In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ovid’s Literary Loves: Influence and Innovation in the AmoresBetty Rose NagleBarbara Weiden Boyd. Ovid’s Literary Loves: Influence and Innovation in the Amores. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. xii 1 252 pp. Cloth, $39.50.The “literary love affair” (130) in the Amores is as much (or more) an affair conducted with literature as it is one represented in literature. Although Barbara Boyd never puts it that way, this (...) is the essence of her argument. In her reading, this three-book collection of amatory elegies is the narrative of Ovid’s early career as a poet. This novel use of the genre—for literary autobiography—is one of the ways in which Ovid expands its boundaries. In Ovid’s Literary Loves Boyd intends to help readers appreciate the originality of the Amores, in part by showing in it the beginnings of that interest in redefining generic boundaries which in the past decade we have come to recognize, through the work of Stephen Hinds and others, as a hallmark of Ovid’s whole corpus.In her introduction, “The Isolation of Ovid’s Amores,” Boyd digests and assesses the current opinion about Ovid’s collection. Its “literary isolation” has resulted from the combined effects of the “generic fallacy” and what she calls the “progressive fallacy.” The latter (her own coinage) is the critical position which holds either that “what comes first is worst” or that “what comes last is worst” (5); accordingly, the Amores are early Ovid and hence inferior, and Ovid is the last of the elegists and hence inferior. As an antidote to the “generic fallacy” Boyd proposes James Zetzel’s “challenge of generic freedom,” itself the latest variation of Kroll’s “Kreuzung der Gattungen.” [End Page 468]Chapter 1, “Reused Language: Genre and Influence in the Interpretation of the Amores,” takes its point of departure from a comparison of the two propemptica Am. 2.11 and Propertius 1.8a. Boyd sets out “both to simplify and to clarify a method for reading imitation in the Amores” (19), and in doing so she makes a substantial contribution to the typology of imitation in Latin literature as a whole. She does this by bringing together two unlikely bedfellows, integrating G. P. Goold’s ideas about Ovid’s “formulae” and “instinctive” versification with G. B. Conte’s concepts of “poetic memory” and poetic language as “reused language.” She also employs Conte’s distinction between “exemplary model” (verbatim imitation) and “code model” (the system of generic rules familiar beforehand) and Richard Thomas’s preference for the term “reference” instead of “imitation.” For her purposes she distinguishes (30–31) between a “parallel,” which may “simply be a common topos” (30) rather than an actual imitation; a “formula,” which may be “a very precise mark of a poetic tradition” (30) without making a specific reference; and a “reference,” which is likely to engage with a whole tradition rather than simply allude to a single source. Finally, she distinguishes (47) “external allusion” (to another poet) from “self-imitation,” which in turn is differentiated into “’internal reference’ proper” (to an earlier poem in the same collection) and “self-imitation” (“reference across works”). These latter may well be, as she claims, “two different, though related, phenomena” (47), but “self-imitation” is not relevant to Boyd’s own discussion until her last chapter. In posing the question “How do we recognize ‘imitation’?” she distinguishes between imitation of “form and theme” (33) and imitation of “content” (34), using the latter term rather idiosyncratically to include “precise features, such as style, diction, and metrical character” (34).Chapter 2, “Literary Means and Ends: Ovid’s Ludus Poeticus,” continues the treatment of imitation in considering Ovid’s practice of “multiple allusion” (67, 89), according to Boyd “an aspect of his style that is far too little recognized and understood” (67). The goal is to clarify how Ovid views his literary past and what meaning his sources have for his use of them—in brief, as she neatly summarizes, “to move beyond equating Ovid’s inspiration and purpose with Propertius and parody, respectively” (50). She shows how in creating Sulmo as a literary landscape (Am. 2.16... (shrink)

Scientists aim to remediate artifacts in their experimental datasets. However, the remediation of one artifact can result in another. Why might this happen, and what does this consequence tell us about how we should account for artifacts and their control? In this paper, I explore a case in functional neuroimaging where remediation appears to have caused this problem. I argue that remediation amounts to a change to an experimental arrangement. These changes need not be surgical, and the arrangement need (...) not satisfy the criterion of causal modularity. Thus, remediation can affect more than just the factor responsible for the artifact. However, if researchers can determine the consequences of their remediation, they can make adjustments that control for the present artifact as well as for previously controlled ones. Current philosophical accounts of artifacts and the factors responsible for them cannot adequately address this issue, as they do not account for what is needed for artifact remediation (and specifically correction). I support my argument by paralleling it with ongoing concerns regarding the transparency of complex computational systems, as near future remediation across the experimental life sciences will likely make greater use of AI tools to correct for artifacts. (shrink)

Many-minds arguments are flooding into legal theory. Such arguments claim that in some way or another, many heads are better than one; the genus includes many species, such as arguments about how legal and political institutions aggregate information, evolutionary analyses of those institutions, claims about the benefits of tradition as a source of law, and analyses of the virtues and vices of deliberation. This essay offers grounds for skepticism about many-minds arguments. I provide an intellectual (...) zoology of such arguments and suggest that they are of low utility for legal theory. Four general and recurring problems with many-minds arguments are as follows: (1) Whose minds?: The group or population whose minds are at issue is often equivocal or ill-defined. (2) Many minds, worse minds: The quality of minds is not independent of their number; rather, number endogenously influences quality, often for the worse. More minds can be systematically worse than fewer because of selection effects, incentives for epistemic free-riding, and emotional and social influences. (3) Epistemic bottlenecks: In the legal system, the epistemic benefits of many minds are often diluted or eliminated because the structure of institutions funnels decisions through an individual decisionmaker, or a small group of decisionmakers, who occupy a kind of epistemic bottleneck or chokepoint. (4) Many minds vs. many minds: The insight that many heads can be better than one gets little purchase on the institutional comparisons that pervade legal theory, which are typically many-to-many comparisons rather than one-to-many. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of PhilosophyDavid EngelAndrea Wilson Nightingale. Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xiv + 222 pp. Cloth, $57.95.The old saw "Everybody's a comedian" has its counterpart in contemporary academia: "Everybody's a philosopher." Biologists. Psychologists. Linguists. Physicists. Anthropologists. Historians. Even jurists. Many scholars of comparative literature, English, and history can be heard describing what they (...) do, not as literary criticism or history, but as "philosophy." One may even wonder whether we need philosophy departments anymore. Philosophy's private domain has shrunk from what it was under Aristotle (just about every subject short of wagon repair) to its present emaciated condition: it can claim almost nothing for itself alone. The other disciplines have encroached upon it bit by bit. This book is a timely contribution to an important current issue: what is philosophy, [End Page 316] and what does it have to offer? Nightingale argues that Plato faced similar questions. Rhetoricians, tragedians, and comedians all peddled what they had to say as wise (sophon), while dismissing other claims and pursuits as foolishness or worse. Against them and their respective discourses Plato proposed a new candidate: philosophia.Prior to Plato, philosophia meant just "intellectual cultivation." According to Nightingale, it was Plato who made it into a full-blown discipline--or, as she says, invented the discourse. As a way of privileging philosophia (in Plato's new sense of the word) above rival discourses, he parodied them. Nightingale's claims about the parody of other genres and Plato's privileging of philosophia are novel, insightful, and very persuasive. Perhaps it is overstatement to credit Plato with inventing philosophy, but that hardly diminishes the overall impression of this fine book's main arguments.Among Plato's contemporaries, the foremost challenger for the title "practitioner (and teacher) of sophia" was Isocrates. Nightingale uses his Antidosis to show that (1) Isocrates wanted to claim philosophia for himself, and (2) his version of philosophia was significantly different from Plato's. She concludes that the term was still a subject of genuine contention: its meaning mattered to both Plato and Isocrates. As Isocrates advocates rhetorike as philosophia, Plato argues that philosophy is both different from rhetoric and better than rhetoric. Rhetoric aims, ultimately, at public utility as the public perceives that utility, and rhetoric's value is gauged only by the political influence of those who practice it. Plato rejects that entire value system. At bottom it is also the value system of the other genres which, as Nightingale persuasively shows, Plato also parodies.Plato's "parody" (Nightingale's use of the word is broad, but unexceptionable) is "a device for defining and privileging his own pursuits" (59). Moving from rhetoric to tragedy, she considers Gorgias' echoes of Euripides' Antiope. Plato's parody of tragedy subtly criticizes tragedy qua discourse. The tragedian is "ignorant of truth... imitating appearances... gratifying the multitude... fostering the inferior part of the soul," that is, he is precisely what the philosopher is not (67). Socrates and Callicles evoke Euripidean characters: respectively, Amphion (who advocates a private life devoted to the liberal arts) and Zethus (who argues for a life of political activity) (69-70). Plato's unambiguous allusions to Antiope juxtapose not only Socrates and Callicles (and, through them, two irreconcilable views of what philosophy is) but also the tragic hero and the philosophical one (72-73). Plato's "life of the mind for its own sake" orientation wins, ultimately, in both comparisons. Furthermore, just as Amphion's arguments fail to persuade Zethus in Antiope but are eventually vindicated by Hermes' appearance at the play's conclusion, so too Socrates' arguments fail to convince Callicles, and Gorgias' concluding underworld myth parallels Antiope's deus ex machina: affirmation that the view which had been rejected (Amphion's and Socrates') was right, after all (87-88). [End Page 317]Nightingale then examines encomium. Publicly performed epitaphioi and their fictive counterparts (e.g., Menexenus) influenced one another, and the techniques of the encomium, although salient in that genre, occurred elsewhere, including deliberative and forensic situations. In her view, Plato's concern is not narrowly with encomium... (shrink)

In this paper I argue that we can learn much about wild justice and the evolutionary origins of social morality – behaving fairly – by studying social play behavior in group-living animals, and that interdisciplinary cooperation will help immensely. In our efforts to learn more about the evolution of morality we need to broaden our comparative research to include animals other than non-human primates. If one is a good Darwinian, it is premature to claim that only humans can be empathic (...) and moral beings. By asking the question What is it like to be another animal? we can discover rules of engagement that guide animals in their social encounters. When I study dogs, for example, I try to be a dogocentrist and practice dogomorphism. My major arguments center on the following big questions: Can animals be moral beings or do they merely act as if they are? What are the evolutionary roots of cooperation, fairness, trust, forgiveness, and morality? What do animals do when they engage in social play? How do animals negotiate agreements to cooperate, to forgive, to behave fairly, to develop trust? Can animals forgive? Why cooperate and play fairly? Why did play evolve as it has? Does being fair mean being more fit – do individual variations in play influence an individual''s reproductive fitness, are more virtuous individuals more fit than less virtuous individuals? What is the taxonomic distribution of cognitive skills and emotional capacities necessary for individuals to be able to behave fairly, to empathize, to behave morally? Can we use information about moral behavior in animals to help us understand ourselves? I conclude that there is strong selection for cooperative fair play in which individuals establish and maintain a social contract to play because there are mutual benefits when individuals adopt this strategy and group stability may be also be fostered. Numerous mechanisms have evolved to facilitate the initiation and maintenance of social play to keep others engaged, so that agreeing to play fairly and the resulting benefits of doing so can be readily achieved. I also claim that the ability to make accurate predictions about what an individual is likely to do in a given social situation is a useful litmus test for explaining what might be happening in an individual''s brain during social encounters, and that intentional or representational explanations are often important for making these predictions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NARRATIVE AND EXPLANATION: EXPLAINING ANNA KARENINA IN THE LIGHT OF ITS EPIGRAPH Marina Ludwigs University ofCalifornia, Irvine In this paper, I will be examining the relation of explanation to narrative, looking briefly at the theoretical side ofthe problematic and in more detail at specific explanatory issues that arise in Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina. Although the use itselfofthe term "explanation" is not as visible in the humanities as it is (...) in the sciences, the explanatory enterprise by other names is just as prominent. For indeed, an animating impetus behind textual interpretation is an explanation ofhowatextcan be brought into a correspondence with another text, while contemporary critical-theoretical activities of demystifying aesthetic and cultural assumptions, contextualizing historical knowledge, or laying bare ideological presuppositions are, in one way or another, engagements in the explanation ofthe workings of language. I approach humanistic explanation via a brief detour of scientific explanation, which constitutes an already established discourse with a set of defined issues and standard arguments, limiting myself to touching upon issues relevant to the narrativization of explanation. In scientific debates, explanation is defined as an answer to the question of "why?," in contradistinction to the question of "what?," which prompts a description of a phenomenon in question. Descriptive and explanatory conceptual frameworks, however, are interdependent. A physical description involves an "in-depth" understanding of underlying regularities. An explanatory answer to a question is, in its turn, an argument that logically deduces the explanandum (the description ofa phenomenon to be explained) from the explanans (well-understood regularities). This Marina Ludwigs125 formal definition of an explanation necessitates a symmetry between explanation and prediction, because the reconstructed logical sequence can also be read in the other direction, demonstrating the inevitability of what has occurred. Thus the sight of shattered glass and a baseball lying about allows me to explain the accident by invoking the law ofthe conservation ofmomentum and the low shock-resistance ofglass. But the knowledge of these regularities would have also allowed me to predict the same outcome had I seen the baseball flying in its direction ofthe window. The ontological status of "regularities" has elicited a lively debate in the scientific community pertaining to the problem ofthe "real." The standard view of regularities defines them as general laws (the kind we learn about in physics classes) that could be deductive or inductive, deterministic or statistical. A general law may be subsumed under another, even more general law, thus forming a unifying hierarchy of laws. A rival conception appeals to causal mechanisms and defines regularities as established chains oftemporal succession. Both models, the covering-law and the causal one, have been criticized: the former—for its failure to distinguish a law from an accidental generalization; the latter—for its resurrection ofthe metaphysical notion ofcausal influence and its inability to deal with probabilistic events. One of the later contenders is Nancy Cartwright's model, that proposes to conceive of regularities as so-called "nomological machines"—"fixed (enough) arrangements] ofcomponents, or factors, with stable (enough) capacities that in the right sort of stable (enough) environment will, with repeated operation, give rise to the kind of regular behavior that we represent in our scientific laws" (Cartwright 50). Cartwright claims that scientific models work on the ceteris paribus (everything else being equal) basis. That is to say they "hold only in circumscribed conditions or so long as no factors relevant to the effect besides those specified occur" (Cartwright 28), such as inside a battery, refrigerator, or a rocket—insofar as special shielding conditions are in effect (as a counterexample, imagine usingNewton's laws ofmechanics for describing the motion of a dropped crumpled dollar). Cartwright's explanatory framework is thus pragmatic and local, avoiding the twin pitfalls of the metaphysical assumptions underlying the two older models—the totalizing and unifying idea of a covering law, on the one hand, and the influence of causal "force," on the other. What is instead emphasized by her is a procedural aspect of scientific knowledge that has been historically prevalent and reflects the practical exigencies of human existence—the experience of dangers and natural obstacles to human 126Explaining 'Anna Karenina ' desires. When ill-defined impediments are analyzed and reduced to concrete difficulties, specific... (shrink)

First published in 1962. Kant’s philosophical works, and especially the _Critique of Pure Reason_, have had some influence on recent British philosophy. But the complexities of Kant’s arguments, and the unfamiliarity of his vocabulary, inhibit understanding of his point of view. In _Kant’s Theory of Knowledge _an attempt is made to relate Kant’s arguments in the _Critique of Pure Reason _to contemporary issues by expressing them in a more modern idiom. The selection of issues discussed is intended to (...) present a continuous argument, of an epistemological kind, which runs centrally through the _Critique_. The argument deals with essentially with the problems, raised in the Transcendental Analytic, about the status of categories. It deals with certain preliminary assumptions made in setting these problems, and discusses the way in which the various sections of the Analytic contribute to their solution. It also deals with Kant’s criticisms of traditional metaphysics, and ends with an account of his effort in the Third Antinomy to resolve the conflict between freedom and causality, and so to effect a transition of knowledge to moral philosophy. (shrink)

