Bringing together a group of established and emergent Jonson scholars, this volume reacts to major advances in thinking about the writer and his canon of works. The study is divided into two distinct parts: the first considers the Jonsonian career and output from biographical, critical, and performance-based angles; the second looks at cultural and historical contexts building on rich interdisciplinary work. Social historians work alongside literary critics to provide a diverse and varied account of Jonson. These are less (...) standard surveys of the field than vibrant interventions into current critical debates. The short-essay format of the collection seeks less to harmonize and homogenize than to raise awareness of new avenues of research on Jonson, including studies informed by book history, cultural geography, the law and legal discourse, the history of science and interests in material culture. (shrink)

Ben Jonson, writing before 1641 in Discoveries, observed that nature intends us no courtesies. The rivers carry our boats, the winds favour our sails, and the sunlight warms our bodies, by necessary motions that contain no kindliness. This represented, or expressed, though perhaps unwittingly and certainly without scientific precision, the mechanical version of physical nature that steadily prevailed during the seventeenth century.

This essay traces out the context that allowed numerous early modern thinkers to deny that animals had faces. Using early- to mid-seventeenth-century writing by, among others, John Milton, John Bulwer and Ben Jonson, it shows that faces were understood to be sites of meaning, and were thus, like gestural language and the capacity to perform a dance, possessed by humans alone. Animals, this discourse argued, have no ability to communicate meaningfully because they have no bodily control, and as such (...) they are faceless beings without individuality and without a sense of self-consciousness. The ethical implications of such a reading of the human face are far reaching. (shrink)

This is the first collaborative volume to place Shakespeare's works within the landscape of early modern political thought. Until recently, literary scholars have not generally treated Shakespeare as a participant in the political thought of his time, unlike his contemporaries Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney. At the same time, historians of political thought have rarely turned their attention to major works of poetry and drama. A distinguished international and interdisciplinary team of contributors examines the full range of (...) Shakespeare's writings in order to challenge conventional interpretations of plays central to the canon, such as Hamlet; open up novel perspectives on works rarely considered to be political, such as the Sonnets; and focus on those that have been largely neglected, such as The Merry Wives of Windsor. The result is a coherent and challenging portrait of Shakespeare's distinctive engagement with the characteristic questions of early modern political thought. (shrink)

A contemporary of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe was one of the most influential early modern dramatists, whose life and mysterious death have long been the subject of critical and popular speculation. This collection sets Marlowe's plays and poems in their historical context, exploring his world and his wider cultural influence. Chapters by leading international scholars discuss both his major and lesser-known works. Divided into three sections, 'Marlowe's works', 'Marlowe's world', and 'Marlowe's reception', the book ranges from (...) Marlowe's relationship with his own audience through to adaptations of his plays for modern cinema. Other contexts for Marlowe include history and politics, religion and science. Discussions of Marlowe's critics and Marlowe's appeal today, in performance, literature and biography, show how and why his works continue to resonate; and a comprehensive further reading list provides helpful suggestions for those who want to find out more. (shrink)

