this Italian scholar says very little about Giuseppe Peano and his followers, and cites none of their works; for a major component of Russell's background is thereby not properly illuminated, and several important examples of the place of mathematical issues in Russell's developing philosophical programme are left unregistered (for example, why definite descriptions are preferred to indefinite ones in the first place). Among other quality books of this genre, one thinks most readily of J. Vuillemin, La premiere philosophie de Russell (1968), N. Griffin, Russell's Idealist Apprenticeship (1991), and F. A. Rodrfguez-Consuegra, The Mathematical Philosophy ofBertrand Russell (1991). All three recent authors have the advantage over. their distinguished French predecessor of the availability of the Russell Archives, and all have made effective use of the manuscripts. (However, nobody seems yet to have fully exploited the potential of Russell's correspondence.) The other two new volumes gain a certain edge over this one for their somewhat more extensive use of manuscripts, and the greater attention paid to mathematico-Iogical issues; but nevertheless,.the Italian public are basically well served by their compatriot with this book and its introductory predecessor.... (shrink)

In close collaboration with the late Matthew Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp pioneered the theory and practice of ‘the community of philosophical inquiry’ (CPI) as a way of practicing ‘Philosophy for Children’ and prepared thousands of philosophers and teachers throughout the world in this practice. In Community of Inquiry with Ann Margaret Sharp represents a long-awaited and much-needed anthology of Sharp’s insightful and influential scholarship, bringing her enduring legacy to new generations of academics, postgraduate students and researchers (...) in the fields of education, philosophy, philosophy of education, Philosophy for Children and philosophy of childhood. Sharp developed a unique perspective on the interdependence of education, philosophy, personhood and community that remains influential in many parts of the world. This perspective was shaped not only by Sharp’s work in philosophy and education, but also by her avid studies in literature, feminism, aesthetic theory and ecumenical spirituality. Containing valuable contributions from senior figures in the fields in which Sharp produced her most focused scholarship, the chapters in this book present a critical overview of how Sharp’s ideas relate to education, philosophy of education, and the Philosophy for Children movement as a whole. The historical and philosophical nature of this collection means that it will be a vital resource for philosophers and educators. It should also be of great interest to teacher educators and those involved in the study of pragmatism and feminism, as well as the history of education across the globe, particularly in the United States of America. (shrink)

Does religiosity help or hinder the exercise of agency? This article brings new evidence to bear on this long-standing debate, examining the life and work of the indigenous activist and follower of liberation theology, Rigoberta Menchú, in Guatemala, and the experiences of a millenarian community in Brazil, particularly one of its leaders, Dona Dodô. The two cases elucidate the dynamics of agency and piety, challenging the idea that pious individuals lack agency. In particular, the article interrogates the construction of (...) pious women as doubly oppressed by the forces of religion and patriarchy, and argues that, on the contrary, it was in the course of religious observance that Menchú and members of the millenarian community mounted challenges to ecclesiastical as well as political orders. Thus, the article underscores the possibilities for resistance and contention through piety rather than at odds with it. In studying these historical figures, the article looks beyond the Global North, which has inspired much of the theorising on religion and agency, to women and men marginalised by their ethnicity, poverty and rurality. In doing so, it demonstrates how religion can enable action among those far from traditional centres of power. (shrink)

Analytic philosophy was introduced in Latin America in the mid-twentieth century. Its development has been heterogeneous in different countries of the region but has today reached a considerable degree of maturity and originality, with a strong community working within the analytic tradition in Latin America. This entry describes the historical development of analytic philosophy in Latin America and offers some examples of original contributions by Latin American analytic philosophers.