In this article, I present some worries about the possible impact of global efforts to aid the needy in some of the world’s most desperate regions. Among the worries I address are possible unintended negative consequences that may occur elsewhere in a society when aid agencies hire highly qualified local people to promote their agendas; the possibility that foreign interests and priorities may have undue influence on a country’s direction and priorities, negatively impacting local authority and autonomy; and the related (...) problem of outside interventions undermining the responsiveness of local and national governments to their citizens. -/- Another issue I discuss is the possibility that efforts to aid the needy may involve an Each-We Dilemma, in which case conflicts may arise between what is individually rational or moral, and what is collectively rational or moral. Unfortunately, it is possible that if each of us does what we have most reason to do, morally, in aiding the needy, we together will bring about an outcome which is worse, morally, in terms of its overall impact on the global needy. -/- The article ends by briefly noting a number of claims and arguments that I made in my 2017 Uehiro Lectures regarding how good people should respond in a world of need. As I have long argued, I have no doubt that those who are well off are open to serious moral criticism if they ignore the plight of the needy. Unfortunately, however, for a host of both empirical and philosophical reasons, what one should do in light of that truth is much more complex, and murky, than most people have realized. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 181 reason that it provides the best arguments available to date against nuclear deterrence, but ultimately the arguments fail because the author takes as an apodictic premise what is actually a prudential judgment that no nuclear weapons could ever be used in a moral and ethical way. Professor Kenny is not only an Absolutist, but also a Determinist. The present reviewers are neither. University of (...) Illinois-Urbana Champaign-Urbana, Illinois Public Affairs Officer ROBERT BARRY, O.P. MATTHEW M. MURPHY United States At·ms Control and Disarmament Agency Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. By UMBERTO Eco. Translated by Hugh Bredin. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986. Pp. 131. $12.95. This is not a new work. As Umberto Eco himself states in the Preface of this book, the text was written in 1958 and published in 1959 as a single chapter of a four volume handbook on the history of aesthetics, written by various authors (Momenti e problemi di storia dell' estetica, Milano, Marzorati, 1959, vol. 1: 'Dall'antichita classica al barocco, pp. 115-230). No doubt it was due to the recent popularity in Europe and America of Mr. Eco's novel, The Name of the Rose (which subsequently inspired the film of the same title) that Yale University Press saw fit to translate and reissue this seminal work of the author. He wrote it when he was 26 years old and serving in the Italian army. Hugh Bredin, a senior lecturer in scholastic philosophy at Queen's University, Belfast, has simplified in the translation what the author claims was the "tortured syntax" of his impressionable youth. Nevertheless, one suspects that the style and context of this slim volume will appeal primarily to philosophers and not art historians, despite its ubiquitous presence in art bookstores and museum giftshops. The scope of Mr. Eco's work enables the reader to gain an overview of aesthetic problems which developed in Europe in the period between the sixth to the :fifteenth centuries, when the classical tradition inherited by the medieval world no longer provided adequate solutions. A thousand years of artistic and philosophical history are barely penetrated in so few pages, but Mr. Eco forthrightly proceeds to catalogue ideas and thinkers in chapters devoted to such topics as Transcendental Beauty, Symbol and Allegory, and the Aesthetics of Proportion and Light. As 18~ BOOK REVIEWS was evident in The Name of the Rose, the author has an encyclopedic knowledge of both classical and medieval sources (he gently chides Maritain for his ignorance of one of Bonaventure's definitions of beauty, p. 24). As professor of semiotics his understanding of words and images is impressive (he takes a whole page to explain the visual applications of Vitruvius's use of the word euritmia, pp. 65-66). But after repeated eitings of relevant quotations from various medieval works-some in outright conflict with one another-the reader has no satisfying sense of what was the "medieval " view of art and beauty. Rather a mosaic of interesting and diverse facts emerges in the thematic structure of the book which cuts across chronological, geographical, and cultural boundaries. Thus, for instance, one learns in the chapter on the Aesthetics of Light that St. Augustine preferred equilateral to scalene triangles, Hugh of St. Victor considered green to be the most beautiful of colors, the Limbourg brothers in painting miniatures had no use for sfiirnatura just as Chretien de Troyes had no use for it in literature, and the Christian image of God as Light traced its pedigree to the Semitic Baal and the Egyptian Ra with heavy doses of Plato and Arab pantheism thrown in as contributing influences. This dizzying effect of so much intelligent trivia, forcibly pieced together in an effort to arrive at a persuasive conclusion, backfires and ultimately works ag:iinst Art and Beaiity in the Middle Ages in much the same way that the plot in The Name of the Rose suffered from a surfeit of scholastic argumentation. Mr. Eco, in an attempt to bedazzle his readers with facts, merely blinds them to the point. Other authors have written about art in the Middle Ages, and they were successful... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.3 (2003) 177-188 [Access article in PDF] Chaïm Perelman's "First Philosophies and Regressive Philosophy":Commentary and Translation David A. Frank Michelle K. Bolduc Chaïm Perelman's 1949 article, "First Philosophies and Regressive Philosophy," has remained unavailable to readers unable to read French. Our commentary and translation is intended to provide English readers access to the context, influences, and themes that make the article an extraordinarily important work in (...) the history of twentieth-century rhetoric. In this article, Perelman offers a powerful critique of first philosophies and anticipates the problems of radical postmodernity. "First Philosophies" remains a strikingly elegant attempt to foil what Foucault (1984, 41-42) has called the "Enlightenment blackmail of reason," the assumption held by logical positivists and radical skeptics that if reason does not yield absolute and eternal Enlightenment knowledge, there can be no knowledge.Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's New Rhetoric project avoids Enlightenment blackmail by charting a third way between logical positivism and radical relativism, and "First Philosophies" sets forth the project's philosophical blueprint. Commencing in 1947 and culminating in 1958 with the publication of Traité de l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca sought, discovered, and developed a philosophical system designed as a rapprochement between dialectic (reason and logic) and rhetoric (the art of adapting arguments to audiences). Historians of rhetoric judge the work a "grand revolution" (Meyer 1999, 259), believing it marks a rhetorical renaissance in Europe, and suggest nothing like it will appear for another 100 years after its publication (Johnstone 1971). The New Rhetoric project influenced Gadamer and a host of post-war European and American thinkers (Mootz 1998). Michael Leff calls the 1970 English translation of Traité a "bombshell" (1994, 510). Beyond its historical importance, Crosswhite suggests that the New Rhetoric project is "the single most important event in contemporary rhetorical theory" (1996, 35)and "First Philosophies" marks Perelman's turn from logical [End Page 177] positivism to rhetoric, offering prescient answers to the post-World War II crises of reason, and the ideas in the article provide the Traité'sphilosophical glue (see in particular the English translation, 62).Perelman joined many post-war theorists, including Horkheimer and Adorno (1972), in the resistance to the reign of a disembodied Enlightenment rationality. However, Perelman identified what Habermas (1987, 119) would later call the "performative contradiction" in the conclusion that radical skepticism was the only alternative to Enlightenment rationality. In "First Philosophies," Perelman responds directly to Sartre's 1943 Being and Nothingness (198; see translation below) by exposing the failure of radical skeptics to see that they had been held hostage by Enlightenment blackmail in accepting the Enlightenment criterion for truth, rejecting it, and then making skepticism an absolute. Indeed, "First Philosophies" navigates from this performative contradiction to chart a third way between Enlightenment rationality and radical skepticism with an approach that he labels regressive philosophy. Regressive philosophy, Perelman argues, provides the human community with a mode of philosophical reasoning located between the extremes of Enlightenment rationality and radical skepticism. In this space between extremes, Perelman identifies contingent truths and values dependent on a rhetorical mode of reasoning, one making moral judgments possible.To best understand "First Philosophies," we recognize the importance of historical context in the development of social theories of knowledge (see Delacampagne 1999; Kennedy 1999). The intellectual networks in which philosophers operate also influence the development of philosophical systems, as Randall Collins has aptly documented. In addition to historical context and intellectual networks, Frederick Beiser has recently noted: "[t] he best introduction to any philosophy is the biography of the person who created it" (1999, 5). He argues that textual analysis alone cannot illuminate the motivation or meaning of a philosophy. A sense of Perelman's biography and the cultural influences that gave rise to "First Philosophies" are necessary for a proper understanding of its themes. For Perelman, the primary intellectual exigencies of the post-war period were the interrelated crises of justice, philosophical reasoning, and responsibility to which "First Philosophies" is a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.3 (2003) 177-188 [Access article in PDF] Chaïm Perelman's "First Philosophies and Regressive Philosophy":Commentary and Translation David A. Frank Michelle K. Bolduc Chaïm Perelman's 1949 article, "First Philosophies and Regressive Philosophy," has remained unavailable to readers unable to read French. Our commentary and translation is intended to provide English readers access to the context, influences, and themes that make the article an extraordinarily important work in (...) the history of twentieth-century rhetoric. In this article, Perelman offers a powerful critique of first philosophies and anticipates the problems of radical postmodernity. "First Philosophies" remains a strikingly elegant attempt to foil what Foucault (1984, 41-42) has called the "Enlightenment blackmail of reason," the assumption held by logical positivists and radical skeptics that if reason does not yield absolute and eternal Enlightenment knowledge, there can be no knowledge.Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's New Rhetoric project avoids Enlightenment blackmail by charting a third way between logical positivism and radical relativism, and "First Philosophies" sets forth the project's philosophical blueprint. Commencing in 1947 and culminating in 1958 with the publication of Traité de l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca sought, discovered, and developed a philosophical system designed as a rapprochement between dialectic (reason and logic) and rhetoric (the art of adapting arguments to audiences). Historians of rhetoric judge the work a "grand revolution" (Meyer 1999, 259), believing it marks a rhetorical renaissance in Europe, and suggest nothing like it will appear for another 100 years after its publication (Johnstone 1971). The New Rhetoric project influenced Gadamer and a host of post-war European and American thinkers (Mootz 1998). Michael Leff calls the 1970 English translation of Traité a "bombshell" (1994, 510). Beyond its historical importance, Crosswhite suggests that the New Rhetoric project is "the single most important event in contemporary rhetorical theory" (1996, 35)and "First Philosophies" marks Perelman's turn from logical [End Page 177] positivism to rhetoric, offering prescient answers to the post-World War II crises of reason, and the ideas in the article provide the Traité'sphilosophical glue (see in particular the English translation, 62).Perelman joined many post-war theorists, including Horkheimer and Adorno (1972), in the resistance to the reign of a disembodied Enlightenment rationality. However, Perelman identified what Habermas (1987, 119) would later call the "performative contradiction" in the conclusion that radical skepticism was the only alternative to Enlightenment rationality. In "First Philosophies," Perelman responds directly to Sartre's 1943 Being and Nothingness (198; see translation below) by exposing the failure of radical skeptics to see that they had been held hostage by Enlightenment blackmail in accepting the Enlightenment criterion for truth, rejecting it, and then making skepticism an absolute. Indeed, "First Philosophies" navigates from this performative contradiction to chart a third way between Enlightenment rationality and radical skepticism with an approach that he labels regressive philosophy. Regressive philosophy, Perelman argues, provides the human community with a mode of philosophical reasoning located between the extremes of Enlightenment rationality and radical skepticism. In this space between extremes, Perelman identifies contingent truths and values dependent on a rhetorical mode of reasoning, one making moral judgments possible.To best understand "First Philosophies," we recognize the importance of historical context in the development of social theories of knowledge (see Delacampagne 1999; Kennedy 1999). The intellectual networks in which philosophers operate also influence the development of philosophical systems, as Randall Collins has aptly documented. In addition to historical context and intellectual networks, Frederick Beiser has recently noted: "[t] he best introduction to any philosophy is the biography of the person who created it" (1999, 5). He argues that textual analysis alone cannot illuminate the motivation or meaning of a philosophy. A sense of Perelman's biography and the cultural influences that gave rise to "First Philosophies" are necessary for a proper understanding of its themes. For Perelman, the primary intellectual exigencies of the post-war period were the interrelated crises of justice, philosophical reasoning, and responsibility to which "First Philosophies" is a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:192 HUME'S REFUTATION OF — WOLLASTON? Recently while rereading Book III of Hume's Treatise I was struck by an anomaly in the text that I had never noticed before. It consists in the juxtaposition of two arguments Hume offers regarding the source of the moral qualities of our actions. At first I dismissed Hume's arrangement of these arguments as being of little consequence — one of them (...) appears in a footnote — but the more I thought about the juxtaposition the more it intrigued and puzzled me. Expecting that it must have been noted by other readers I checked through the literature to find some discussion of it. Since after a long search I have failed to uncover anything, and believing the point, which relates to Hume's central view concerning morality, to be of some interest, I have decided to write this brief paper. Two passages from § 1, entitled "Moral Distinctions not deriv'd from Reason," of Part I, Book III, are involved. Hume begins the section by arguing that, because of the limited scope of its capacities, reason cannot distinguish between right and wrong or, as he puts it, between virtue and vice, and therefore that it is a mistake to speak of actions as being reasonable or unreasonable. Since Hume's views on this question are well-known and since they are not directly relevant to the point of my paper, I shall not pursue them further, but turn directly to the issue at hand. After having stated his argument at the beginning of § 1 and reached the conclusion that "actions may be laudable or blameable, but they cannot be reasonable or unreasonable," Hume turns to answer an objection that might be made against him by a rationalist ethicist. He writes: 193 But perhaps it may be said, that tho' no will or action can be immediately contradictory to reason, yet we may find such a contradiction in some of the attendants of the action, that is, in its causes or effects (T 459). Pursuing this objection, Hume first considers the causes of our actions. He acknowledges that we can be led astray in what we do in two ways; by making mistakes of fact, first, about the nature of some object we desire (e.g., thinking some fruit delicious when it really is not) and, second, about the means we should employ to gain the object (e.g., attempting to pluck the fruit when it is beyond our reach). Although these errors cause us to act in ways that may be termed unreasonable in a "figurative and improper way of speaking" (T 459), they cannot be the source of any immorality in what we do because they are committed involuntarily and innocently. A person who falls into such errors and acts on them is "more to be lamented than blam'd" (T 459). To conclude his answer to the rationalistic objection he has raised, Hume turns next to the issue of whether the immorality of our actions can be explained in terms of the unreasonableness of any of their effects. In a memorable passage he denies that the fact that false judgments are the effects of our actions can be the source of immorality in what we do. As to those judgments which are the effects of our actions, and which, when false, give occasion to pronounce the actions contrary to truth and reason; we may observe, that our actions never cause any judgment, either true or false, in ourselves, and that 'tis only on others they have such an influence. 'Tis certain, that an action, on many occasions, may give rise to false conclusions in others; and that a 194 person, who thro' a window sees any lewd behaviour of mine with my neighbour's wife, may be so simple as to imagine she is certainly my own. In this respect my action resembles somewhat a lye or falshood; only with this difference, which is material, that I perform not the action with any intention of giving rise to a false judgment in another, but merely to satisfy my lust and passion. It causes, however, a mistake and false judgment by accident; and the falshood... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy by John DeweyCharles A. HobbsJohn Dewey. Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012, 351 pp., index.John Dewey’s latest publication marks a watershed moment for scholarship in American philosophy, and, in addition to Dewey himself, we have editor Phillip Deen to thank for discovering it (among the Dewey papers in Special Collections at Morris Library of Southern Illinois (...) University) and editing it. We see Dewey late in life (early 1940s) engaged mainly in a critique of the modern, ancient, and (fragmentarily) medieval philosophical periods, which Dewey argues, are eras not nearly as distinct as traditional understanding admits. In the Introduction, Deen helpfully explains how we are now bequeathed incomplete but in most [End Page 122] cases quite robust chapter drafts that amount to another substantial work by Dewey. While published by Southern Illinois University Press, this volume is not itself part of The Collected Works of John Dewey. Still, the careful editing (of what are actually a number of manuscripts) is comparable in its excellence. There is also a well-done Index.The scope is twofold: retrospective and prospective. Chapters one through seven trace the development of so-called modern philosophy along with its central epistemological problem, with the aim being to demonstrate how thoroughly “unmodern” such philosophy has been. Then, chapters eight through fourteen constitute a genuinely modern approach that naturalistically and functionally undercuts the epistemic problem of subject/object and points to a revolution in the process of knowing.We turn to the retrospective, beginning in the first chapter with the acknowledgement that Dewey comes to philosophy itself as a kind of anthropologist, something we note as consistent with the influence of Franz Boas on Dewey (with whom Dewey was a colleague and intellectual ally at Columbia for about thirty-five years). This is further underscored by a lengthy quotation of anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski on the meaning of culture (p. 290). The ongoing history of philosophy is itself a cultural activity. Indeed, citing James, Dewey declares that “The sickliest way in which a student of philosophy can approach his subject-matter is that of a search for ultimate impersonal revelation of truth.” (p. 16) Rather, let the philosopher have the pragmatic attitude of openness “... to truth from whatever source it comes” (ibid).With that, Dewey once again turns to the Greeks, who initiated “The Discovery of Rational Discourse” (Ch. III) as underscored by the Socratic means of cooperative discourse, with the dialogues—not lectures—being evidence of the Athenian philosophical revolution in turning “from discussing nature and giving an account of it to the examination of the nature and procedure of discussion and report” (p. 38). Yet this project, despite its initial promise, failed for lack of a genuine logic of experimentation or inquiry. Then philosophy focused on going beyond the natural, beginning with the medieval “Search for Salvation” (Ch. IV, a significantly less developed and unified chapter draft). “Modern” philosophers then rightly replaced grand cosmic schemes with a focus on human nature (Ch. V), but they went too far with their introspective methods, gradually resulting in the same consequence supernaturalism had produced: a dualism of mind and nature, as if human nature is somehow not a part of nature. As we recall from Human Nature and Conduct (1922), human nature is not independent of but rather interdependent (or, using Dewey’s later term, transactional) with the rest of nature. The key is to avoid hypostatizing mind and better to talk of culture as nature. [End Page 123]With the Renaissance onward, humans have been “Wandering between Two Worlds” (Ch. VI), and endless arguments between “rationalists” and “empiricists” overlook what these camps share, namely a psychology assuming a fundamental split between subjective/objective and assumptions about certainty as founded upon various first principles or substances. The result is the stagnation of philosophy while science flourishes. Dewey cites Bertrand Russell as an example of continued insistence on such a priori principles (p. 106).We find ourselves in an epoch split between scientism and moral and religious fundamentalism, the result of a lingering tenacious investment in bad elements from ancient and medieval... (shrink)