This is a new edition of "A Problem in Greek Ethics," originally published in London in 1901 for "private circulation." Part of the project Immortal Literature Series of classic literature, this is a new edition of the classic work published in 1901-not a facsimile reprint. Obvious typographical errors have been carefully corrected and the entire text has been reset and redesigned by Pen House Editions to enhance readability, while respecting the original edition."A Problem in Greek Ethics" is an account of (...) sexuality between men in all its forms, with Greek culture as a backdrop. Perhaps the best description of "A Problem in Greek Ethics" is this one in "Queer Religion" (Praeger, 2012, edited by Donald L. Boisvert and Jay Emerson Johnson, pp. 180-181): "Published at the turn of the century, 'A Problem in Greek Ethics' is a systematic and well-documented exposition of the role of homosexuality in the different historical periods of ancient Greek society. Throughout most of his work, Symonds prefers to use the term 'paiderastia' to 'homosexuality,' the latter a term he only uses in rare instances. Nevertheless, 'paiderastia,' in Symonds's work, amounts to a broad concept of homosexuality rather than to our current concept of pederasty. Whitman and his work are never mentioned by Symonds in 'A Problem in Greek Ethics,' but the conceptual connection had already been made explicit in Walt Whitman: 'A Study' eight years earlier. In the introductory lines to 'A Problem in Greek Ethics,' the reader is alerted that ancient Greece offers a unique example in history of 'a great and highly developed race not only tolerating homosexual passions, but deeming them of spiritual value, and attempting to use them for the benefit of society.' According to Symonds, while homosexual relations were not prominent in the so-called heroic age of Greece, it was nevertheless the love of Achilles for Patroclus, as narrated by Homer, that conferred in a later age of Greek history an almost religious sanction to the martial form of paiderastia. This episode in the Iliad inspired in later generations an ideal of manly love, which he describes as 'a powerful and masculine emotion, in which effeminacy had no part, and which by no means excluded the ordinary sexual feelings.' To which he adds that the tie created by these relationships was 'both more spiritual and more energetic [than] that which bound man to woman.' While Homer knew not about homosexuality, very early in Greek history paiderastia became a national institution giving rise, according to Symonds, to a distinction between a noble, spiritual, form of masculine passion, which he calls "heroic love," and a base and sensual one, which he identifies as 'vulgar love.'"About the Author: John Addington Symonds was born in Bristol, England, in 1840. He was an English poet, an author of several works, and a literary critic. In 1873 he wrote "A Problem in Greek Ethics," which discussed homosexuality between men. He printed ten copies in 1883, before effectively publishing the book in 1901. He was also known for his work on the Renaissance, as well as for his translations and biographies. He wrote "Our Life in the Swiss Highlands" (1891), biographies of Philip Sidney (1886), Ben Jonson (1886) and Michelangelo (1893), several volumes of poetry and essays, and a translation of the "Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini" (1887). John Addington Symonds died in Rome in 1893. In 1896, Havelock Ellis published, in German, prepared with the collaboration of Dr. Hans Kurella, "Das konträre Geschlechtsgefühl" (Leipzig, by Georg H. Wigand's Verlag), later revised and published by Ellis as "Sexual Inversion"-the first medical text in English about homosexuality, which he had co-authored with Symonds, and which would become a part of Ellis's six-volume "Studies in the Psychology of Sex.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.2 (2000) 88-112 [Access article in PDF] Milton's Aesthetics Of Eating Denise Gigante It is not a little curious that, with the exception of Ben Jonson (and he did not speak gravely about it so often), the poet in our own country who has written with the greatest gusto on the subject of eating is Milton. He omits none of the pleasures of the palate, great or (...) small. In his Latin poems, when young, he speaks of the pears and chestnuts which he used to roast at the fire with his friend Diodati. Junkets and other "country-messes" are not forgotten in his "Allegro." The simple Temptation in the Wilderness, "Command that these stones be made bread" (which was quite sufficient for a hunger that had fasted "forty days"), is turned, in Paradise Regained, with more poetry than propriety, into the set out of a great feast, containing every delicacy in and out of season. The very "names" of the viands, he says, were "exquisite." And in Paradise Lost, Eve is not only described as being skilful in paradisaical cookery ("tempering dulcet creams"), but the angel Raphael is invited to dinner, and helped by his entertainers to a series of tid-bits and contrasted relishes--Taste after taste, upheld with kindliest change. --Leigh Hunt, "Eating Songs" The title of an old play gives us a direct taste and surmise of its inwards, as the first lines of the Paradise Lost smack of the great Poem. --John Keats, "On 'Retribution, or the Chieftain's Daughter'" That Milton's Romantic readers should invoke the "taste" of his epic poetry suggests an awareness beyond the anecdotal. For as this essay will show, Milton complicates the category of physiological taste in such a manner as to form the ground for the possibility of aesthetic taste, which emerges as a distinct discourse in the early years of the eighteenth century. This is not to say that Milton is the only source for this dubious meaning-in-transition. But precisely how, prior to the interventions of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and the entire tradition of post-Miltonic theorists of taste, is one to read Adam's darkly sardonic postlapsarian remark: "Eve, now I see thou art exact of taste... And Palate call judicious" [PL IX.1017-20]? Critics have observed Milton's "ruthless and relentless pressure on 'taste,'" the fact that the word and its variants appear thirty times in Book IX of Paradise Lost alone [Ricks 69]. What I would like to suggest is that just as Milton is a seminal figure for the eighteenth-century aesthetic preoccupation with the sublime, 1 he is theoretically situated at the origins of the more generic thing called taste as well. [End Page 88]Of course Milton himself was aware of the epistemological implications of taste, whereby the Latin sapere can mean both "to taste" and "to know." 2 The fruit whose "mortal taste" was the source of all our woe did, after all, grow on the tree of knowledge, knowingly described by Satan as "precious of all Trees / In Paradise, of operation blest / To Sapience" [PL I.2, IX.795-97]. So too, when Adam calls Eve "exact of taste," he adds "of Sapience no small part" [PL IX.1018]. Throughout Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Milton plays with the epistemological connotation of taste, incorporating it even into the 1671 companion piece of the latter, Samson Agonistes, whose blind hero declares, "The way to know were not to see but taste" [1091]. At the time Milton was writing, however, taste was philosophically connected not only to knowledge and pleasure, but to morality as well. At the origins of the British empirical discourse of taste, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, inheriting this link between epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics, inquires: "Will it not be found... that what is beautiful is... true; and what is at once both beautiful and true is, of consequence, agreeable and good?" [2: 268-69]. For Milton as for Shaftesbury, the beautiful was the true was the good, and access to these ideals was bound up with the philosophic complexity... (shrink)