__Forging People __explores the way in which Hispanic American thinkers in Latin America and Latino/a philosophers in the United States have posed and thought about questions of race, ethnicity, and nationality, and how they have interpreted the most significant racial and ethnic labels used in Hispanic America in connection with issues of rights, nationalism, power, and identity. Following the first introductory chapter, each of the essays addresses one or more influential thinkers, ranging from Bartolomé de Las Casas on race and (...) the rights of Amerindians; to Simon Bolívar's struggle with questions of how to forge a nation from disparate populations; to modern and contemporary thinkers on issues of race, unity, assimilation, and diversity. Each essay carefully and clearly presents the views of key authors in their historical and philosophical context and provides brief biographical sketches and reading lists, as aids to students and other readers. “Latin American philosophy has a long history of engagement with issues of race, ethnicity, and nationality. To date, however, there has been no volume that focused on the contributions of the major figures in the Latin American tradition, to illustrate their connections, and to illuminate the context in which much of their work occurred. This volume fills that gap and takes an important step in remedying this shortcoming in the existing philosophical literature, and also in the literature of related fields such as Latin American studies, ethnic studies, and the cross-disciplinary work of race, ethnicity, and nationality.” —_Manuel Vargas, University of San Francisco _. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AQUINAS AND HEIDEGGER: THE QUESTION OF BIDLOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY VINCENT GUAGLIARDO, O.P. Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology Graduate Theological Union Berkeley, Oalifornia I N IDS BOOK, Hediegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics, John D. Caputo recommends a " deconstruction" of Aquinas' philosophical theology in order to let.the true ·element orf his thought, mysticism, come to the fore. Caputo argues persuasively that Aquinas' thought, expressed ·as.it is (...) in the garh of metaphysics, cannot escape Heidegger':s critique of met:aiphysfos as "onto-theo-logioal ". Aquinas, no more thoo.any other thinker of the West, has succeeded mavoiding this iorgorttenness. Those Thomi:sts who have tried to argue that Aquinas.is an exception rto this critique, Caputo oontends, have not succeeded in presenting their case. The verdict o.f Heidegger stainds. The on:ly reoourrse left is thart of deconstruction, which Capurto presents ais gaining mther than losing the true Aquinas precisely because deconstruction.allows us to move from the said (the metaphysical dimension) fo rbhe uil!said (the mystical dimension) of Aquinas' thought. The uns1aiid is the kernel, the center a;ro:und which whatever Aquinas says moves. It is the true dimension which his thinking il'eally seeks: union with God, in wh~ch both the union and God 1are themselves rineff1a;ble.1 There is, however,.a disturbing problem which I find wti:th Capui;o's conclusion. This problem does not have to do with his oonte!lltion that the true kernel of St. Thomas' thought!is mysticail. Ra.ther, the problem concerns what is being disen1 See John D. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas: An }j}ssay on Overcoming Metaphysics (N.Y.: Fordham University Press, 1982), pp. 211 & 247-8. 407 408 VINCENT GUAGLIARDO; O.P. gaged and put out of play tin the deconstrrucrb.ion, namely: philosophical thoology.2 What are the iimplicatfons of such a movie? Are they desirable for theology? Ought we and oan we, 1a;s Caputo suggests, disengage,and leave behind St. Thomas' philosophical theology because metaphysical without there being any true loss? Might we be facing a;n impoverishment of another kind: in a moI"e " radical " seeking of the dii.vine might we not be losing something m'a foI"getfulness of ourselves as,.after 1 all, omy human? ls not this something precisely the,realm of the humanitas of the homo huma,nus, which Heidegger 's thinking seeks Ito point out and draw us closer to, where humanitas refers to our necessary trelation to Heing, from whlch relation we as humans cannot detach ourselves so long as we are " auf die Erde "? 3 The ~oblematic In beginning our inquiry I would like to distinguish three different regions of human engagement in which the over1appii.ng of one onto the other ii.s not.always easy to discern: philosophy, phl1osopihioal theology and mysticism.. I want to say "iphilosophical theology " and not simply " theology " because I think that it ii.s not possible to thoologize without 1 at the same time also philosophiizing. I 1think St. Tihomas thought this as well. 'l\hat is why his theology was always philosophioa ;l, 1in dialogue wiith :the philosophers: Aristotle, the Platonists, Ma~monides and the Ail1abs. In saying this, however, I do not mean to,say that philosophy 1and theology 1 are 1 the same. Now the altemativce which Caputo would ha,ve us embrace, because presumably not onto-theo-logioal, is that of a "reli2 See Caputo, op. cit., 11 & 283. a" Die Wahrheit des Seins denken, heisst zugleich die humaniitas des homo humanus denken " (" Brief iiber den Humanismus," in W egmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978), p. 349). This Latin expression is a.lso used by St. Thomas in De ente et essentia, III, to designate the formal principle (rationality) by which. the whole (an individual human being) becomes a whole. Also see In Met., VII, Leet. 5, nn. 1378-1380. THE QUESTION OF PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY 409 giious 1alerthi0Jogy" of mysticism.4 One is.then led to ask whether and if,so, how, the same person could ibe hoth a philosopher and 1a mystic, i.e. both!a thinker and a person of [aith. Do they remain " existentially " opposed,,as... (shrink)