In this paper I argue that aspects of Deweyan pragmatism can and should be reconstructed in light of work in biological systems research. One background assumption for my argument is that pragmatism has been fruitfully stimulated by concepts arising from biology, evolution in particular. Another is that while pragmatism tends to be focused on practical problem solving, words and ideas often shape, frame, and help select what might appear as workable solutions and even how problems themselves come to be (...) understood as problems. Dewey and others, of course, have had a lot to say about the influence of Darwinian evolution on the development of pragmatism in general and on Dewey's thought in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.2 (2002) 159-160 [Access article in PDF] The Nine Lives of the Dynamic Unconscious Jerome Kroll IN THEIR PROVOCATIVE ARTICLE "Dispensing with the Dynamic Unconscious," O'Brien and Jureidini offer two basic arguments against the existence or, more accurately, because we are dealing here with constructs, the plausibility, of the dynamic unconscious. First, they assert, in contradistinction to the psychoanalytic claim that evidence of a (...) cognitive unconscious supports the claim for a dynamic unconscious, that the notion of a cognitive unconscious is incompatible with that of a dynamic unconscious. Second, they argue on the grounds of parsimony that the phenomena explained by a dynamic unconscious can be better explained (accounted for) by other mechanisms.I would argue that neither of their contentions is correct. O'Brien and Jureidini have essentially taken data and evidence from cognitive science, issued a new vocabulary, and then asserted that their vocabulary is superior and constitutes better explanations for the phenomena and observations under question. They have failed to show any incompatibility between the two explanatory constructs. O'Brien and Jureidini agree with the basic Freudian tenet that most mental activity is unconscious, that is, out of consciousness, and that much of what is out of consciousness can be brought into consciousness with proper cueing. No problem so far.The problem with the dynamic unconscious, as O'Brien and Jureidini see it, is that the cognitive unconscious is modular, best described as a series of subpersonal systems akin to a set of narrowly focused computational specialists, whereas the dynamic unconscious contains fully formed repressed memories. What O'Brien and Jureidini have now given us are multiple homunculi rather than just one CEO or executive homunculus. How literally do we want to take these subpersons? Are subpersonal mental states more satisfactory scientifically than personal-level mental states? Second, O'Brien and Jureidini unfairly attribute to the psychoanalytic position the claim that the dynamic unconscious "is presumed to contain fully formed repressed memories." With the compelling evidence from psychology and neuroscience that all memory is a reconstruction, I do not think that any contemporary psychodynamicist makes a case for fully formed repressed memories, nor is this notion essential to a theory of a dynamic unconscious. O'Brien and Jureidini invoke Occam's razor by invoking a straw horse argument. Their description of the action of subpersonal parts doing sufficient specific cuing sounds suspiciously like the work done in the dynamic unconscious. In the next section, an emotional response is described as pushing images out of mind before they can be reported on (assumedly, before they become conscious). What is doing the pushing here? Upon what principles or priorities are images pushed out of mind?The authors explain that mental "representations are inaccessible to consciousness by virtue [End Page 159] of architectural constraints rather than the operation of a repressive force." But architectural constraints sounds like another way of describing neural facilitation and inhibition. Certainly most neural activity, perhaps all, involves facilitation and inhibition of signals at multiple synapses. Repression is just a psychological construct to describe what the processes of facilitation and inhibition bring about in terms of meaningful mental activity. While we are on the topic of choice of words, the repeated description of the dynamic unconscious as subterranean is an inflammatory locution designed to rally opposition to the notion. The cognitive unconscious is equally subterranean.To look further into the supposed superiority of explanation via the cognitive unconscious, we see that O'Brien and Jureidini attribute the following processes to the cognitive unconscious: evaluation, decision making, editing out, filling in, reconstruction, and reconfiguration. But what are the bases of these processes? What guides or influences the way ideas, images, and emotions are reconstructed and reconfigured? It does not appear to be done randomly. When the reconstructive narrative becomes "significantly distorted" because the memory to be retrieved is fraught with distress, what accounts for the shape of the distortion and what (dare we say who?) recognizes that a memory is about to be distressing? We may all be unhappy with the notion of a dynamic unconscious... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:184 THE ECONOMIC THOUGHT OF DAVID HUME David Hume's views on economics are expressed in his Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, Part II (1752). He was a contemporary of Adam Smith and read Smith's The Wealth of Nations shortly before his death. Some commentators have suggested that Hume exercised some influence over Smith's views on economics; others are not so sure. Hume's commentators over the last 200 years have (...) emphasized his theory of knowledge, doctrine of causality and belief, theory of morals and historical writing. His views on economics have been relatively neglected. The purpose of this essay is to summarize and clarify Hume's views on economics. Commerce and Trade Hume's essay "Of Commerce" is an extension of his view of property rights. Just as government should not impair property rights, it should not impair commerce, which is the freedom to contract between consenting parties. But Hume was not a 'pure' advocate of laissez-faire. He supported the infant industry argument: A tax on German linen encourages home manufacturers, and thereby multiplies our people and industry. A tax on brandy encreases the sale of rum, and supports our southern colonies. The bulk of workers are employed either in argiculture or manufacturing. In the more primitive societies, almost everyone is employed in agriculture (husbandry), and as agricultural techniques are improved, the land becomes able to support more nonagricultural workers, including artisans and providers of luxuries as well as manufacturers. Some of these 185 surplus (i.e., nonagricultural or manufacturing) workers are sometimes appropriated by the sovereign for use in the army or navy (OC 256), which prevents them from producing luxury goods and services, and leads to a different kind of state than would exist if their labor were not so appropriated. Increases in industry, the arts and trade generally increase both the power of the sovereign and the happiness of the people (OC 260). Trade is something that is mutually beneficial -- both parties gain. Hume spends a great deal of time refuting the idea that one nation's gain is another's trade loss. Thus, trade is a win-win rather than a win-lose situation, as some modern-day mercantilists (such as Thurow fThe Zero Sum Gamel and Batra G The Great Crash of 1989l)would have us believe. Hume views everything in the world as purchased by labor, and sees labor as being caused by people's passions (OC 261). In modern language, one could say that wealth is produced either from physical or mental labor, and that it is individual incentive that causes the human action to begin in the first place. Of course, this view overlooks the fact that labor does not exist in a vacuum, but is mixed with land and perhaps capital (which can be seen as the result of accumulated labor). Exchange occurs when producers of a commodity produce more than they can consume. At that point, they trade their surplus for other goods and services (OC 261). In peacetime, the farmers' surplus goes toward the acquisition of manufactures or the cultivation of the liberal arts. In war, the surplus can go toward the support of an army or navy. The state becomes more powerful as it can produce increasingly beyond subsistence, what Hume refers to as employment beyond mere necessities (OC 186 262). But rather than encouraging the increase in state power by force, such increase is best accomplished by allowing individuals to produce as much as they want, which they will do automatically in the absence of coercion, and then appropriate part of the surplus: It is a violent method, and in most cases impracticable, to oblige the labourer to toil, in order to raise from the land more than what subsists himself and family. Furnish him with manufactures and commodities, and he will do it himself. Afterwards you will find it easy to seize some part of his superfluous labour, and employ it in the public service, without giving him his wonted return. Being accustomed to industry, he will think this less grievous, than if, at once, you obliged him to an argumentation of labour without any reward. (OC 262) Countries that engage in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Jack W. Meiland INTERPRETATION AS A COGNITIVE DISCIPLINE Interpretation is the fundamental method of the humanities. The humanist is concerned first to understand what a text, a speech, a work of art, means; and interpretation has this understanding as its goal. All of the other activities and aims of the humanist depend on interpretation. One cannot properly appreciate a work of art until one grasps what it means. Nor (...) can one appropriately evaluate it until this condition is met. Moreover, the importance of interpretation reaches far beyond the humanities into everyday life, where we interpret what we hear and read in order to grasp meanings. Its importance reaches into the sciences: the social sciences where one must interpret this individual behavior and that institutional practice, and the natural sciences where one must interpret the results of one's experiments. Because interpretation is of such fundamental and pervasive importance in our lives, it is urgent for us to understand what interpretation is and what it should aim at. In this article, I investigate the activity of interpretation by focusing on the interpretation of literary texts and by beginning with the views of E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Eleven years ago, Hirsch published Validity in Interpretation, a book which delves into the nature of interpretation in great detail.1 Richard Palmer has said that Hirsch's book is "the first full-dress treatise in general hermeneutics written in English," and continues, "In the years to come, it will undoubtedly take its place among the significant American works on the theory of interpretation. In a systematic and carefully argued presentation, the book challenges some of the most cherished assumptions that have guided literary interpretation for some four decades."2 1 think that Palmer's prediction has been fulfilled. Hirsch's book remains a decade later one of the very few systematic American works in this field,3 and it has been widely read, much used in university courses, and has significantly influenced thought on its subject. Validity in Interpretation presents a carefully worked-out position buttressed by philosophically-informed 23 24Philosophy and Literature and systematic argumentation in a way which reveals the fundamental questions at issue. Although there have been scattered criticisms of Hirsch's views,4 in my opinion there has not so far appeared the kind of searching critique which this book deserves in view of its attempt to deal with these issues so seriously and at such a fundamental level and in view of the influence which the book has had. The necessity for a critique is now reinforced by the recent publication of another book by Hirsch, The Aims of Interpretation, more than half of which is devoted to a further explication and defense of these same views.5 In undertaking to reply to Hirsch's position, I hope not only to cast doubt on that position but also, and mainly, to provide better foundations for the view which I hold. It is one of the great merits of Hirsch's work that it facilitates that constructive effort by attacking the issues at such a basic level, enabling us to come to grips with them immediately. In what follows, I will describe Hirsch's view, make clear what kind of position he holds, and defend his view against criticisms which I consider misguided. Then we will be in a position to assess his contentions and to defend an alternative theory. Hirsch's view is, briefly, that the interpretation of a literary work should aim at re-creating (or, as he sometimes puts it, "re-cognizing") the meaning which the author of that work intended the work to have. He opposes all views which ignore authorial meaning; views which hold that the meaning of a work may change through the ages, so that the work may have one meaning at one time and another meaning at another time; views which hold that the work may have meaning in virtue of its relation to the interpreter's interests, to the needs and problems of the interpreter's times or the spirit of his age, or in fact to anything except the author's intended meaning.6 The first point that must be... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reinhold Niebuhr’s Paradox: Paralysis, Violence, and Pragmatism by Daniel Malotky, and: Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics by Reinhold Niebuhr, and: An Interpretation of Christian Ethics by Reinhold NiebuhrDaniel A. MorrisReinhold Niebuhr’s Paradox: Paralysis, Violence, and Pragmatism By Daniel Malotky LANHAM, MD: LEXINGTON BOOKS, 2011. 124 PP. $52.50Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics By Reinhold Niebuhr, with a (...) foreword by Cornel West LOUISVILLE: WESTMINSTER JOHN KNOX PRESS, 2013 (ORIG. PUB. 1932) 320 PP. $30.00An Interpretation of Christian Ethics By Reinhold Niebuhr, with an introduction by Edmund N. Santurri LOUISVILLE: WESTMINSTER JOHN KNOX PRESS, 2013 (ORIG. PUB. 1935). 278 PP. $30.00Have we been passing through a revival of interest in Reinhold Niebuhr since Barack Obama reported to David Brooks in 2007 that Niebuhr “is one of my favorite philosophers”? Or did Niebuhr’s work never go out of style in the first place? Whether current publishing trends reflect a revival or the norm, these three books highlight Niebuhr’s enduring relevance. They also show that Niebuhr’s lasting influence has not made him immune to criticism. Perhaps most important, they demonstrate that his insights can speak productively to contemporary issues whose urgency he may not have recognized.The new editions of An Interpretation of Christian Ethics and Moral Man and Immoral Society from Westminster John Knox Press contain welcome contributions to scholarship on Niebuhr. Originally delivered as the 1934 Rauschenbusch Memorial Lectures at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, Interpretation was first published in 1935. A 1956 edition added a preface in which Niebuhr summarizes the text’s central claims and expresses a desire to revise many of his arguments. The new edition of Interpretation retains Niebuhr’s 1956 preface, and adds an introduction by Edmund N. Santurri, which precedes the preface. In his introduction, Santurri claims that this text “may well be Reinhold Niebuhr’s most important work in theological ethics,” despite Niebuhr’s confession of embarrassment in the preface (ix; italics in the original). For Santurri, Interpretation provides much-needed theological background for the ethical and political claims in Moral Man and Immoral Society. Moreover, Santurri holds [End Page 207] that the important features of Niebuhr’s mature theological anthropology were present in nascent form in Interpretation. Thus, the text’s lasting influence is clear: To understand the ethical and political insights in the other works in Niebuhr’s corpus, one must understand the developing theological anthropology presented in Interpretation.Having made this case for the text’s importance, Santurri devotes the bulk of his introduction to reviewing four arguments that critics level against Niebuhr. They are, briefly, feminist arguments against the portrayal of agape as self-sacrifice, just war arguments against the claim that the Gospels prescribe nonresistance, Anabaptist arguments against Constantinian Christianity (which Santurri traces to the differing soteriologies of Yoder and Niebuhr), and theological arguments that Niebuhr’s doctrine of God is incoherent. Santurri concludes that the first three critiques of Niebuhr ultimately fail for a variety of reasons, but suggests the fourth critique is valid. Even if he dismisses the first three arguments too easily, this is a clear, responsible, and thorough review of critical receptions of Niebuhr. The footnotes point the way to excellent resources, orienting readers to four important conversations in short order. Scholars and graduate students who study Niebuhr will benefit from this introduction, as will readers who desire a concise guide to critical receptions of Niebuhr’s work.Originally published in 1932, Moral Man and Immoral Society is more recognizable than Interpretation as one of Niebuhr’s landmark works. Perhaps for this reason, Westminster John Knox Press produced another edition of this text in 2002. That edition included an introduction by Langdon B. Gilkey, which appraised the influence of Moral Man in part by describing the fresh perspective it brought to American theological ethics in the early twentieth century. The 2013 edition of Moral Man retains Gilkey’s introduction (as well as a 1960 preface by Niebuhr), which is preceded by Cornel West’s new foreword to the book. In his brief foreword, West claims that this text “is not only... (shrink)