To stress the subjectivity of the analyst is to accept the centrality of countertransference in the analytic relationship. Psychoanalysts have long recognized the importance of transference in the analytic setting—that is, the analysand's way of relating to the analyst in terms of his strong, ambivalent unconscious feelings for earlier figures , a process whose successful resolution constitutes the psychoanalystic "cure." But, since the patient's transference is only experienced by the analyst through his countertransference responses, recent theorists have come to emphasize (...) the importance of countertransference in psychoanalysis. In what Otto Kernberg calls its "totalistic" definition, countertransference refers to "the total emotional reaction of the psychoanalyst to the patient in the treatment situation."1 It is, therefore, a source of both empathic understanding and defensive misunderstanding, of distortion and insight. Hans Loewald remarks: "Since a psychoanalytic investigation can be carried out only by a human mind, we cannot conceive of one in which the analyst's [counter] transference and resistance are not the warp and woof of his activity."2 · 1. Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism , p. 49. · 2. Hans Loewald, "Psychoanalytic Theory and the Psychoanalytic Process," The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 25 : 56. Cf. Heinz Kohut, "Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 7 : 459-83. For a clear discussion of the background of the countertransference concept in Freud, see Humberto Nagera, et. al., Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts on Metapsychology, Conflicts, Anxiety and Other Subjects , pp. 200-206. Two surveys of the literature on the topic are particularly useful: Douglas Orr, "Transference and Countertransference: A Historical Survey," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 2 : 621-70, and Kernberg, pp. 49-66. Arthur F. Marotti, associate professor of English at Wayne State University, has written a number of essays on Ben Jonson, John Donne, Thomas Middleton, and Edmund Spenser. He is completing a book-length social-historical and psychoanalytic study of Donne's poetry and a book on Jonson; some of the theoretical assumptions behind both projects are discussed in this article. See also: "Psychoanalysis and the Marionette Theater: Interpretation is Not Depreciation" in Vol. 5, No. 1. (shrink)