This essay revisits the scholarly production around three major pandemics in the region: (a) the Third Plague Pandemic; (b) HIV/AIDS in the 1980s; and (c) COVID-19. The essay aims to provide a comprehensive set of resources (both printed and digital) in four languages (Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French) to examine how scholars have approached these phenomena and how their scope and interpretations have changed over time. Historians of health paid particular attention to sociocultural aspects of the disease, which enabled them (...) to consider usually-neglected actors, such as patients of Indigenous and African descent with their own medical traditions. This added more complexity to our understanding of how these pandemics were fought and received. In addition, the essay suggests that COVID-19 prompted the emergence of historians of health as public scholars. They actively used social networks and other digital tools not only to communicate about the long history of diseases and pandemics in the region, but also to provide an authorized or informed perspective amid misinformation and fake news. In addition, the internet was crucial to the development of helpful databases and virtual conferences beyond academic campuses and paywalls. (shrink)

This paper addresses two interrelated questions. The first question is our relation, as the modern westerners that we are, to Greek philosophy in its historical context. The second question is the relation between Greek philosophical conceptions of the self and what we moderns take ourselves to be when we try to think about the world objectively. My inquiry is motivated by the belief that what a philosopher of the distant past can say to us is influenced by our (...) own independent viewpoint, a viewpoint which may enable us to use that philosopher as a contributor to debates of which he himself had no inkling. Greek philosophers were innocent of the Cartesian tradition and the problems it has generated concerning the connection, if any, between an individual subject of consciousness and the so-called 'external world'. However, I argue that early Greek speculation about the physical world was inward as well as outward looking. Their attempts to think about the world objectively raised issues about the nature of the self — the inquiring (or non-inquiring) subject — issues that, in the case of Heraclitus, are quite explicit. Following up my earlier point about linking modern viewpoints to ancient insights, I make a comparison beween parts of Thomas Nagel's book, The View from Nowhere, and the philosophy of Heraclitus. In particular, I argue that Heraclitus adumbrates a concept analogous to Nagel's 'objective self and shares some of Nagel's interests in integrating that perspective with the practice of being a person in the everyday world. In the final part of the paper I comment briefly on Plato's and Aristotle's criticism of Heraclitus, a criticism that, from a modern perspective, seems to me misconceived. I also offer the Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who was influenced by Heraclitus, as an excellent example of what it could mean to combine an objective viewpoint with one's ordinary humanity. More generally, the paper may be read as a defence of objectivity — not in the sense that we can hope to understand the world independently of our own concepts or culture (I sidestep any questions about objective truth), but in the sense, rather, that trying to get beyond an irreducibly personal view of things is a basic human propensity (property of the self) even though our use of it seems bound to be (and perhaps should be) selective. (shrink)

In the recent philosophical literature on inquiry, epistemologists point out that their subject has often begun at the point at which you already have your evidence and then focussed on identifying the beliefs for which that evidence provides justification. But we are not mere passive recipients of evidence. While some comes to us unbidden, we often actively collect it. This has long been recognised, but typically epistemologists have taken the norms that govern inquiry to be practical, (...) not epistemic. The recent literature challenges this assumption and uncovers a rich range of questions about the epistemic normativity of inquiry. In this paper, I approach these questions from the formal side of epistemology. Developing out of the philosophy of science, as it did, this branch of epistemology has long discussed inquiry. And, building on the insights of Janina Hosiasson (1931), David Blackwell (1951), and I. J. Good (1967), it has produced a reasonably well-developed framework in which to understand norms of inquiry, both epistemic and practical. In the first half of the paper, I will present the pragmatic versions of this framework due to Hosiasson, Blackwell, and Good, and the epistemic version due to Graham Oddie (1997); in the second half of the paper, I put this framework to work, turning to some of the questions from the recent debate about inquiry and asking how the framework can help us answer them. Questions include: When should we initiate an inquiry, when should we continue it, when should we conclude it, and when should we reopen it? How do epistemic norms of inquiry relate to epistemic norms of belief or credence, and can they conflict, as Jane Friedman (2020) contends? How should we resolve the apparent puzzle raised by Friedman's example of counting the windows in the Chrysler Building? How should we direct our attention, as Georgi Gardiner (2022) asks? How should we choose and reason after receiving evidence we'd rather not have received? And how should we understand the epistemic error that occurs when someone is resistant to evidence in the way Mona Simion (2023) describes? (shrink)