In the ethical debate on genetic modification, it is common to encounter the claim that some anti-GM argument would also apply an established, ethically accepted technology, and that the anti-GM argument is therefore unsuccessful. The paper discusses whether this argumentative strategy, the Similarity Argument, is sound. It presents a logically valid, generic form of the Similarity Argument and then shows that it is subject to three types of objection: It does not respect the difference between pro tanto reasons and all-things-considered (...) judgments; it relies on the unproblematic transferability of reasons from one case to another; and it runs the risk of equivocations, especially in cases where the anti-genetic-modification argument relies on gradable features. The paper then shows how these issues play out in three specific Similarity Arguments that can be found in the literature. Finally, the paper discusses what conclusions we can draw from the fact that genetic modification and established technologies are similar for the ethical status of genetic modification. (shrink)

In this book Larry Temkin examines the concepts of equality and inequality, and addresses one particular question in depth: how can we judge between different sorts of inequality? When is one inequality worse than another? Temkin shows that there are many different factors underlying and influencing our egalitarian judgments and that the notion of inequality is surprisingly complex. He looks at inequality as applied to individuals and to groups, and at the standard measures of inequality employed by economists (...) and others, and considers whether inequality matters more in a poor society than a rich one. The arguments of non-egalitarians are also examined. Temkin's book presents a new way of thinking about equality and inequality which challenges the assumptions of philosophers, welfare economists, and others concerned with these notions on a practical as well as a theoretical level. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Philosophy of Religion Metaphysics Epistemology Ethics Philosophy of Mind Science and Language How to Use This Book.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.3 (2000) v-vii [Access article in PDF] On Feminizing the Philosophy of Rhetoric Molly Meijer Wertheimer When asked to define his editorial policies in choosing articles to publish in Philosophy and Rhetoric, Henry W. Johnstone Jr. disavowed following any strict editorial guidelines; instead, he gave two examples to show how selection worked as a process. In one case, he agreed to publish an "off the wall (...) article" by a distinguished classicist; in another, he accepted an unusually long article--a "behemoth"--by an eminent rhetorician. These examples demonstrate what was to me one of Henry's most unusual and endearing traits as an editor and scholar: he was willing always to go wherever the argument led. It was probably in this spirit that he agreed to publish a special issue on "Feminizing the Philosophy of Rhetoric." I want to thank him posthumously for that decision. As "guest editor" of the issue, I feel privileged to present four well-written essays and two reviews that lead the readers of Philosophy and Rhetoric to consider some philosophical issues that emerge when we overlap concepts of "gender," "culture," and "rhetoric."The essays in this issue explore tactics women have used to get their messages across to others who would not--even could not--entertain speech seriously if presented by a woman. In the first essay, "Unveiling Esther as a Pragmatic Radical Rhetoric," Susan Zaeske reads the Book of Esther as a rhetorical manual of exile and empowerment. She traces features of the narrative that were useful as a model of rhetorical behavior early on, as well as appropriations that were made throughout the Middle Ages, Antebellum South, and even in our own day. Her essay emphasizes the riskiness to the speaker that is often entailed by the act of speaking, especially when the listener is "all-powerful" (199); when "his decisions are based not on careful deliberation, but on who influences him the most, usually by prodding his sense of power and manliness" (200). In the narrative, the speaker, Queen Esther, is depicted as utterly thoughtful, careful, well planned and well timed. She seems very much in control of an "indirect" rhetoric. Says Zaeske, "[T]he book teaches that direct, resistant rhetoric is ineffective, even dangerous, while clever, indirect, noncon- frontational methods will succeed in gaining the desired end--power" (202). [End Page v] This is a "conciliatory strategy wise women are forced to use in the patriarchal world" (qtd. on p. 202). And this kind of strategy is contrasted to the defiant rhetoric of Vashti, the former queen, Esther's predecessor, who was banished for saying no to one of the king's commands. Silence and supplication, according to Zaeske, when adopted self-consciously as strategies, are effective with hostile, neanderthal-type auditors. They are "radical," at least in the sense that they are "extreme."Nan Johnson, in her essay "Reigning in the Court of Silence: Women and Rhetorical Space in Postbellum America," furthers discussion of women's rhetorical options. In Zaeske's essay, women assume positions of supplicants or petitioners, or they stand defiant in the face of an oppressive listener (the king). The former are idolized; the latter are demonized. Centuries later, in the fifty years following the Civil War, similar representations of women appeared in conduct literature. Johnson describes a media blitz of ideas and images in etiquette and other self-help manuals that sought to define rhetorical behaviors and actions appropriate for men and women. Some of the writings idolized the "quiet woman" of the home, who reigned silently as queen stitching together via indirection a rhetoric of nurturance that moved beyond the home only through the actions of husbands and sons. This kind of rhetoric was viewed as a natural consequence of femininity. Other writings demonized the woman who spoke from the public platform as a teacher, preacher, and advocate, and who needed a rhetorical education to do so effectively. Many writings highlighted the negative consequences of rhetorical experience to women (who risked their femininity and the love of their families) and to their families (who risked the true source of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Justifying the Arts:Drama and Intercultural EducationMike Fleming (bio)IntroductionFor teachers of arts subjects, questions about justification can be tiresome in the same way that contemporary aestheticians may feel fatigue about defining art.1 Providing justification can feel more like an exercise in rhetoric than theoretical enquiry, induced more by political necessity than intellectual challenge. If the value of the arts is not self-evident, it is difficult to advance arguments to (...) convince those who have no knowledge or affinity with them. Not that many educationists admit to falling into the latter category. As Eisner has said, nobody wants to be seen as a philistine.2 Yet to those with a deep commitment to the value of the arts in education and wider society, the arts are rarely thought to be taken as seriously as they should be.3 This paper will describe five approaches to the question of justifying the arts before examining the specific case of drama and intercultural education.Approaches to Justifying the Teaching of the ArtsFaced with questions of justification, providing a list of reasons for teaching the arts is one approach but not the only one. Instead, looking for broader categories of justification within possible lists (e.g., between art and entertainment, feeling and cognition) exposes differences of emphasis more easily. Exploration of the tension between such concepts as "creating" and "responding" may help get behind bland claims of the kind that the arts can "develop creativity." In this way, the relevance of aesthetic theory, which often centers on the tension between competing concepts, can be demonstrated more readily. Another approach to the question of justification is to reject the idea that the arts should serve instrumental goals at all by advancing an argument in favor of their intrinsic rewards. A fourth approach is to [End Page 54] question whether it is appropriate to seek justification for the arts as a generic concept, rather than looking instead at individual art forms; the benefits of dance may be different in certain respects from those of visual arts. Finally, a priori enquiry could be abandoned altogether in favor of seeing what teachers actually say about their reasons for teaching the arts. Each of these positions will be examined briefly.Mortimer includes physical education and personal and social education among the areas of benefit he attributes to the arts.4 Within five broad categories, he describes further subcategories, amounting to more than seventeen reasons for teaching the arts. He also claims that the arts are a way of developing life skills and attitudes that are transferable across the curriculum and are a way of contextualizing other learning. It is easy to sympathize with someone who is passionate about the arts and concerned that they should be seen as a "fundamental" not as a "frill," but such general claims do not always bring clarity or insight. It is difficult for example to see how poetry "encourages physical confidence in balance." A visit to a children's home may be more fruitful in "developing sensitivity to others." The benefit of "using imagination and creativity" (a catchall phrase that on its own says very little) may in practice find tension with other stated benefits such as "discriminating, selecting, editing." The latter concepts suggest a more constrained, skills-oriented form of teaching rather than an approach that encourages free flow of imagination. Long lists of justifications can obscure theoretical differences and from a tactical point of view in the political arena can appear overblown. They are well meant but not always helpful. Nor do they go far in explaining the deep importance of the arts in so many people's lives.The influential Gulbenkian report in the United Kingdom was wide-ranging in its claims but reinforced the idea of the arts as being an alternative to academic study and what it termed "logico-deductive thought."5 "Society," it argued, "needs and values more than academic abilities." In the 1980s, many writers were keen to free themselves from the influence of narrow theories of self-expression to embrace a wider discipline-based approach but continued to underplay the cognitive dimensions of work in art.6 Of course an emphasis... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 218-219 [Access article in PDF] David Roochnik. Beautiful City: The Dialectical Character of Plato's Republic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. ix + 159. Cloth, $35.00. Plato makes no general assertions, certainly none about "universals" (108). The Republic does not advocate the creation of an ideal state (78, 93) but transcends utopias to acknowledge the merits of democracy and democratic diversity (...) (92). Nor does Plato hold the tripartite psychological theory associated with the Republic (18-20). Such theories are impossible for human souls with their essentially temporal natures (104). The Republic is a dialectical work (2). Its movement shows without Plato's saying it that diversity is a social good; that the psychological theory of Book 4 "is preserved in its partiality as a moment of the dialectical development of the dialogue" (3); and so on.David Roochnik belongs in the tradition of Leo Strauss, unearthing an odd and unknown Republic from beneath the dialogue familiar to hordes of readers (beginning with Aristotle) who evidently read it wrongly. Roochnik brings intelligence to his project, clear writing, and a mind inclined toward originality. Nevertheless Strauss's influence is everywhere. E.g.: The Republic is "a conversation that twists and turns, develops, and at times revises what was earlier said. In its totality it gives voice to the truth about the human soul" (131).Roochnik's main subject is that truth about the soul. He says that the Republic corrects Book 4's tripartite analysis with the temporally oriented psychology told in the anecdotes of Books 8 and 9. The wise reader respects both approaches. The soul is "erotic and therefore necessarily diverse, but... desires arithmetical simplicity," and both diversity and simplicity "must be included in an adequate psychology" (120). "Our souls are... suspended between... time and eternity, the divine and the beastly" (108). The erotic and the arithmetical serve as poles between which Plato navigates. Book 4 proposes a mathematical psychology, but Eros increasingly dominates the Republic and the rigid arithmetic designed to harness Eros fails. Book 4's arithmetical account of the soul is "inadequate, and... it is meant to be inadequate" (19). One should see the soul as arithmetical in one respect, irrepressibly erotic in another.Number plays a defining role in the Platonic city, too (38). Kallipolis battles Eros with an arithmetical ideal but loses (44-45). The failure of arithmetic amounts to the failure of utopia. The Republic "teaches that perfect justice is neither possible (the marriage number fails) nor desirable (we don't really want to exile everybody over ten)" (93). Notice: because "we"—Roochnik and his friends?—don't want to found a city among impressionable children, the Republic teaches that Kallipolis is not desirable.To similar effect: "if Kallipolis were to come into being, then the Republic could not. But since Kallipolis requires the Republic in order to come into being, it contains in itself the seeds of its dissolution" (69). Nonsense! Kallipolis needs the Republic in order to come into existence but not to remain existent. The dialogue's disappearance implies nothing about the city's dissolution.Straussians routinely deny that the Republic constructs its city. Though typical, Roochnik claims not to be (7 n. 4, 75). His reading "is not ironic": "the... revisions I have discussed take place on the surface of the dialogue itself, and the kinds of negations that follow are dialectical ones which... preserve what is negated in its partiality" (91).But garble about surfaces and dialectic will not rescue a hermeneutical method if one begins (Roochnik does, all Straussians do) by calling every flaw in a Platonic argument intentional. That Platonolatry is implausible in itself; it is methodologically shoddy for other reasons too. In the first place, it yields meager results. When every argumentative failure is intentional the Republic becomes platitudinous. Thus Roochnik's dialectical meaning is less memorable than the laziest reader's understanding of the Republic (Forms, cave, archons). He dismisses radical claims as unworthy of Plato but replaces them with the mealy... (shrink)