But since the Greeks first wrote what they called tragedies and comedies, and Aristotle in The Poetics formulated some distinctions about them, writers have been conscious of the two modes as engaging them in different undertakings, involving them in different worlds, each with its own demands. They have gauged their predilections and capacities against the demands of each and have deliberately chosen one or the other, or some calculated mixture. They are often quite explicit about it. Shakespeare announced his plays (...) as "tragedies" or "comedies" or, when he chose, he mixed the forms with the recklessness of Polonius. Marlowe spoke his intention when in the Prologue to Tamburlaine he asked his audience to view his hero in "the tragic glass." Ben Jonson ventured into tragedy in his own scholarly, methodical way, boasting to have discharged all the crucial "offices of a Tragic writer," which he lists straight out of Aristotle. Milton's choice of the tragic form to express his final mood was of course deliberate and, especially in relation to the tragic undertones of his great epic, significant. Artists are free--but free to choose their own sort of bondage. It is they and not so much the critics who have worked to maintain the integrity of the forms. Their conscious, explicit choices show that in their eyes the forms are real, and different, and not merely an academic conspiracy. The phenomenon is a powerful example of the fruitful interaction of tradition and individual talent. (shrink)

The nineteenth century compared her to Shakespeare; in our own time, she has been likened most often to Henry James. Both comparisons reflect a basic difficulty in reconciling subject matter with treatment, in squaring Jane Austen's restricted world - "3 or 4 Families in a Country Village" - with her profound impact upon our imaginations. Over the years her admirers have tried to resolve this paradox in various ways, none quite successful, but throughout all the changes in critical method one (...) thing has remained constant: the high level of admiration. As Edmund Wilson once remarked, in various revolutions of taste which have occurred during the last century and a half, "perhaps only two reputations have never been affected by the shifts of fashion: Shakespeare's and Jane Austen's. We still agree with Scott about Jane Austen, just as we agree with Ben Jonson about Shakespeare." Even in the half-century after Jane Austen's death, when her reputation was limited in comparison with those of the great Victorians, the praise of discriminating critics was remarkably consistent; and it seems safe to predict, as we begin to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of her birth, that this high estimate will remain unchallenged. The bicentennial year will produce the usual tributes, conferences, and collections of essays, but the call for "revaluation" which is usually a ritual part of such occasions will scarcely be heard. The question will not be one of placing Jane Austen in some hierarchy of value, but of trying once again to explain her accepted excellences. A. Walton Litz has written The Art of James Joyce, Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development, Introspective Voyager: The Poetic Development of Wallace Stevens, and numerous articles. He is professor of English at Princeton University. (shrink)

Offers many fresh insights that will give even longtime readers of Shakespeare a new appreciation of the great master. Scholars have long debated the extent of Shakespeare's education. Although his friend and admirer Ben Jonson said of him, "thou hadst small Latine and lesse Greek," Shakespeare's plays reveal a wide familiarity with literary and philosophical works from the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, and the classical age. Philosopher Farhang Zabeeh delves into this fascinating topic in this detailed study of the (...) philosophical influences evident in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. Readers will be surprised and delighted to discover in Shakespeare unmistakable echoes of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Dante, Montaigne, and other famous thinkers. In one chapter, the author makes a convincing case that one of the bard's most famous comic characters, John Falstaff, is a parody of Socrates. In other chapters, he demonstrates indirect references to Plato in Shakespearean passages concerning appearance versus reality, as well as the influence of Aristotle's ethics. Other common philosophical themes evident in the plays concern the nature of time, subjectivity versus objectivity, and political and moral values. (shrink)