This article examines Marx’s earliest writings, especially his doctoral dissertation on “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature” and the notebooks he kept while preparing it. Previous commentators on this material have tended to take one of two approaches: either they have used it to associate Marx with an expansive and abstract Western Tradition of philosophical inquiry, or they have located it in the narrow context of the intellectual culture of the German Vormärz. Here I (...) seek to mediate between these extremes. These documents, I argue, suggest that Marx was less a part of a Western Tradition, or a set of abstract normative debates that ostensibly stretches from the ancients to modernity, than of what I call Latin Culture, or a Latin-speaking culture that was inscribed in practices, norms, and institutions, and that persisted in Europe from late antiquity into the nineteenth century. Placing Marx’s early writings in this context helps explain some of the tensions that characterise his thought and to clarify the practical consequences of what might otherwise appear as purely theological and metaphysical speculations. (shrink)

The philosophy of piano performance teaching, rooted in hermeneutic theory, represents a significant evolution from traditional pedagogical methods. This approach emphasizes a shift from mere knowledge transmission to a deeper, interpretative understanding of music, prioritizing the dialogic interaction between teacher and student. Such an educational framework underscores the ontological essence of music, advocating for respect for its historical and contemporary realities and elevating the interpretative role of the student within the learning process. In this context, piano performance teaching transcends conventional (...) skill-based instruction, evolving towards a model that is student-centered and rich in connotative depth. This pedagogical philosophy not only respects but also highlights students' subjectivity, recognizing their central role in interpreting and understanding musical texts. The emphasis on the ontological aspects of music encourages respect for both the past interpretations and potential future directions of musical expression. Moreover, by integrating hermeneutic principles into piano performance teaching, this approach fosters a spiritual and philosophical exploration of music, aligning with broader themes of religious art education. It encourages students to engage with music as performers and as thoughtful interpreters who consider the deeper meanings and spiritual dimensions of musical works. This philosophical shift enhances the educational experience, promoting a holistic understanding of music that connects technical proficiency with existential and spiritual inquiry. In essence, the hermeneutic-based philosophy of piano performance teaching redefines the pedagogical landscape, offering a more nuanced and spiritually enriching framework that aligns with the principles of religious art education. This approach not only challenges traditional methods but also opens new avenues for the exploration of music as a profound medium of human expression and spiritual reflection. (shrink)

This article traces the development of the theory and practice of what is known as ‘community of inquiry’ as an ideal of classroom praxis. The concept has ancient and uncertain origins, but was seized upon as a form of pedagogy by the originators of the Philosophy for Children program in the 1970s. Its location at the intersection of the discourses of argumentation theory, communications theory, semiotics, systems theory, dialogue theory, learning theory and group psychodynamics makes of it a (...) class='Hi'>rich site for the dialogue between theory and practice in education. This article is an exploration of those intersections, and a prospectus of its possible role in the formation and reformulation of school curriculum. It will be argued here that, when formulated as community of philosophical inquiry in particular, it offers the possibility of ‘philosophising’ the school curriculum in general, by extending the concept-work that doing philosophy entails to all of the disciplines. The article begins with an attempt at an operational definition of the term as, move to an analysis of its dynamics, offers an example of its use in a mathematics classroom, and finishes with a schematic view of its whole-curriculum and whole-school possibilities. (shrink)