The emphasis that the modernity gives to disengagement and beginning leads one to think that the modernity itself is in fact a culture that initiares crisis. Even if there is no initial crisis, it can be created through the ambivalent nature of modernity. Behind the concept of crisis lies the notion that history is a continuous process or movement that opens the door to nihilistic understanding which stems from the idea of contemporary life and thought alienation through the pessimistic meaning (...) of the word. There is a dialectical relationship between the ideas of modernity and progress, and the decadence, and the main theme of Nietzsche's philosophical career. Since the death of Hegel, who made the idea of crisis plausible, everything is nothing but a counter-movement not only in Germany, but also in Europe. The first of these counter-movements is romanticism with its objection to the mind which is liberated from the bonds of tradition. The main thesis of the present article is, between reactiveness of romanticism -on the surface- and the modernity; from one side romanticism's consuming modernity, which is its mirror image, while at the same time feeding from it and modernity's manipulating the ideas developed against it and monopolizing them thanks to its ambivalent nature. For this purpose, following an an anti-enlightenment thinker Nietzsche's, anti-romantic footsteps which at the same time feeds from the romantic heritage, an attempt will be made to analyze the relationship between modernity and romanticism. Another goal of this article is to allow a comparison of how the intellectual development in the West finds its response on the modernization process of our country by probing how the modernization experience of early period Islamist's who experienced this process in a feeling of "backwardness" and with a wounded consciousness and anxiety has led to a shallow romantic worldview. SummaryRomance and romanticism are the main topics of this article. Romanticism is a period, whereas romance is a spiritual attitude not limited to this period, therefore, even today it’s existence is felt. In other words, it is not specific to the Germans. This term is often used to correspond to certain aspects of European intellectual life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for instance between 1790 and 1850. In its extremely diverse definitions, the most "romantic" definition in our opinion, belongs to Novalis: “I'm romanticizing by giving a high meaning to ordinary things, a mysterious reputation to the ordinary, the honor of the unknown to the known, an infinite look to the finite.” The rejection of existing social reality, the experience of loss, the melancholic longing and the search for loss are the main components of the romantic motive. This study is based on the argument that there is a dialectical relation between romanticism and modernity, which is known as an opposing movement against enlightenment thought. The intellectual feature, which contains the opposite of modernity itself, makes this argument plausible. In addition, the view of modernity as a crisis culture due to the emphasis on disengament and beginnings offers us the possibility to establish a relationship between modernity, which accepts itself as decadence, and romance. Behind the concept of crisis lies the idea that history is a continuous process or movement opening the door to the nihilist understanding in which modern life and thought are alienated in a pessimistic sense. Thus, Allan Megill defines historicism as a prerequisite for nihilism. According to the author, Prophets of Extremity, if the history has no direction to be changed, maintained or lost when wandering in history, it also cannot have a "crisis". The suggestion of "God is dead" is the most concise expression of this crisis. In this crisis state of nihilism, it is a completely forlorn condition of living in the present. Today, which is in the absolute forlorn state; the savior declares his belief that he is devoid of all sorts of features, things that let us reconcile with the current situation of things. In the face of this situation, when people see that the present becomes completely forlorn, they move in two opposite directions with a desire to regenerate culturally: They either have to go back to the past or head for the future. However, every attempt to determine what the future or the past posess will require them to be real, belonging to the present. This will return us to the forlorn state. Nietzsche embraces both opposing sides, but does not attempts choose between them. This is the place where Nietzsche dictates that today is corrupt taking a radical attitude against romanticism fed by the notion of crisis. The fact that modernity has given up its critique of reason, which is revealed by its dialectic, had a great influence on Nietzsche's putting distance between himself and romantics. That is to say, in response to enlightened thought, although romantics speak of unity, apparently, they could not prevent emergence of emotion against mind, local against the universal, individual against social, in other words, the emergence of the second values, which they believed that these were belittled and despised by Enlightenment. Therefore, romantics seem like they could not save themselves from being caught in the web of dialectics in the account they entered that is based on the subject-object distinction in cartesian thought. It is because modernity acts with the consciousness that the life is established on the occurrence and decadence. Based on this, we can say that decadence is inevitable. This decadence (distortion) from the outside may be through movements developed against it, or experienced within itself (even if no one attempts to destroy it). Modernity, with the awareness that it cannot escape from the decadence, wants to arbitrate itself by turning this decadence in its favor by manipulating it. In other words, the modernity dramatizes the feeling of crisis considering itself decadence and the seemingly contradictory ideas of avant-garde and decadence become almost synonymous. It must be the reason why Nietzsche identifies modernity with decadence Modernity manages to put the decadence in its body at the center of attraction by producing self-opposing movements, monopolizing and manipulating. In short, both romanticism and avant-garde movements are the movements that are emerged not against modernity but from itself. Just like an apple worm, they both consume modernity and feed on it. They act as a mirror. Although they seem to criticize, as movements that have emerged from it, they allow the modernity to complete and correct the deficiencies. As a result of this, we can say that romantic critical movements are developed against the world and are shaped by modernity, beginning with the idea of enlightenment, and moved forward in the track of modernity.While romanticism developed in the West as opposed to modernity, in Ottoman-Turkish thought, it was seen as the rhetoric of retardation and regretting of backwardness from civilization. It is inevitable that the experience of modernization in a sense of backwardness, with a wounded consciousness and urgency, will open up space for romance. In our modernization adventure starting with Tanzimat, it is a fact that there has not been a drastic reckoning due to Enlightenment on an intellectual basis, industrialization on an economic basis, programs of revolutionary and nationalist formations on a political basis. Therefore, in Turkish thought, it is not possible to talk about a critical tradition developed against modern paradigm. The status of being audience to what was being experienced in Europe, resulting from superiority was transformed into grudge due to the defeats in the military field. Due to the decadence experienced in the present, inability to find the solution to the problems of its age, melancholic state of mind because of being stuck in the golden age experienced in the past, in the case of a preference, led to a romantic world view because of the appeal of its simplicity to imitate what was once lived in the past. Thus, it is very natural that the direction of Namık Kemal, the cult personality of Islamist-Turkish thought, is towards the past even when talking about progress and civilization. Seeing the 19th century Europe as a re-implementation of ideas and institutions that are actually Islamic, Namık Kemal, in our opinion, showed us a clear example of a typical Islamist romanticism and an example of occidentalist approach regarding that the West learned the civilization from Muslims. In fact, the exact equivalent of this approach displayed in Turkish cogito without even knowing that it is romantic, emerging in the personality of Namık Kemal and in the feeling of backwardness,with a hectic and injured consciousness, is kitschization. So much so that, the state of being kitsch also explains the current situation of Islamic geography which is far from creating a tradition for at least a century, and it clearly tells the usual romantic end. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.3 (2002) 261-264 [Access article in PDF] Mind, Meaning, and the Brain Thomas Fuchs, MD, PhD Keywords: Mind, brain, meaning, translation, depression. A Systemic View of the Mind Progress in brain research over the past two decades demonstrates the power of the neurobiological paradigm. However, this progress is connected with a restricted field of vision typical of any scientific paradigm. The psychiatrist should be aware (...) of this restriction, because, unlike the brain scientist, he deals with patients, not with brains. The restricted view may be described by the terms of (1) reductionism, (2) reification, and (3) isolation.Reductionism: Neurobiology tends to regard subjectivity as a mere by-product of the brain's activity as a symbol-manipulating machine or an information processor. Consciousness becomes an epiphenomon of the neuronal machinery that, operating behind our back, creates the illusion of a continuous self and of an autonomous will (Churchland 1995; Roth 1996).Reification: Mental or subjective states seem to be localizable in the brain; thoughts or feelings, it appears, may be observed in the colored illumination of cortical and subcortical structures. This results in the belief that brain images could also show the cause of a mental illness, or even the illness itself, which then manifests, for instance, in a reduced metabolic activity in certain areas of the cortex.Isolation: As a further consequence, this view isolates the individual patient and considers his illness separated from the interconnections with his environment. However, on these interconnections his personal experiences and dispositions are founded, and it is the actual interpersonal situation that has triggered his present illness.Walter Glannon's paper successfully counters these tendencies toward a neurobiological reductionism with an extended view of the mind: "... the mind is not located in any one place but is distributed among the brain, the body, and the environment." Of course, who observes someone's brain will never see his thoughts, his pain, or his anxiety. For consciousness is not a localizable object or state at all but a process of relating to something: a perceiving of, remembering of, wishing for, aiming at, and so on. Thus on the phenomenological level, there is nothing like a "mental event" that could be isolated from the world and from the stream of conscious experiences. The mind exists only embedded in the world and in the temporal process of life.The same applies to the biological level: Consciousness is based on the continuous interaction of the brain with the organism, and of the organism as a whole with the environment. The role of the brain for mental phenomena is thus comparable to the role of the heart in the circulatory system or of the lung in the respiratory system. Of course, the lung is the central organ of breathing, but respiration may not be restricted to the [End Page 261] lung, nor to the organism as a whole. It means constant exchange with the environment, and there is no sense in asking whether the air taken in still belongs to the surroundings or already to the organism. The same systemic unity is found in the circle of perception and action mediated by the brain: When I am writing a letter, there is no place in the unity of action where my "self" ends and the "world" begins, no border that separates inner and outer worlds.There is another argument to be raised against the reification of the mind if we consider the aspect of a historical biology. From birth on, our mind as well as the correlated brain structures are essentially formed by social and cultural influences. The brain is not inserted into the world as a prefabricated apparatus but through its plastic development in and from the world. Thus it adapts epigenetically to its specific natural and social environment like a key to a lock. This complementarity makes it impossible to restrict one's view to the anatomic organ and requires an interdisciplinary approach to brain-environment investigation, as for example, under the heading of a "social cognitive neuroscience" (Ochsner and Lieberman 2001).As Glannon goes on to argue, to overcome... (shrink)

The research in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has nowadays extended its attention to the study of persuasive technologies. Following this line of research, in this paper we focus on websites and mobile applications in the e-commerce domain. In particular, we take them as an evident example of persuasive technologies. Starting from the hypothesis that there is a strong connection between logical fallacies, i.e., forms of reasoning which are logically invalid but psychologically persuasive, and some common persuasion strategies adopted within these (...) technological artifacts, we carried out a survey on a sample of 175 websites and 101 mobile applications. This survey was aimed at empirically evaluating the significance of this connection by detecting the use of persuasion techniques, based on logical fallacies, in existing websites and mobile apps. In addition, with the goal of assessing the effectiveness of different fallacy-based persuasion techniques, we performed an empirical evaluation where participants interacted with a persuasive (fallacy-based) and with a non-persuasive version of an e-commerce website. Our results show that fallacy-based persuasion strategies are extensively used in existing digital artifacts, and that they are actually effective in influencing users’ behavior, with strategies based on visual salience manipulation (accent fallacy) being both the most popular and the most effective ones. (shrink)

In spite of the title, the author of this book asserts that its primary aim is to offer a reasonable account of the concepts of possibility and potentiality. His analysis of these concepts allows him to approach the free will controversy in his own way and to offer many interesting analyses and arguments bearing on the issue. He distinguishes three kinds of non-logical possibility: epistemic or relative possibility, natural possibility or natural power, and possibility of choice or personal power. (...) He thinks that the arguments for determinism have been based in one way or another on a failure to notice the subtle differences which exist between these three kinds of non-logical possibility. Although there is room for doubt that his analysis adds up to a decisive refutation of determinism, he has found many interesting differences between kinds of possibility and potentiality which bear on the free will issue and other philosophical issues as well. There is a discernible influence of Ryle and Austin on the book although both of these philosophers come in for criticism, especially Ryle for his failure to carefully separate the different meanings of 'power', 'tendency', 'capacity', and similar terms, and for his general commitment to the notion that all power is conditional. This latter thesis is one of the author's main targets.--R. H. K. (shrink)

The paper provides a qualified defence of Bruce Waller’s deductivist schema for a priori analogical arguments in ethics and law. One crucial qualification is that the schema represents analogical arguments as complexes composed of one deductive inference but also of one non-deductive subargument. Another important qualification is that the schema is informed by normative assumptions regarding the conditions that an analogical argument must satisfy in order for it to count as an optimal instance of its kind. Waller’s (...) schema is defended from criticisms formulated by Trudy Govier, Marcello Guarini and Lilian Bermejo-Luque. (shrink)

Arguments for value incommensurability ultimately depend on a certain diagnosis of human motivation. Incommensurablists hold that each person's basic ends are not only irreducible but also incompatible with one another. It isn't merely that some goals can't, in fact, be jointly realized; values actually compete for influence. This account makes a mistake about the nature of human motivation. Each value underwrites a ceteris paribus evaluation. Such assessments are mutually compatible because the observation that there is something to be (...) said for an outcome from a particular perspective allows for any ultimate evaluation of that outcome; Values can be irreducible without thereby being incommensurable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric by David SansoneJon P. HeskDavid Sansone, Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. xi + 258 pp. Cloth $99.95.The central claim of this book is that the development of the art of rhetoric in fifth-century Greece was directly inspired by the revolutionary new genre of tragic drama. This entails a radical departure from what Sansone calls the (...) “standard view” of the origins of Greek rhetoric. As Ruth Scodel has recently and quite rightly pointed out, however, it would be more accurate to call it the “traditional view” (Scodel, Bryn Mawr Classcial Review 2013.06.16). The “standard” view of most of us is to be agnostic about the alleged Sicilian “origins” of rhetorical education and “handbooks” which we find in various ancient sources.Sansone’s thesis, while undoubtedly bold and original, is not completely unexpected. It was only a matter of time before the tragedians became “first inventors” of rhetoric given that some scholars now argue that Tisias and Corax probably did not even exist and that the output of Gorgias and Antiphon is best described as “pre-disciplinary” rather than an instantiation of the discipline of “rhetoric” itself. In other words, Sansone’s argument dovetails nicely with the long-held view, particularly associated with the work of Thomas Cole and Edward Schiappa, that proper rhetoric does not really exist before it is given its name (rhētorikē) in the fourth century.How could tragedy possibly beget rhetoric? Sansone’s answer is ingenious. Because drama presents embodied characters before the eyes of its audience, it is radically different from narrative forms such as epic poetry or lyric. In the latter format, only one character can speak at any one time. In tragedy, the audience also pays attention to the characters on stage who are present but not speaking. This focus on interlocutors’ simultaneous reactions as well as the speaker himself is dubbed “the counterpoint.” For Sansone, this innovation goes hand-in-hand with the fact that Greek texts nearly always describe the audience of narrative forms as “hearers” while the audience of drama are spectators or “viewers.” Sansone gives a good account of the way in which the tragedians can be felt to play with audience expectations through drama’s capacity to direct their focus towards silent or expressive reactions which are simultaneous with another character’s speech. He also writes well on the way in which tragedy entails the dimunition of a Muse-inspired authorial “poet’s voice” in favour of a plurality of characters’ viewpoints. The upshot here is that the playwright is required to compose speeches for characters who are often in a state of conflict, to use in interaction with one another, and before an audience in the theater. For Sansone, this fresh [End Page 155] dynamic is “sufficient to account for the self-conscious theorizing about forms of argumentation that is the essential feature of formal rhetoric” (x).It seems silly to deny some credence to this thesis. Sansone does not discuss the early tragedians’ possible interactions with other elite communicators beyond the thought that Gorgias and his predecessors may have had direct exposure to Aeschylus in Sicily. But one can imagine that politician-orators like Cimon, Themistocles, and Pericles or litigants and intellectuals who predated Antiphon were interested in, and influenced by, the tragedians’ discipline of writing arguments in the voice of a character, not to mention the related requirement to imagine what another character or internal audience of characters might say in reply. There must have been some early discussions in which these people talked about techniques of delivery, persuasion, and argumentation at some level of general principle, self-consciousness, and in relation to shared imperatives between their respective fields. As Sansone shows well, Aeschylus Suppliants 191–203 betrays some self-awareness of the playwright’s ethopoetic mission. This speech from Danaus can also be seen as a moment of quasi-rhetorical instruction.But there is an unassailable problem with the idea that tragedy’s basic formal properties and dynamics constituted the sole driving force behind the invention of rhetorical discourse. Aside from... (shrink)

One of Prof. Walzer's most fascinating contributions to the field of political theory is his introduction of the concept of `complex equality'.In Spheres of Justice, he defines this concept as follows: “In formal terms, complex equality means that no citizen's standing in one sphere or with regard to one social good can be undercut by his standing in some other sphere, with regard to some other good. Thus, citizen X may be chosen over citizen Y for political office, and then (...) the two of them will be unequal in the sphere of politics. But they will not be unequal generally so long as X's office gives him no advantage over Y in any other sphere – superior medical care, access to better schools for his children, entrepreneurial opportunities, and so on” .To achieve a situation of complex equality, Prof. Walzer proposes a system of blocked exchanges: it should be avoided that goods obtained in one sphere are exchanged to obtain goods in another sphere. For instance, the money person X has acquired in the economic sphere should not be used to `buy' power and influence in the political sphere.Prof. Walzer states that this system of complex equality will lead to a more egalitarian distribution of social goods. Maybe in each sphere distinct inequalities will persist, but given the plurality of spheres, eventually every person will acquire goods in one sphere or another. This line of reasoning reminds us to some extent of the traditional pluralist argument as it was formulated by Robert Dahl .Dahl asserts that in contemporary American society, no single group actually dominates political decision-making, since the power of even very influential groups is limited to a few policy arenas. Even underprivileged groups have enough access to proper channels to let their voice get heard in political decision-making. (shrink)