This article discusses the use of some Tacitean key terms and techniques by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon in his History of the Rebellion, on the English Civil War, and in his autobiographical account of his times, the Life. Tacitism is a broad term denoting sceptical and secular historical and political ideas, inspired by the works of Cornelius Tacitus. English Tacitism dates back to the last decades of the sixteenth century and gained special importance during the reign of Charles I, (...) when it became a recognisable element of political debate. Clarendon had been connected with one influential Tacitist group, i.e. Ben Jonson's circle. The paper explores the ways in which Clarendon used this intellectual background in presenting a conservative, royalist and idealistic worldview. I analyse the use of two Tacitean keywords connected with the discourse of reason of state, prudence and dissimulation, and their synonyms introduced by Clarendon, skilfulness, seasonableness, dexterity and uningenuity, and Clarendon's portrayal of Cromwell. Clarendon uses these terms and Tacitean narrative techniques precisely to present a religious and ‘counter-Tacitist’ vision of history, influenced by late-humanist ideas, but also demonstrating the importance and persuasive power of the Tacitean discourse in seventeenth-century England. (shrink)

Renaissance plays and poetry in England were saturated with the formal rhetorical twists that Latin education made familiar to audiences and readers. Yet a formally educated man like Ben Jonson was unable to make these ornaments come to life in his two classical Roman plays. Garry Wills, focusing his attention on _Julius Caesar_, here demonstrates how Shakespeare so wonderfully made these ancient devices vivid, giving his characters their own personal styles of Roman speech. In four chapters, devoted to four (...) of the play’s main characters, Wills shows how Caesar, Brutus, Antony, and Cassius each has his own take on the rhetorical ornaments that Elizabethans learned in school. Shakespeare also makes Rome present and animate by casting his troupe of experienced players to make their strengths shine through the historical facts that Plutarch supplied him with. The result is that the Rome English-speaking people carry about in their minds is the Rome that Shakespeare created for them. And that is even true, Wills affirms, for today’s classical scholars with access to the original Roman sources. (shrink)

David Lowenthal offers a serious treatment of the idea that Shakespeare was a serious thinker, indeed a philosopher who chose to develop his ideas in dramatic form. Readers accustomed to contemporary Shakespeare criticism may be puzzled by Lowenthal’s book. He makes no effort to historicize his discussion of Shakespeare and never invokes the unholy trinity of race, class, and gender in analyzing the plays. Compared to new historicist, feminist, Marxist, and deconstructionist critics of Shakespeare, Lowenthal may seem to be a (...) naive reader; he is looking for what he can read out of the plays, not what he can read into them. Grounding himself in the older tradition of Shakespeare criticism, from Ben Jonson to Samuel Johnson, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to A. C. Bradley, Lowenthal views the playwright as a source of genuine wisdom. He assumes that Shakespeare knew what he was doing and was fully in control of his dramatic material, shaping his plays into artistic wholes that allow him to raise fundamental questions about the human condition. (shrink)

In this first of the projected "Yale Ben Jonson" volumes, the editor philosophically interprets Volpone's character and the course of the play as a spiritual degeneration to brute matter; for man, according to the Great Chain of Being, may rise to the level of rationalism or sink like Volpone to the lowest level of materialism.--A. B.

This introduction argues for the value of projecting as a category of analysis, while exploring the contexts for its emergence and spread as a genre of intellectual and practical activity in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The emergence of the morally ambivalent figure of the “projector” in Elizabethan and Stuart England – initially in connection with confessional strife and attacks on corruption, and subsequently in relation to colonial expansion, experimental philosophy, and commercial and fiscal innovation – provoked defences of (...) projecting that articulated the relationship between private interest, individual effort, the public good, and collaborative ­scientific practice in new ways. German cameralists and French philosophes extended these arguments, while recuperating the figure of the projector, in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