This volume brings together contributions from distinguished scholars in the history of philosophy, focusing on points of interaction between discrete historical contexts, religions, and cultures found within the premodern period. The contributions connect thinkers from antiquity through the Middle Ages and include philosophers from the three major monotheistic faiths-Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. By emphasizing premodern philosophy's shared textual roots in antiquity, particularly the writings of Plato and Aristotle, the volume highlights points of cross-pollination between different schools, cultures, and moments in (...) premodern thought. Approaching the complex history of the premodern world in an accessible way, the editors organize the volume so as to underscore the difficulties the premodern period poses for scholars, while accentuating the fascinating interplay between the Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin philosophical traditions. The contributors cover many topics ranging from the aims of Aristotle's cosmos, the adoption of Aristotle's Organon by al-Farabi, and the origins of the Plotiniana Arabica to the role of Ibn Gabirol's Fons vitae in the Latin West, the ways in which Islamic philosophy shaped thirteenth-century Latin conceptions of light, Roger Bacon's adaptation of Avicenna for use in his moral philosophy, and beyond. The volume's focus on "source-based contextualism" demonstrates an appreciation for the rich diversity of thought found in the premodern period, while revealing methodological challenges raised by the historical study of premodern philosophy. Contextualizing Premodern Philosophy: Explorations of the Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin Traditions is a stimulating resource for scholars and advanced students working in the history of premodern philosophy. (shrink)

Illustrations: 13 B/w & 1 Colour Illustrations Description: The frontiers of Traditional Knowledge and Science have long attracted the minds of scientists, theologians, intellectuals and students, who have been arguing both their similarities and dissimilarities, apparent contradictions, and the possibility of an ultimate harmony between the two. In ancient and medieval India - as in much of the Non-Western world - there was only one word for tradition and science, namely, vidya. Vidya encompassed what in the modern historically-sensitive inquiries (...) is called 'knowledge-systems.' However, in the modern West, placing Science and Tradition side-by-side has become something of an anathema, for many in the post-Enlightenment era regard Tradition to be a leftover from the Dark Ages. Science, in contrast, with its systematic approach to studying and understanding of all there is, has been considered to be unassailable. But even this impenetrable divide may be showing signs of rupture in the twenty-first century : there is now growing evidence of a line of continuity and creative engagement in a 'third space' between Science and Traditional Knowledge. Individuals and learned organizations are making enormous contributions in this interactive exploration. The Sir John Templeton Foundation, based in Philadelphia, USA, is one such international organization. Professor B.V. Subbarayappa is one such eminent scholar who has relentlessly pursued, and in his quiet way stimulated, the fusion of disparate minds in this area. He is hailed as a pioneer in the History and Philosophy of Science movement in India. His contributions in this field are without match and have earned him a name among scientists, science historians, philosophers and intellectuals all over the world. His monumental work and his sheer humanity have inspired the Editors of this volume to find a way to honour him. Scholars of various persuasions from around the world have contributed exploratory, specialist and dialogic essays toward this conversation of Science and Tradition. A biographical sketch with a comprehensive Bibliography (first-ever) of Prof Subbarayappa is also featured in the Introductory essay. Professor--D.P. Chattopadhyaya and J.N. Mohanty have offered prefatory comments of their own. Given the extensive range of topics discussed, both specialists and lay readers will doubtless gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between Science and Tradition in a cross-cultural context, and hopefully be inspired to develop respect for knowledge across these two frontiers. (shrink)

This inaugural handbook documents the distinctive research field that utilizes history and philosophy in investigation of theoretical, curricular and pedagogical issues in the teaching of science and mathematics. It is contributed to by 130 researchers from 30 countries; it provides a logically structured, fully referenced guide to the ways in which science and mathematics education is, informed by the history and philosophy of these disciplines, as well as by the philosophy of education more generally. The first handbook to cover the (...) field, it lays down a much-needed marker of progress to date and provides a platform for informed and coherent future analysis and research of the subject. -/- The publication comes at a time of heightened worldwide concern over the standard of science and mathematics education, attended by fierce debate over how best to reform curricula and enliven student engagement in the subjects There is a growing recognition among educators and policy makers that the learning of science must dovetail with learning about science; this handbook is uniquely positioned as a locus for the discussion. -/- The handbook features sections on pedagogical, theoretical, national, and biographical research, setting the literature of each tradition in its historical context. Each chapter engages in an assessment of the strengths and weakness of the research addressed, and suggests potentially fruitful avenues of future research. A key element of the handbook’s broader analytical framework is its identification and examination of unnoticed philosophical assumptions in science and mathematics research. It reminds readers at a crucial juncture that there has been a long and rich tradition of historical and philosophical engagements with science and mathematics teaching, and that lessons can be learnt from these engagements for the resolution of current theoretical, curricular and pedagogical questions that face teachers and administrators. (shrink)