This paper has aimed to remedy a neglect of multi-party disputes by addressing how those involved in a two-party argument may collaborate with others who are co-present. Collaboration is a complex phenomenon. In the first place, we have seen that disputes, although initially produced by two parties, do not consist simply of two sides. Rather, given one party's displayed position, stance, or claim, another party can produce opposition by simply aligning against that position or by aligning with a counterposition. (...) This means that parties can dispute a particular position for different reasons and by different means. It is therefore possible for several parties to serially oppose another's claim without achieving collaboration. A second complexity, then, is just that collaboration is a negotiated phenomenon. For example, while it is possible for an outside party to produce an uninvited alignment display that is sympathetic to an already-stated position in a two-party dispute, the party whose position it supports can agree or disagree with that display. Thus, outsiders' uninvited alignment displays that occur subsequent to those of the insiders or principals in a two-party dispute must be considered as collaboration offers, which can be accepted or rejected. But that is not the end of it, for an outside party can offer alignments that now align with a principal party's position and then, addressing a different aspect of the principal's talk, align against it. Finally, in addition to being offered, collaboration can also be solicited. A principal in a two-party dispute solicits collaboration by inviting an outsider to display an alignment favorable to inviter's own position or to participate in a joint activity that supports that stance. Such solicits can be accepted, rejected, or, again, handled in such a way as to exhibit neutrality. Argumentative collaboration, in short, is a specific, momentary, and delicate state of affairs that is also an organized, technical achievement.The fact that the subjects for this study were children has become submerged in the formal analysis of alignment structures and collaboration. Thus, following this research, two directions can be pursued. One would be to ask how children's arguments differ from those occurring among adults. A reasoned answer would be that matters of substance or content may distinguish disputes among youthful persons from those occurring among older ones, while the forms of disputing remain relatively invariant (Maynard, 1985a, 1985b). In other words, by studying multi-party disputes among first-grade children, we learn about the structure of collaboration as a generic phenomenon among at least practitioners of standard English no matter what their age. This claim can be sustained in part because the analysis presented here depends upon deriving a priori conventional relations between utterances, rather than statistical relations between variables (Coulter, 1983). We have not examined exogenous influences — which would include the age characteristics of participants — on disputes, but rather the endogenously-produced structure of argumentative discourse. Still, the claim that patterns of collaboration are generic to children and adults can be examined with further research on multi-party disputes among different age groups.Another, more radical, research orientation, would be to consider, in any social arena where the members are identified as children, how it is that such a ‘membership category’ (Sacks, 1972) is relevant. If that query is made, then research on ‘children's arguments’ would involve investigating formal practices for exhibiting the accountable category ‘children’ as much as it would mean describing the ways that disputing is done. Those who have studied children's arguments, in Pollner's (1979) terms, have treated ‘children’ as a social fact, a ‘thing,’ rather than as a socially organized meaning, or ‘ing.’To attend to the -ing of things involves a radical modification of the attitude of daily life, for it requires attending to the processes of constitution in lieu of the product thus constituted (Pollner, 1979: 253, fn. 11).In short, we have treated arguments as the important event without also seeing how it is that the category ‘children’ is constituted as a recognizable feature of and within the research setting. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Scepticism in the Enlightenment ed. by Richard H. Popkin, Ezequiel de Olaso, Giorgio Tonelli, and: The Skeptical Tradition around 1800: Skepticism in Philosophy, Science, and Society ed. by Johan van der Zande, Richard H. PopkinHeiner F. KlemmeRichard H. Popkin, Ezequiel de Olaso and Giorgio Tonelli, editors. Scepticism in the Enlightenment. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. Pp. xiii + 192. Cloth, $99.00.Johan van der Zande and Richard H. Popkin, (...) editors. The Skeptical Tradition around 1800: Skepticism in Philosophy, Science, and Society. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998. Pp. xix + 462. Cloth, $150.00.Who could reasonably question the importance of skepticism for the philosophical achievements of the period known as the Enlightenment? Skepticism seems to be the most appropriate means for illuminating a philosophical landscape shrouded in fog. The relatively restrained metaphor of “Aufklären” was used first by German philosophers to describe their project of removing prejudice and obscurity. British philosophers instead used the concept of “improvement,” and in France, the endeavours of the philosophes were largely associated with a determined fight against the dogmatic teachings of an all-powerful church and for religious and political freedom. But not every philosopher who employed skeptical arguments or the method of skepticism was therefore a skeptic, or someone who intended to establish a form of skepticism. And [End Page 171] some who sought to provide philosophy with a firm anti-skeptical foundation found themselves being accused of being skeptics themselves. Berkeley’s dogmatic Immaterialism was accused immediately of leading right away to the most abstruse kind of skepticism ever heard of, and Kant’s critical philosophy was forbidden in Hessia because of its alleged skepticism. Furthermore, many philosophers were indebted to some form of skepticism while not being skeptics themselves. Thus Reid’s common-sense-philosophy owed as much to Hume’s skeptical philosophy as did J. G. Hamann and F. H. Jacobi.Modern skepticism goes back to ancient Academic and Pyrrhonian Skepticism, which many philosophers of the Enlightenment for one reason or another still considered as a live option. But exactly what kind of skepticism their own writings entail and to what extent they were influenced by more modern types of skepticism—like that to be found in the works of Montaigne, Bayle, and others—is not always easy to decide. In addition, skepticism was sometimes viewed as a kind of systematic philosophy and the skeptic was considered to be a specific kind of philosopher, different from a Platonist, Stoic, or Epicurean, as in Hume for instance. But the vast majority of philosophers used skeptical arguments as instruments, or as the first step in laying the foundation for a new philosophical system. Finally, there are many much more subtle traces of skepticism in Enlightenment thought, which cannot always be put together easily in a comprehensive picture. The many-sided history of skepticism in the eighteenth century is accordingly difficult to tell.Richard H. Popkin’s work has been decisive for a further investigation of eighteenth century skepticism. His early “Scepticism in the Enlightenment” (1963) was seminal. Popkin pointed out in this article Hume’s central position. Hume marked the beginning of an increasing debate about different and variable types and contents of Enlightenment skepticism. Scepticism in the Enlightenment contains articles by Popkin himself, as well as articles by the late Giorgio Tonelli, known to many as an expert in Kant’s precritical philosophy, and by the late Ezequiel de Olaso, which were directly or indirectly occasioned by Popkin’s work. Only two of the ten articles are new (de Olaso on “Scepticism Old and New,” and Popkin’s very useful contribution on “Berkeley in the History of Scepticism”). But Tonelli’s “Kant and the Ancient Skeptics,” which appeared in 1967 in German, appears here for the first time in English translation. Although Tonelli’s scholarly article is still of interest today, Hume’s influence on Kant’s thought in the middle of the 1760’s should not be underestimated. Tonelli also seems to be too sceptical about Kant’s first-hand knowledge of ancient skepticism. For instance, Johann Matthias Gesner’s Chrestomathia Graeca (Leipzig, 1731), the school book used in the Greek class Kant attended as a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy: Reading Tanabe Hajime and William Desmond by Takeshi MorisatoLance H. Gracy (bio)Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy: Reading Tanabe Hajime and William Desmond. By Takeshi Morisato. England: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. Pp. viii + 269. Hardcover $116.00, isbn 978-1-350-09251-8.Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy: Reading Tanabe Hajime and William Desmond by Takeshi Morisato is an informative and (...) insightful read on metaphysics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and relevant areas of interest. Morisato's stated objective in the introduction is (a) to investigate the possibility of comparative philosophy through William Desmond's metaxological way of thinking, and (b) to examine how the "absolute dialectic" in Tanabe Hajime's metanoesis can help us understand the relationship between one framework of thinking and another (p. 16). Morisato's book proceeds in five parts. Part One orients the reader to the scope of the project through an overview of comparative philosophy and its methodological frameworks--namely, the metaxological methodology of William Desmond, which deals importantly with the (modern) predicament of religion as expressed in the "transcendental univocity" of the Kantian system; and the metanoetic methodology of Tanabe Hajime, which deals importantly with the issue of "rational progress" in Hegelian dialectic. Yet each intellectual framework deals with both Kant's and Hegel's systems. Part Two addresses what the problem of religion in Kantian and Hegelian philosophy is in more detail. Part Three, "Metaxology and the Problems of the Philosophy of Religion," and Part Four, "Metanoetics and the Problems of the Philosophy of Religion," offer a more detailed account concerning how Desmond's and Tanabe's philosophies tackle conceptual problems in modern philosophy of religion. Morisato's conclusion follows from these along with an endnotes section, bibliography, and index.According to Morisato, overcoming the problem of comparative philosophy--i.e., the "philosophical problem of comparing two systems of thinking rooted in different cultural and intellectual contexts" (p. 22)--means, at least in part, clarifying the extent to which philosophers of different culturalintellectual contexts and backgrounds share, as "kindred spirits" or as "intellectual companions," a consonance of thought regarding their philosophical perspectives. Desmond and Tanabe represent just such a pair, whose consonance of thought, expressed by Morisato en passant and expressed more definitively in the conclusion, is unified in a struggle against hegemonic structures in the [End Page 1] philosophy of religion, specifically those of Kant's and Hegel's philosophies of religion. William Desmond (1951–present) is a Catholic philosopher who currently holds the David R. Cook Chair in Philosophy at Villanova University. He has worked extensively on metaphysics, ontology, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and German idealism. Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) was a Japanese philosopher of the Kyoto school and is perhaps most well-known for his Philosophy as Metanoetics. Morisato does a commendable job elucidating issues in modern systems of religion, which have undoubtedly been influenced by Kant's and Hegel's systems. As it concerns Kant, contemporary philosophy of religion still struggles with the claims of transcendental idealism, particularly its reduction of religious belief to mere postulates of practical reason. And as it concerns Hegel, what seems to be an unending, "progressive" self-return of dialectical monism has deeply influenced the way, and manner, in which religious adherents deal with societal views of the individual and individuals' views of society. By this token, Morisato's attempt to get beyond the so-called "extirpation" of the source of religious truth as the "creative power behind our understanding of reality and our existence" is refreshing, to say the least (p. 46). In what follows, I offer a relatively brief overview of Morisato's book and conclude with a reflection on the text.Morisato's critique of the Kantian and Hegelian systems begins with the argument that Kantian transcendental univocity implies that reason's autonomy, as dictates of the moral law as absolute duties, not only precedes divine legislation, but becomes one with it or else is reduced to it. In other words, for Kant, the rational-moral universal is divine law. However, reason's autonomy fails to comprehend the divine origination of finite particulars due to... (shrink)

[About the book]: This volume is a state-of-the-art survey of the psychology of reasoning, based around, and in tribute to, one of the field's most eminent figures: Jonathan St B.T. Evans.In this collection of cutting edge research, Evans' collaborators and colleagues review a wide range of important and developing areas of inquiry. These include biases in thinking, probabilistic and causal reasoning, people's use of 'if' sentences in arguments, the dual-process theory of thought, and the nature of human rationality. These (...) foundational issues are examined from various angles and finally integrated in a concluding panoramic chapter written by Evans himself.The eighteen chapters, all written by leading international researchers, combine state-of the-art research with investigation into the most fundamental questions surrounding human mental life, such as:What is the architecture of the human mind?Are humans rational, and what is the nature of this rationality?How do we think hypothetically? The Science of Reason offer s a unique combination of breadth, depth and integrative vision, making it an indispensable resource for researchers and students of human reason. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:20. HUME ON REASON1 One of the main concerns of Hume's Treatise of 2 Human Nature (T) is the investigation of the role that reason plays in belief and action. On the standard interpretation, Hume is taken to argue that neither our beliefs nor our actions are determined by reason; Books I and III are thus seen as sharing a common theme: the denigration of reason's role in human (...) affairs. Arguing for this view, Kemp Smith claims that "Hume's principle of the subordination of reason to the passions runs through his whole philosophy ", not merely through Books II and III. This interpretation of Hume's enterprise presupposes that the faculty of reason whose role in action is discussed in Book III is the same faculty which has been shown not to determine belief in Book I. In this paper I argue that a univocal reading of 'reason' and related terms like 'reasoning' throughout the Treatise has the consequence that there are major internal inconsistencies in Hume's philosophy, cannot account for some important sections of the work, and leads to misinterpretation of the nature of his overall argument. In its place I develop an interpretation which avoids these difficulties and emphasizes the radical nature of Hume's naturalism. The Argument of the Treatise Let me begin by reviewing the salient features of the main argument of the Treatise. In Book I, Hume is concerned to show that our most fundamental beliefs — e.g., about the continued and distinct existence of object, about what we are not presently observing, and in the existence of the self — are not acquired by reason, but instead by the imagination, influenced by custom and habit. In a typical passage, he argues: Reason can never shew us the connexion of one object with another, tho' aided by experience, and the observation of their constant conjunction in all past instances. When the mind, 21. therefore, passes from the idea or impression of one object to the idea or belief of another, it is not determin'd by reason... (T92)4 In Book III, and in Book II, Part III, Section III (Of the influencing motives of the will), Hume is concerned to show that reason alone can never produce any action, or give rise to volition (T414), and the same faculty is as incapable of preventing volition, or of disputing the preference with any passion or emotion (T414-415). Hume uses this result in Book III, Part I, Section I, to show that the rules of morality...are not conclusions of our reason (T457). Proponents of the univocal reading of 'reason' would hold that the Treatise thus constitutes a continuous attack on reason, showing that it causes neither our most fundamental beliefs nor our actions and moral judgments. But if this reading were correct, Hume would fail to avail himself of an obvious and persuasive argument for the conclusion he reaches in Books II and III, and in the latter books he would contradict the results of Book I. Conflict between Book I and Books II and III If Hume did have the same faculty in mind throughout the Treatise, a strong argument to show that reason does not cause action would be available to him in Books II and III, utilizing the results he has established in Book I. The principal way in which reason would be thought to influence action is by informing us of facts about efficient means to achieve our ends and about the possible effects of actions — facts about causal relations. Since the conclusion of Book I is that judgments about causal relations do not result from reason, it follows that even if such beliefs did cause action, it would still not be the case that reason caused action. But Hume not only does not make such an argument in Books II and III, he denies one of its premises — the claim that beliefs about causal relations do not result from reason — which was the main conclusion of Book I. In the 22. later books he asserts repeatedly that reason can cause beliefs about causal relations. For example, in Book III, he says:...reason, in a strict and philosophical... (shrink)

Thoughts and theoretical reflections about “governance” in Islamic society, whether theorizing about the desired structure of government or describing the characteristics of an ideal ruler, is one of the most important topics studied in the field of political thought and philosophy in Islam, to which great names such as Farabi, etc. are connected. In this context, this research, through a comparative approach, seeks to examine and analyze the views of Farabi and Sohrawardi about the ideal ruler from the perspective of (...) a judicial approach. Based on such an approach, a philosopher like Farabi considers the different ways of connecting to the active intellect as the separation of the theoretical intellect from matter and the connection to the active intellect, and a divine sage like Sohrawardi also speaks of the separation of the theoretical intellect and the separation of the power of imagination, which is manifested in a prophet. In the eyes of both thinkers, human reason has the ability to overcome material existence. This type of excellence is a condition for achieving complete metaphysical knowledge and theoretical perfection. The ultimate happiness is the achievement of the active intellect. “The Absolute First Leader” and “Quṭb (Imam or pole)” have both achieved this position. Introduction The ideal government and ruler, in the system of Islamic philosophy, are based on the approach of philosophers to wisdom and their opinions and ruling foundations. The philosophers’ approach to wisdom and intellect in the system of Islamic philosophy has changed and developed from Farabi to Sohrawardi and later. Based on this change in the method and approach to wisdom of the sages, philosophical issues and topics including the issue of government and the ideal ruler, have also undergone changes and transformations. Despite the significant evolution of Islamic philosophy in the two Peripatetic and Illuminative systems, it seems that the ideal ruler in Sohrawardi’s philosophy, which he refers to as “the pole/Imam (quṭb),” is compatible with the first leader of al-Farabi’s utopia. The problem of this research is to investigate the characteristic features of “Qutb” and “First Leader/Philosopher” in the Peripatetic and Illuminative systems of philosophy based on Sohrawardi and Farabi’s approach to wisdom and its types. “Qutb” in Sohrawardi’s thought In the wisdom of enlightenment, the perfect human being and the “Qutb” to whom the position of caliph belongs, is perfect in intuitive and argumentative wisdom, and in other words, he is both adept in reflection and adept in discussion. In Sohrawardi’s thought, the rulers must know wisdom as well be practical wayfarers, that is, they must possess a combination of theoretical and practical wisdom. On the one hand, Sohrawardi’s theory is influenced and consistent with Plato’s theory, both of which emphasize the “ruling sage,” and on the other hand, it is influenced by the Iranian tradition and the benefit of the ideal kings from wisdom and intellect, and “Khurra-yi Kiani”1 and the approval of God, which is in the interpretation Religious and close to Sufism and Shiism, it is interpreted as Qutb and divine sage. A Qutb or an Imam is one who is connected with the active intellect, receives grace from the higher realm, and spreads goodness, prosperity, knowledge, justice, and virtue among religions with a divine plan. “The First Leader” in Farabi’s thought The First Leader is someone who does not need the guidance of another human being; rather, all sciences and knowledge are obtained by him in esse and he is able to infer appropriate actions and behavior from general reasoning. He can also best guide others to perform these meritorious deeds; the same actions and actions that bring a person to happiness. These abilities are realized in people of great and outstanding nature by connecting to the active intellect. Such a person, in fact, in the eyes of the ancients, is a king and ruler and worthy of revelation. The rule of such a person is the first rule and his leadership is the first leadership, and the rule of others that is through his rule will be the subordinate rule, and people under the rule of this leader and leader are virtuous people, the chosen ones, and the fortunate ones. Conclusion In examining and comparing the two viewpoints, it should be said that a philosopher like Farabi considers the different ways of connecting to the active intellect to be the separation of the theoretical intellect from matter and the connection to the active intellect, and a Godly sage like Sohrawardi also speaks of the separation of the theoretical intellect and the power of imagination, which manifests itself in a prophet, where we witness detachment from matter and the ability to remove the soul from the body. In the eyes of both thinkers, human reason has the ability to overcome material existence. This type of excellence is a condition for achieving complete metaphysical knowledge and theoretical perfection. The ultimate happiness is the achievement of the active intellect.”First Leader”and “Qutb” have both achieved this position. Based on this, the complete transcendence of material existence is possible for certain people. (shrink)