Answers to the questions of what justifies conscientious objection in medicine in general and which specific objections should be respected have proven to be elusive. In this paper, I develop a new framework for conscientious objection in medicine that is based on the idea that conscience can express true moral claims. I draw on one of the historical roots, found in Adam Smith’s impartial spectator account, of the idea that an agent’s conscience can determine the correct moral norms, even if (...) the agent’s society has endorsed different norms. In particular, I argue that when a medical professional is reasoning from the standpoint of an impartial spectator, his or her claims of conscience are true, or at least approximate moral truth to the greatest degree possible for creatures like us, and should thus be respected. In addition to providing a justification for conscientious objection in medicine by appealing to the potential truth of the objection, the account advances the debate regarding the integrity and toleration justifications for conscientious objection, since the standard of the impartial spectator specifies the boundaries of legitimate appeals to moral integrity and toleration. The impartial spectator also provides a standpoint of shared deliberation and public reasons, from which a conscientious objector can make their case in terms that other people who adopt this standpoint can and should accept, thus offering a standard fitting to liberal democracies. (shrink)

Accoding to G.E. Moore, something''s intrinsic valuedepends solely on its intrinsic nature. Recently Thomas Hurka andShelly Kagan have argued, contra Moore, that something''s intrinsic valuemay depend on its extrinsic properties. Call this view the ConditionalView of intrinsic value. In this paper I demonstrate how a Mooreancan account for purported counterexamples given by Hurka and Kagan. I thenargue that certain organic unities pose difficulties for the ConditionalView.

In a situation in which several explanations compete, is the one that is better qua explanation also the one we should regard as the more likely to be true? Realists usually answer in the affirmative. They then go on to argue that since realism provides the best explanation for the success of science, realism can be inferred to. Nonrealists, on the other hand, answer the above question in the negative, thereby renouncing the inference to realism. In this paper I separate (...) the two issues. In the first section it is argued that a rationale can be provided for the inference to the best explanation; in the second, that this rationale cannot justify an inference to realism. The defence of the inference rests on the claim that our standards of explanatory power are subject to critical examination, which, in turn, should be informed by empirical considerations. By means of a comparison of the realist's explanation for the success of science with that of conventionalism and instrumentalism it is then shown that realism does not offer a superior explanation and should not, therefore, be inferred to. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Hud Hudson's compatibilistic interpretation of Kant's theory of free will, which is based on Davidson's anomalous monism. I sketch an alternative interpretation of my own, an incompatibilistic interpretation according to which agents qua noumena are responsible for the particular causal laws which determine the actions of agents qua phenomena. Hudson's interpretation should be attractive to philosophers who value Kant's epistemology and ethics, but insist on a deflationary reading of things in themselves. It is in an (...) incompatibilist interpretation of Kant's theory of free will that a "positive" conception of noumena is at its most important. If a compatibilistic interpretation is acceptable, one might suppose that we can do without a "positive" conception of noumena throughout Kant's philosophy. I demonstrate, however, that there are central elements of Kant's theory of free will that cannot be accommodated within Hudson's interpretation. (shrink)

I argue against several extant views (Rolston, etc) about the value of endangered species. I argue that the best way to defend a non-anthropocentric view about the value of endangered species is to appeal to the intrinsic value of biological diversity.

A growing number of contributors to environmental philosophy are beginning to rethink the field’s mission and practice. Noting that the emphasis of protracted conceptual battles over axiology may not get us very far in solving environmental problems, many environmental ethicists have begun to advocate a more pragmatic, pluralistic, and policy-based approach in philosophical discussions abouthuman-nature relationships. In this paper, we argue for the legitimacy of this approach, stressing that public deliberation and debate over alternative environmental ethics is necessary for a (...) culture of democracy to be upheld in decision making and policy formulation. Then we argue for a democratically tempered environmental ethics that is grounded in a practical understanding of the character of moral claims regarding the natural world. We offer the results of an empirical study of environmental ethics held by the public to illustrate the diversity in their moral commitments to nature. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the implications of this ethical pluralism for policy discussions about the management of American public lands. (shrink)