Although these essays derive from much previously published material, the whole is greater than its parts. The collection allows a comparative view of a variety of local knowledge systems, from that of the medieval masons who built the cathedral of Chartres to early modern cartography, and from the complex navigation system of Micronesia to present‐day research on malaria and on turbulence. David Turnbull marshals local systems of knowledge to substantiate his thesis that “there is not just one universal form of (...) knowledge but a variety of knowledge” .Turnbull aims to show that knowledge is motley—that it is assembled out of heterogeneous components. It is a product of social labor. Its contents are pertinent to the locality in which it was produced. As such, contrary to the claims of modernist Western science, it is not rational, autonomous, and objective. Knowledge is performative and historically contingent. It is both various and able to be compared across diverse cultures. Against the claim of science to represent universal, objective knowledge, Turnbull points to the conclusions of philosophers such as Richard Rorty who have examined the indeterminacies of modern scientific and technical ways of knowing. Using an eclectic variety of studies in philosophy and the sociology of knowledge, Turnbull reiterates Wittgenstein's point that meaning consists of embodied performance and usage.For me the most illuminating part of this book is its comparison of the development of Western cartographic techniques in the “age of discovery” with the profoundly different navigational system that was developed in the Pacific by Polynesians. Turnbull shows the difficulties that early Europeans had in assembling the multitude of local knowledges about place and distance into a systematic cartographic knowledge in the interest of the state. He then discusses the profoundly different but also highly sophisticated navigational system of the Polynesians. They developed what he calls “a dynamic cognitive map,” a map based on a star compass and etak, a system of mental representation in which the canoe was conceived as stationary and a reference island as moving backward against the rising and setting points of the stars. It was a complex system of navigation that Polynesian navigators learned by long years of study from childhood; it allowed an accurate estimation of the distance traveled. Pacific oceanic navigation was based on this system of mapping and on a key, highly sophisticated technology, the seaworthy canoe. Turnbull here undermines the “great divide” between so‐called traditional knowledge systems and modern scientific ones. He effectively questions assumptions such as the one that contrasts deliberate European discoveries of the Americas with accidental Polynesian discoveries of the Pacific islands.He takes a similar approach in his discussion of the building of Gothic cathedrals, which he conceives as sites of experimental practice, as “laboratories.” He describes the cathedrals as sites of local knowledge, built with talk, tradition, and templates . Pointing to the evolution of the master mason into the architect in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, he suggests that thereby “theory became divorced from practice and skill became expertise” . Here Turnbull oversimplifies the later development. History itself becomes a template cut for the purposes of his own theoretical structure, rather than the complex, locally contingent, messy, and inherently interpretive entity that it is. Calling cathedrals “laboratories” and the process of their construction “technoscience” places modern categories onto the past in a procedure that can only create a distorting lens.This criticism can be directed at many social studies of science that use historical examples and is not meant to detract from the great value of this collection of interrelated studies. For modern science, Turnbull emphasizes both the motley assemblage and indeterminacy of scientific practices . Rather than modern science being superior to other knowledge systems, both are based on local practices. The question then becomes not how scientific methodology achieves universal, objective truth, but how technoscientific knowledge spaces achieves apparent universality and connectedness. Turnbull's answer includes technical devices and social strategies that treat various instances of knowledge/practice as equivalent and that make connections through ordering. He also shows the legitimacy and sophistication of knowledge systems that developed before or outside of modern technoscientific knowledge, and he creates a legitimizing space for both kinds, emphasizing the value of comparison and reciprocity. Rejecting the extremes of both the modern and the postmodern, he aims to create a middle ground that he calls the transmodern, a ground in that reciprocal dialogue between scientific and other kinds of knowledge systems can create both new insights and concrete human progress. This book is a valuable contribution toward such a goal. (shrink)