1.1 ContextIn the period following the demise of logicism, formalism, and intuitionism, contributors to the philosophy of mathematics have been divided. On the one hand, there are those who tend to focus on such issues as: Do mathematical entities exist? If so, what type of entities are they and how do we know about them? If not, how can we account for the role that mathematics plays in our everyday and scientific lives? Contributors to this school—let us call it the (...) analytic school—do not, on the whole, concern themselves with careful analyses of important historical developments in mathematics. On the other hand, there are those who contribute to an historical school in the philosophy of mathematics. Contributors to this school tend to concern themselves almost exclusively with detailed historical analyses of important developments in mathematics. They are typically interested in answering questions concerning the growth of mathematical knowledge.In recent years, interest in the historical school has been growing, as has its influence on the analytic school. This book marks another stride in this direction. Oliveri aims to employ tools developed for use within the historical school to address one of the major issues investigated by the analytic school, i.e., whether we should be realists or anti-realists about mathematics. This is a laudable objective, since even a successful partial integration of these two schools would be valuable to contributors within both.1.2 Noteworthy ContributionsIn attempting a partial integration of these two schools, Oliveri makes several noteworthy contributions. The most significant is his development of a new type of argument for structural realism about mathematics. This argument exploits tools for theorizing about mathematics that were developed by Imre Lakatos [1978] in his work on scientific research programs . It focuses attention on the progressive mathematical research program that started with …. (shrink)

First published in 1962. Kant’s philosophical works, and especially the _Critique of Pure Reason_, have had some influence on recent British philosophy. But the complexities of Kant’s arguments, and the unfamiliarity of his vocabulary, inhibit understanding of his point of view. In _Kant’s Theory of Knowledge _an attempt is made to relate Kant’s arguments in the _Critique of Pure Reason _to contemporary issues by expressing them in a more modern idiom. The selection of issues discussed is intended to (...) present a continuous argument, of an epistemological kind, which runs centrally through the _Critique_. The argument deals with essentially with the problems, raised in the Transcendental Analytic, about the status of categories. It deals with certain preliminary assumptions made in setting these problems, and discusses the way in which the various sections of the Analytic contribute to their solution. It also deals with Kant’s criticisms of traditional metaphysics, and ends with an account of his effort in the Third Antinomy to resolve the conflict between freedom and causality, and so to effect a transition of knowledge to moral philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.3 (2003) 177-188 [Access article in PDF] Chaïm Perelman's "First Philosophies and Regressive Philosophy":Commentary and Translation David A. Frank Michelle K. Bolduc Chaïm Perelman's 1949 article, "First Philosophies and Regressive Philosophy," has remained unavailable to readers unable to read French. Our commentary and translation is intended to provide English readers access to the context, influences, and themes that make the article an extraordinarily important work in (...) the history of twentieth-century rhetoric. In this article, Perelman offers a powerful critique of first philosophies and anticipates the problems of radical postmodernity. "First Philosophies" remains a strikingly elegant attempt to foil what Foucault (1984, 41-42) has called the "Enlightenment blackmail of reason," the assumption held by logical positivists and radical skeptics that if reason does not yield absolute and eternal Enlightenment knowledge, there can be no knowledge.Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's New Rhetoric project avoids Enlightenment blackmail by charting a third way between logical positivism and radical relativism, and "First Philosophies" sets forth the project's philosophical blueprint. Commencing in 1947 and culminating in 1958 with the publication of Traité de l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca sought, discovered, and developed a philosophical system designed as a rapprochement between dialectic (reason and logic) and rhetoric (the art of adapting arguments to audiences). Historians of rhetoric judge the work a "grand revolution" (Meyer 1999, 259), believing it marks a rhetorical renaissance in Europe, and suggest nothing like it will appear for another 100 years after its publication (Johnstone 1971). The New Rhetoric project influenced Gadamer and a host of post-war European and American thinkers (Mootz 1998). Michael Leff calls the 1970 English translation of Traité a "bombshell" (1994, 510). Beyond its historical importance, Crosswhite suggests that the New Rhetoric project is "the single most important event in contemporary rhetorical theory" (1996, 35)and "First Philosophies" marks Perelman's turn from logical [End Page 177] positivism to rhetoric, offering prescient answers to the post-World War II crises of reason, and the ideas in the article provide the Traité'sphilosophical glue (see in particular the English translation, 62).Perelman joined many post-war theorists, including Horkheimer and Adorno (1972), in the resistance to the reign of a disembodied Enlightenment rationality. However, Perelman identified what Habermas (1987, 119) would later call the "performative contradiction" in the conclusion that radical skepticism was the only alternative to Enlightenment rationality. In "First Philosophies," Perelman responds directly to Sartre's 1943 Being and Nothingness (198; see translation below) by exposing the failure of radical skeptics to see that they had been held hostage by Enlightenment blackmail in accepting the Enlightenment criterion for truth, rejecting it, and then making skepticism an absolute. Indeed, "First Philosophies" navigates from this performative contradiction to chart a third way between Enlightenment rationality and radical skepticism with an approach that he labels regressive philosophy. Regressive philosophy, Perelman argues, provides the human community with a mode of philosophical reasoning located between the extremes of Enlightenment rationality and radical skepticism. In this space between extremes, Perelman identifies contingent truths and values dependent on a rhetorical mode of reasoning, one making moral judgments possible.To best understand "First Philosophies," we recognize the importance of historical context in the development of social theories of knowledge (see Delacampagne 1999; Kennedy 1999). The intellectual networks in which philosophers operate also influence the development of philosophical systems, as Randall Collins has aptly documented. In addition to historical context and intellectual networks, Frederick Beiser has recently noted: "[t] he best introduction to any philosophy is the biography of the person who created it" (1999, 5). He argues that textual analysis alone cannot illuminate the motivation or meaning of a philosophy. A sense of Perelman's biography and the cultural influences that gave rise to "First Philosophies" are necessary for a proper understanding of its themes. For Perelman, the primary intellectual exigencies of the post-war period were the interrelated crises of justice, philosophical reasoning, and responsibility to which "First Philosophies" is a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:92 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY is a great deal to blame for the wrongheaded views that got about in the ancient world concerning this gifted Alexandrian thinker; and in the whole business there is more than a hint of clash between Eastern and Western temperament. When, in dealing with modern critics of Origen, he roundly castigates the scholarly ghettoism that goes on, one is in complete sympathy. Kerr for instance (...) gets scolded for not quoting De Lubac. Lutheran scholars and Catholic, Germans perhaps and French, will tend to approach Origen with preformed conclusions. They have too often written within an exceedingly limited scholarly tradition. Fair enough. People have not any excuse for ignoring one another's contributions. Evidences of this sort of thing, with conspicuous faults on both sides (Lutheran and Catholic, that is) are not far to seek, God knows. One is not so happy however when the faint suggestion is made, particularly in the appendix, that it is only to students with the proper dispositions that Origen will yield up his message. That one must believe with Origen, so to speak. It may be the enthusiasm of the moment, or the undue influence of Origen's own attitude to holy writ; but this could be a disastrous line of argument. It comes perilously near to the reasons Julian the Apostate gave for excluding Christians from the Hellenist schools. And it smacks too much of Hellenistic ideas about doctrine for the multitude and for the initiate. Incidentally Crouzel argues that Origen, contrary to the accepted beliefs about him, was singularly free of this sort of thing. Some of his supposedly esoteric doctrines are found in the most popular of his compositions, and vice versa. In all it is a book calculated to set students of Origen thinking, and searching. DENIS MEEIIAN Valyermo Priory Duns Scotus, Philosophical Writings: A Selection. Edited and translated by Allan Wolter, O.F.M. (The Nelson Philosophical Texts; Edinburgh: Nelson, 1962. Pp. xxiii + 198. Latin text and translation, 162 parallel pages. SOs., $6.50.) Minor, sometimes indirect, causes have kept the name of John Duns Scotus in the minds of many philosophers of the twentieth century. The dependence of Gerard Manly Hopkins' notion of inscape on Duns Scotus' doctrine on intuitive cognition and individuation is a case in point. Another and more direct instance is that of the concurrence of some modern theories on free will with the exposition of Scotus. Those whose interest in Duns Scotus has been piqued by some allusion invariably ask the question, where can one get something in English by the man? The answer still is, the man has had quite a few expositors but not many translators. The latest of such expositions is Duns Scotus: The Basic Principles of His Philosophy, B. Bonansea's translation of an Italian work by E. Bettoni. The only complete work of Duns Scotus in English translation is his small opus presenting a demonstration of the existence of God: The De Primo Principio of John Duns Scotus, (St. Bonaventure, N. Y.: 1949), translated by Evan Roche, O.F.M. Allan Wolter is presently engaged in producing a new translation with more extensive notes, since the original translation is out of print. A small selection from Scotus' Oxford Commentary is contained in Richard McKeon's Selections from Medieval Philosophers, Vol. II. The reason for the scarcity of translations has been the lack of a definitive edition of BOOK REVIEWS 93 Scotus's works. No one wanted to undertake an extensive translation from insufficiently edited texts, especially when a definitive text was thought to be imminent. A commission was appointed thirty-six years ago to do for John Duns Scotus what had been done so magnificently for his Franciscan predecessor, St. Bonaventure. The first definitive edition of the opera ornnia of a Scholastic in the period of Scholastic revival was published by Franciscan scholars at Quaracchi near Florence: the Opera Ornnia Sancti Bonaventurae (1882-1901) in nine volumes. The same scholars, under the leadership of E. Longpr~, O.F.M., turned their attention to the works of Scotus. The problems facing the commission were admittedly much greater. Manuscripts had to be gathered, authenticated, compared. Work went slowly... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Plea for PityRobert H. KimballIntroductionDoes the ability to feel pity toward the unfortunate represent one of humanity's better instincts, on par with the capacity for love, compassion, and forgiveness? Or is pity actually one of our morally baser emotions, like jealousy, envy, or hatred, because pity can include contempt for its object and an attitude of morally reprehensible superiority on the part of the pitier? Surprisingly, there is (...) little philosophical consensus on this issue, with informed opinion nearly equally divided. That the same emotion can elicit such contrary evaluations shows how elusive a clear understanding of pity can be.Furthermore, is there something wrong—either logically or morally—with attempting to arouse the emotion of pity in others when they do not already feel it themselves (or do not feel it as intensely as we want them to)? Should appeals to pity be rejected because any emotion is inimical to clear thinking or simply irrelevant to the justification of action? Or is there something particularly morally reprehensible about trying to manipulate another's emotions and actions specifically on the basis of pity? Alternatively, at least in some cases could an exhortation to pity be an acceptable, even desirable, aspect of moral education or an often-necessary reminder to care about the misfortunes of others and not just to pursue our own self-interests? Surprisingly, opinion (at least in the informal fallacy tradition) is remarkably unanimous about the undesirability of appealing to pity. But I think their reasons can be improved upon.Traditional analyses of appeal to pity do not seriously analyze the emotion being appealed to, and most treatments of pity as an emotion do not address its use in rhetorical manipulation. I claim that what is wrong with appeal to pity can be satisfactorily understood only if pity itself is adequately understood. I propose to proceed by combining these two questions: what is wrong with pity? and what is wrong with appeal to pity? [End Page 301]In answering the second question, the textbook tradition of informal fallacy analysis holds that when a speaker attempts to arouse pity in an audience in order to induce an action, this situation should be interpreted not under the rubric of nonlogical causal influence, manipulation, or rhetorical persuasion but rather as belonging to the domain of (informal) logic, and in particular as a failed attempt at argument in which a descriptive premise that A pities B does not entail the normative conclusion that B deserves A's help (or that A should help B). Thus in the informal fallacy tradition, experiencing the emotion of pity is never a valid justification for action.2 I believe this rigid reason/emotion distinction has little basis in our actual belief-forming and decision-making practices. Nor do I believe that emotion should be excluded from reasoning, since our emotions are often informative and are sometimes more reliable guides to action than argument.In Appeal to Pity, Douglas Walton (1997) presents a nuanced and considerably more subtle alternative to the textbook tradition, in which he evaluates epistemically the effect of the emotional state of pity on practical reasoning. Analyzing such cases as charitable appeals (e.g., for starving people and disaster victims, arguments for hardship exemptions from general rules, and alleged atrocities), he emphasizes especially the particularizing nature of pity and the way it overrides universal principles, especially of justice. Under Walton's epistemic evaluation of pity, it emerges as a reason-clouding emotion under certain conditions. Furthermore, he shows how the occurrence of pity is susceptible to manipulation; he emphasizes especially cases in which pity is not actually deserved or justified but is manipulatively made to seem so.But Walton looks at a very small slice of the landscape of pity and what might be problematic about it. So in order to evaluate pity fully—not just epistemically but also as a moral emotion and its role in a fully flourishing life—we need to expand our concept of pity. In fact, pity is a very difficult and complex emotion to analyze (Solomon 1993).Definition of "pity"In pitying someone, such as a homeless person, a starving child, or a mutilated... (shrink)

This volume is one of the most remarkable works in the history of economic thought. First published in 1893, its principal significance rests in its argument that economic theory, however technical or pragmatic, is necessarily formed by and derives its meaning from larger moral and philosophical systems and assumptions. Bonar traces the inexorable presence of this moral and philosophical element in a vast, though highly nuanced, survey of the economic aspect of major thinkers from Plato to Darwin and demonstrates how (...) modern economic thought, in turn, grew out of one or another branch of philosophy. Bonar begins with a consideration of Plato and Aristotle, examining their conceptions of wealth, production and distribution, and civil society. Discussions of the Stoics, Epicurians, and early Christianity explore complications introduced by these bodies of thought. His analysis of the classical and medieval world is followed by an extensive treatment of the concept of natural law, from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, describing its influence and its relation to ideas of natural rights. The book's later sections concentrate on the dominant modes of ninteenth-cen-tury thought: utilitarianism, idealism, and materialism. Bonar identifies and explores the philosophical topics on which the conduct of technical economic analysis makes assumptions: human nature and human wants, the nature and role of the state, the relation of the individual to society, the nature and origin of property, and the role of ideals in socioeconomic life. He concludes by examining the implications for economics of the theory of evolution arising from the work of Darwin and others. The continuing interest of this volume for economists, philosophers, and sociologists lies in Bonar's contention that at the heart of the relationship of philosophy to economics is the problem of order: the ongoing need to reconcile conflicts between freedom and control, continuity and change, hierarchy and equality. In his reading, the fundamental question to which philosophy and economics are both brought to bear is that of changing the structure of power and opportunity in the social economy. This is, in short, a classic in the history of economics as well as the economic element in intellectual history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Indian Philosophy: A Very Short IntroductionHeeraman TiwariIndian Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. By Sue Hamilton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. 168.In recent years there has been a renewed interest in classical Indian philosophy; it cannot be a coincidence that at least three short books on the subject were written for the lay reader between the year 2000 and 2002, and all published by Oxford University Press: one (...) by the famous Indian philosopher J. N. Mohanty, Classical Indian Philosophy, and another by a bright, young Indian philosopher Jonardon Ganeri, Philosophy in Classical India: The Proper Work of Reason. The third volume on the topic is the book under review, Sue Hamilton's Indian Philosophy, in Oxford University Press' "Very Short Introductions" series. While Mohanty and Ganeri are formidable Indian philosophers, Hamilton was originally trained as a scholar of Buddhist religion and developed an interest in the philosophical side of India much later in her career, when she began to give courses on Indian philosophy at Kings College, London.Hamilton opens her book by invoking India's past, which contains "a long, rich, and diverse tradition of philosophical thought," but hastens to remind us that the "role of philosophizing" in India is quite different from that of the West: India's is a philosophy of "personal destiny," "spiritual quest," and not a "professional intellectual pursuit." Hamilton echoes the Orientalists of the early twentieth century when she says that "what Westerners call religion and philosophy are combined in India": in other words, philosophy in India falls short of qualifying as an "academic discipline" (p. 1). Hamilton is probably right in pressing home the popular Western misconception [End Page 482] about Indian philosophy that it is nothing but a "mystical," "magical" tradition of the East, where some "poor" Indians masqueraded as philosophers by elucidating their theory of the universe in "stories about an elephant supporting the earth and a tortoise supporting the elephant."1 Although the renowned modern Indian philosopher B. K. Matilal has tried to remove such misconceptions in one of his pioneering works, the tradition still remains.2 Matilal was not only responding to the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke (who, incidentally, had not read any text on Indian philosophy but had only heard of the philosophy of ancient India) but was also commenting on the prejudices of some twentieth-century Western philosophers, in particular one sweeping generalization about "philosophy" by Anthony Flew.3Much water has flowed under the bridge since the time when such prejudices were warmly entertained, but the reluctance to pay due attention to rationality in Indian philosophy has not fully waned. It is a tribute to Indian philosophers like J. N. Mohanty and B. K. Matilal that Western philosophers have now begun to look at Indian philosophy beyond its "mystic" and "magical" charm.4 In her postscript (p. 139), Hamilton applauds those modern Indian scholars (read: Mohanty, Matilal, and Ganeri) who, owing to "the influence of Western ways of doing things," have tried, with the help of the Naiyāyikas and the Buddhists, to overcome Western misconceptions—for example, that Indian thought is "anything but rational"—by "promoting Indian philosophy strictly in the sense of logical argument," and thus, only in the specific sense of logic and linguistic analysis, has it come to be recognized as an "academic discipline." One must applaud Hamilton, too, for her excellent effort in covering such a large number of topics in just thirty-five thousand words!The narrative of the book throughout suggests an attempt to contrast Indian philosophy with that of the West, and more often than not Western philosophy becomes a yardstick to evaluate "the role of philosophizing" in India in its "original" and "traditional" sense, that is, "religious" and "soteriological." Hamilton does acknowledge that, as in India so in the post-Greek West, too—at least until Immanuel Kant came on the scene—philosophers, namely Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, and Hegel, mainly sought "to understand more about 'God's world'" (pp. 5-6). But the difference between the philosophy of the Christian West and that of India was that while the former tried to understand "God's world" through "rational means" the latter... (shrink)