This book explores the role of causal constraints in science, shifting our attention from causal relations between individual events--the focus of most philosophical treatments of causation--to a broad family of concepts and principles generating constraints on possible change. Yemima Ben-Menahem looks at determinism, locality, stability, symmetry principles, conservation laws, and the principle of least action-causal constraints that serve to distinguish events and processes that our best scientific theories mandate or allow from those they rule out. Ben-Menahem's approach reveals that causation (...) is just as relevant to explaining why certain events fail to occur as it is to explaining events that do occur. She investigates the conceptual differences between, and interrelations of, members of the causal family, thereby clarifying problems at the heart of the philosophy of science. Ben-Menahem argues that the distinction between determinism and stability is pertinent to the philosophy of history and the foundations of statistical mechanics, and that the interplay of determinism and locality is crucial for understanding quantum mechanics. Providing historical perspective, she traces the causal constraints of contemporary science to traditional intuitions about causation, and demonstrates how the teleological appearance of some constraints is explained away in current scientific theories such as quantum mechanics. (shrink)

By defining both depictive and linguistic representation as kinds of symbol system, Nelson Goodman attempts to undermine the platitude that, whereas linguistic representation is mediated by convention, depiction is mediated by resemblance. I argue that Goodman is right to draw a strong analogy between the two kinds of representation, but wrong to draw the counterintuitive conclusion that depiction is not mediated by resemblance.

David Benatar argues that creating someone always harms them. I argue that his master argument rests on a conceptual incoherence.

Abstract:This article sets out two central theses. Both theses primarily involve a fundamental criticism of current contractarian business ethics (CBE), but if these can be sustained, they also constitute two boundary conditions for any future contractarian theory of business ethics. The first, which I label the self-discipline thesis, claims that current CBE would gain considerably in focus if more attention were paid to the logic of the social contract argument. By this I mean the aims set by the theorist and (...) method of reasoning by which normative conclusions are drawn in the contract model. The second, to which I refer as the domain-specificity thesis, argues that current CBE needs to be better adapted to its field of application and the specific goals which it aims to establish. I will substantiate these two theses on the basis of a comparative analysis of CBE with two earlier families of social contract theories. (shrink)

This paper criticizes Kripke’s and Putnam’s theory of the semantics of natural kind terms (KPT) and develops an alternative theory. It first examines description theories of natural kind terms, to see what their flaws are and what can be preserved of them. It then presents the KPT and makes three main criticisms. These rely on the meaning of elementary particles’ names, on reactions to the absence of a common essential nature, and on applications of old terms to new cases. Lastly, (...) it develops a theory that takes noun phrases to be plural referring expressions, and shows how that theory meets the objections to the KPT. (shrink)

Millianism and Fregeanism agree that a sentence that contains a name expresses a structured proposition but disagree about whether that proposition contains the object that the name refers to (Millianism) or rather a mode of presentation of that object (Fregeanism). Various problems – about simple sentences, propositional‐attitude ascriptions, and sentences that contain empty names – beset each view. To solve these problems, Millianism can appeal to modes of presentation, and Fregeanism can appeal to objects. But this raises a further problem: (...) namely, to explain why the proposition expressed by a sentence that contains a name matters in some cases but not in others. (shrink)

Educators continue to struggle with how masculinities are performed and regulated in spaces of learning. In a time of rapid social change, there is a renewed impetus for gender justice reform in schooling, though these approaches themselves remain a shifting picture. Adding a new layer of complexity, we are now witness to educational policy recommendations around surveillance which are designed to counteract boys’ and young men’s vulnerabilities to be radicalised into the misogynies of the ‘manosphere’. These recommendations exist despite limited (...) research and significant gaps in our understanding regarding both the manosphere as well as the emotional lives of young men. The article intentionally shifts the conversation from reactive surveillance in schools to educative gender justice approaches. We focus, in particular, on the significance of ‘pedagogic discomfort’ in terms of fostering gender transformative dialogue which is critical of ideas associated with the manosphere. We consider how a constructive dialogue might be fostered with a particular focus on pedagogies that recognise the emotional intensities of gender justice work. (shrink)