We argue that the use of the term “supernatural” is problematic in philosophy of religion in general, and in the contribution by Thornhill-Miller and Millican in particular. We address the disturbing parallel between Hume’s case against the rationality of belief in miracles and his dismissal of reports of racial equality. We do not argue that because Hume was a racist therefore his view against miracles is faulty, but we draw attention to how Hume sets up a framework that, for similar (...) reasons, discounts evidence of black intelligence and divine intelligence. We go on to argue against TMM’s revision of Hume on miracles. We then argue that empirical testing on the veracity of petitionary belief is impossible for there is no control case and that empirical testing can no more evaluate the evidential merits of most religious experiences than it can assess the merits of any robust philosophical position in epistemology, metaphysics, value theory, logic and mathematics. We express doubts about the integrity and scope of how one might enjoy the good of religion without belief. In a final section we offer a defense of the rationality of believing in specific religious traditions based on religious experience along with what we refer to as sufficient philosophical reasoning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Christian PhilosopherKerry S. WaltersThe Christian Philosopher, by Cotton Mather; edited by Winton U. Solberg; cxlii & 488 pp. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994, $49.95.Poor Cotton Mather! For well over two centuries now he has been a popular icon of unctuous self-righteousness, superstitious fanaticism, and dogmatic intolerance. Nor has endorsement of this stereotype been confined to casual laypersons who know of Mather only from lurid accounts of (...) Salem witch-hunting. Scholars who ought to know better often buy into it. Perry Miller, the doyen of early American studies, consistently wrote of Mather in a particularly unsympathetic manner. More odious, as Professor Solberg reminds us (p. xciii), was the treatment by historians at a Florida planetarium who in 1982 put together a short film on early European and American doomsday predictors which included segments on Mather the astronomer. When these segments appeared, a projector was programmed to flash the words “Feel Free to Boo and Hiss” on the planetarium’s dome—an invitation which audiences, presumably, gleefully accepted.Mather deserves better than this, and Winton Solberg’s critical edition of The Christian Philosopher goes a long way towards rehabilitating the Puritan divine. Along with recent studies such as Kenneth Murdock’s edition of Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1977) and Kenneth Silverman’s masterful The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (1984), Solberg’s study painstakingly presents us with a detailed account of a man who undoubtedly was one of the most important literary figures in early America.Mather published The Christian Philosopher in 1721, seven years before his [End Page 167] death and eight years after being named to the Royal Society of London. The book was both the culmination of a lifetime of learning as well as a calculated effort on Mather’s part to show that his election to the prestigious Royal Society was deserved. The book is the first attempt by an American-born author to take a comprehensive look at the “new learning” associated with that period known since as the Enlightenment. Mather was an omnivorous reader and an equally thorough observer of natural phenomena, and he welcomed the scientific interpretations of reality offered by such savants as Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and John Ray. In the mind of Mather, such explanations posed no challenge to the Christian worldview. On the contrary, he concluded, they supported it by providing clear and indisputable evidence of design in nature. The Christian Philosopher (or, in more contemporary jargon, The Christian Scientist) is Mather’s attempt to defend this thesis. It is an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting!) compendium of data gleaned from the natural realm which, in Mather’s judgment, irrefutably points to the existence of a grand Designer. Although Mather explicitly claimed that his primary goal in writing the book was to demonstrate that atheism is contrary to reason, he also penned one of the New World’s first systematic Enlightenment documents.One of the difficulties in reading The Christian Philosopher traditionally has been the sheer breadth of learning that went into its composition. Mather cites over four hundred books, includes hundreds of allusions to classical and scriptural sources, and so inundates the reader with evidence in support of his fundamental design argument that it is quite easy to lose one’s way. Professor Solberg has considerably lightened these burdens with his critical edition. He prefaces Mather’s text with a masterful 115-page introduction which places the work in its historical context as well as analyzes its methodology and arguments. Moreover, his edition includes 170 pages of endnotes, biographical notes, biblical references and a recapitulation of Mather’s own sources. Finally, Solberg supplies almost each page of Mather’s text with footnotes that identify literary or scriptural allusions and translate Mather’s liberal use of Greek and Latin quotations.Solberg’s edition of The Christian Philosopher will prove, I’m confident, to be the definitive text. It is an invaluable reference tool for the specialist, but it can also serve as a friendly and intriguing introduction for the layperson. Convinced Puritan-bashers who read this study may still regard Mather’s worldview with distaste, but I suspect that Solberg’s sensitive... (shrink)