This article examines the development and critique of analogical arguments in the kalām tradition. There are two basic positions on analogical arguments: one holds that if analogical arguments yield certainty, then they are analyzable as deductive inferences, rendering the analogy itself redundant. Proponents of this view thus hold that if the analogy is useful at all, it will never yield the certainty demanded in the rational sciences; another holds that the analogy remains useful even when the (...) argument is deductively sound, either because the universal premise is epistemically dependent on the source case, or, because the source case is useful in dialectical contexts. The exploration of these themes will center around Juwaynī’s formalization and subsequent critique of analogical arguments in the kalām tradition. (shrink)

Many epistemologists are interested in offering a positive account of how it is that many of our common sense beliefs enjoy one or another positive epistemological status (e.g., how they are warranted, justified, reasonable, or what have you). A number of philosophers, under the influence of Wittgenstein and/or J. L. Austin, have argued that this enterprise is misconceived. The most effective version of this argument is to be found in Mark Kaplan’s paper “Epistemology on Holiday”. After explaining what this (...) criticism amounts to and why it is important, I then respond to it. My response is based upon, and is intended to display the explanatory power of, a contractarian account of our practice of epistemic appraisal. (shrink)

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash ABSTRACT The coverage of healthcare costs allegedly brought about by people’s own earlier health-adverse behaviors is certainly a matter of justice. However, this raises the following questions: justice for whom? Is it right to take people’s past behaviors into account in determining their access to healthcare? If so, how do we go about taking those behaviors into account? These bioethical questions become even more complex when we consider them in the context of (...) a commitment to publicly funded, universal healthcare coverage. INTRODUCTION Healthcare coverage of lifestyle-related conditions is certainly a matter of justice. However, this raises the following justice-related question: Is it right to consider people’s past behaviors in determining their access to healthcare? If so, the methods of taking those behaviors into account must be fair and justifiable. This bioethical question becomes even more complex when we consider it in the context of a commitment to publicly funded, universal healthcare coverage. This paper takes an old, classic debate, evaluates newer approaches, and offers an argument favoring a combined approach which alters the liberal-egalitarian solution to account for social justice. ANALYSIS l. Causes of Disease If healthcare coverage were universal, irrespective of socioeconomic status and lifestyle, people would contribute to the cost of remedying the lifestyle-induced health problems of others. In the West, lifestyle-related diseases are burdensome.[1] This paper approaches this concern from a western lens that incorporates both a European tradition of “social safety nets” and an American tradition of personal freedoms. By taking such an approach, solutions to the consequences of one’s past behavior burdening others must consider an individual’s personal freedom to choose to act as he or she wishes, with the distributive social and economic equality of the many. The concept of disease caused by lifestyle and diet is proven. Many health conditions include behavioral risk factors. Multi-pack smoking increases the risk of chronic lung disease, while obesity increases the risk of type 2 diabetes. Inattention to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and a lack of exercise leads to increased risks of coronary artery disease.[2] While poor lifestyle choices certainly influence these conditions, their causes are multifactorial, and it is difficult to say that any single string of poor choices led to their development. In a scenario where two men excessively eat fast food for 20 years, several discrete factors impact whether any of them might suffer an ischemic-embolic stroke or not. Genetics, circumstances, and activity will also contribute to outcomes. ll. Alcohol-Related End-Stage Liver Disease One paper suggests that alcohol-related end-stage liver disease (ARESLD) differs from other multifactorial disorders as alcohol alone causes the disease.[3] It justifies attributing personal responsibility to patients with ARESLD because the condition develops only after the cumulative effects of large quantities of alcohol consumed from years to decades.[4] However, the paper undermines its position by admitting that even the susceptibility to becoming an alcoholic has some degree of genetic predisposition.[5] Given the extreme scarcity of donor livers, some patients may be prioritized over others on the transplant waiting list. Since donor livers cannot be given to everyone, transplanting a liver into an alcoholic may result in death for competing candidates whose liver disease was not their fault. All else being equal, if bioethicists avoid claiming moral deficiency or judgment, those with apparently self-inflicted ARESLD will not be deprived of treatment but will have a lower priority for transplant.[6] In contrast, another position suggests that it is often difficult to define what behaviors are punishable as these are largely personal and value-laden.[7] Still, people do not support using their own resources to support the consequences of others’ poor choices, no matter how objective.[8] In democratic societies, one must take into consideration community morals and values.[9] Even if we were to punish people for their health-adverse behaviors, we could not logistically employ the vigorous and sustained efforts necessary to determine whose actions are morally weak.[10] lll. The Liberal-Egalitarian Proposal One past argument proposes a liberal-egalitarian solution to manage personal responsibility for so-called “lifestyle diseases.”[11] This Rawlsian system combines the European-style “social safety net” commitment to social and economic equality with the American liberal notion of pluralist toleration and personal freedoms. This idealized system aims to hold people responsible for their choices rather than the consequences to mitigate the downside of blaming those who might not be blameworthy. The approach avoids determining the questionable nature of luck and personal responsibility for health outcomes, fairness in the distribution of economic burden, and the intrusiveness required to practically determine who acts in a morally wrong and health-adverse way. The liberal-egalitarian model, a theory of distributive justice, has two facets: the liberal principle that people should be held accountable for their choices and the egalitarian principle that people who make the same choices should have the same outcomes.[12] This model attempts to fuse responsibility with equity by seeking to reward good behavior and tax bad behavior rather than punish the consequences of the action and navigate who deserves treatment. For instance, the hospital bedside is not the appropriate place to introduce responsibility for one’s health outcomes.[13] This appeals to the reality that, at that time, discerning the true causes of disease was not plausible and to humanity in avoiding a heartless and cruel approach. An argument in favor of the liberal-egalitarian model considers its method of implementation. This approach assumes that the healthcare system treats all individuals regardless of their choices or ability to cover costs. The liberal-egalitarian model also assumes that a certain adverse health condition is related, statistically speaking, to the consumption of a certain good and that good can be taxed. As such, it proposes to tax the consumption of that good to finance the collective burden which arises from that good’s consumption rather than require individuals to pay for their own treatment. In the example of ARESLD, the recommended solution would be taxing all alcohol. While a systematic infrastructure is not explicit, there is the implication that a per-unit tax can be imposed on alcohol so the total tax revenue would make up for the additional healthcare costs due to consumption.[14] Upholding the principle that all people who make the same choices should face the same costs, all consumers of alcohol would pay the same tax, regardless of factors such as genetic predisposition to alcoholism, lifestyle, or expected cost of treatment. Upholding the principle of individual responsibility, this model does not deny treatment to anyone, neutralizing factors outside that individual’s control by imposing the tax ex-ante. Other people are not burdened by those who consume the good. People who consume alcohol face a burden proportional to the amount consumed. This tax-based implementation is justified so long as the tax is not prohibitively high for the average consumer. Further, the model mitigates concerns over the intrusiveness of ascribing morality to health-adverse behaviors. lV. Moral and Social Arguments Against the Liberal-Egalitarian Position Arguments against the liberal-egalitarian model concerns its many assumptions. First, this model assumes that consumption of such goods is directly related to the health outcome and that these goods can be taxed.[15] Certain people genetically predisposed to alcoholism would be predisposed to consume more alcohol. The model falls short when applied to scenarios where health outcomes are not consumption-based, such as engaging in unsafe sex or abstaining from healthy lifestyle choices like exercise. Second, some might argue that the liberal-egalitarian model fails to remain neutral. Residual moral judgments tied to consumption choices introduce non-neutrality. Although taxation in free societies is determined by democratic procedures rather than by individuals in the healthcare system, moral and value-based judgments will be implicit in deciding what behaviors are taxable, such as the purchase of cigarettes. Third, the liberal-egalitarian model fails to determine whether one’s behavior is autonomous, as socio-cultural-economic factors may influence it and behavior is more a product of society, peer pressure, or income. Those also may reflect systemic inequalities. Therefore, this model, which rewards, or taxes based solely on decisions, regardless of their consequences and motivations, fails to consider that a person’s decisions may not be completely autonomous. V. Libertarian Arguments Against the Liberal-Egalitarian Model a. State Intrusiveness as Counter to the Liberal-Egalitarian Model Last, there is a libertarian worry that if the state guarantees universal healthcare coverage to all people, the state will have to become highly intrusive and investigate people’s morals.[16] At least one-third of all disease burden in North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific is attributable to lifestyle measures such as tobacco smoking, alcohol consumption, high cholesterol, and obesity.[17] With these various lifestyles, it is not likely to agree on what conduct to tax or condemn.[18] The fine-toothed comb required to determine whether each citizen has been engaging in these behaviors would intrude on daily life and personal freedom. Libertarians champion the argument that impractical intrusiveness would result from universal healthcare, and such a degree of intrusiveness would likely be universally unacceptable.[19] The liberal-egalitarian model mitigates the libertarian worry about state intrusiveness as it does not involve prying into one’s life and choices other than taxing goods. A liberal state should ideally be neutral to how people decide to live their lives. In all, libertarians can rest assured that the liberal-egalitarian tax-based model, through its ex-ante implementation, will require no prying state eyes. States that provide universal healthcare coverage and wish to condemn certain misconduct do not need to become overly intrusive to carry out measures to hold individuals accountable. b. Fairness Another libertarian worry regarding the guarantee of universal healthcare coverage in the context of lifestyle-driven diseases is that the public will be burdened unfairly with covering others’ ill-advised mistakes or bad luck. An ideal system to address this worry would link treatment or payment for treatment with whatever behavior caused that need.[20] The distribution of burdens should be linked to how different individuals contributed to the creation of those burdens. Applied to health policy, we should ask how the need for a certain treatment arose when determining how to distribute its cost.[21] The liberal-egalitarian model aspires to hold individuals responsible for their choices, not for the consequences of such choices. This model significantly mitigates the libertarian worry over unfair burdens for covering other people’s mistakes or social conditions, which lead to those bad outcomes, by ensuring to not burden others with any of the costs for the treatment of people who decide to engage in certain health-adverse behaviors. The aforementioned taxation-based system would only tax those who also engage in the health-adverse behavior through consumption, and that tax directly pays for the necessary collective treatment. As such, those who do not consume the good are not involved with the payment scheme, while those who do consume the good are responsible for payment in a matter proportional to the amount of the good they have consumed. Vl. Universal Coverage Taking a step back, one should consider whether these worries regarding the coverage of apparently self-inflicted health conditions in the context of universal healthcare are worthwhile issues. One perspective raises what is called the culturally imagined objection — an idea erroneously held by many that sick people, especially those who are poor and uneducated, bring these illnesses upon themselves due to poor decision-making and irresponsible risk-taking.[22] This perspective critiques the uniquely American view that, since individuals are free to choose their lifestyles, they should bear the costs of their lifestyle.[23] Taking this argument further, some (perhaps the strongly libertarian) would say that the poor health status among many individuals is the price individuals must pay for their American way of life and the liberty and freedom to live as they wish. However, people should not completely punish individuals for their health-adverse behaviors because these choices are largely pre-determined by a person’s socioeconomic influences.[24] The outcomes from these allegedly ill-advised behaviors, which largely affect poorer people, are not just poor behavior but rather a public health crisis. Perhaps the state and its people should take collective responsibility and cover the costs of treatment for those health outcomes without question, as a form of public service. Rather than worrying about accountability and taxing bad behavior or intrusiveness into personal decisions, some might argue that people need to collectively take responsibility for reducing the overarching systemic inequalities and covering the associated treatment costs as a measure of public health. Vll. Proposed Solution Given the strengths of the liberal-egalitarian model and taking into account libertarian and social justice-oriented objections, an ideal solution for the coverage of lifestyle-related health problems needs to consider the complex relationship between a person’s behaviors and their apparent health outcomes. It must consider how society as a whole passes judgment on behaviors and how to take into account that many health-adverse decisions are not truly autonomous decisions, as various genetic and socioeconomic factors influence them. An ideal solution combines the liberal-egalitarian tax-based model with the social justice concerns of universal coverage. Whatever the cost for the treatment of medical issues resulting in part or entirely from lifestyle and diet, taxes collected from spending associated with the behavior (like the purchase of alcohol, junk food, and cigarettes) ex-ante should fund 50 percent of the cost of treatment, while the universal healthcare taxation scheme should include the other 50 percent. Such a system would provide an incentive to avoid the purchases that can lead to unhealthy consumption and make healthier choices, slightly punish and discourage such purchases through taxation, yet not overly punish people whose outcomes may have more to do with socioeconomic factors and genetics. Adding public responsibility demonstrates acknowledgement that health care is in the public interest and can mitigate public health inequalities. This solution would fuse personal responsibility with the public responsibility of state-sponsored social improvement while ensuring that all people have fair access to necessary treatment, no matter their ability to pay. CONCLUSION The 50-50 system this paper proposes reflects both justice and personal responsibility in covering healthcare costs allegedly brought about by people’s own health-adverse behaviors. By allocating tax revenue from consumption that contributes or even alone causes poor health outcomes, such a system incorporates personal responsibility. By using general tax revenue for health care, such a system would meet the libertarian requirement of providing care without any moral investigation of past behaviors and the social justice consideration of providing health care to those who may have unwittingly ventured into ill-health due to systemic injustice, socioeconomics, or genetics. - [1] Cappelen, A. W. (2005). Responsibility in health care: A liberal egalitarian approach. Journal of Medical Ethics, 31(8), 476–480. https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.2004.010421 [2] Moss, A. H. (1991). Should alcoholics compete equally for liver transplantation? JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 265(10), 1295–1298. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1991.03460100097032 [3] Moss, p. 1295-1298. [4] Moss, p. 1296. [5] Moss, p. 1295-1298. [6] Moss, p. 1295-1298. [7] Cohen, C. IS THIS SUPPOSED TO BE COHEN AND BENJAMIN (1991). Alcoholics and liver transplantation. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 265(10), 1299–1301. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1991.03460100101033 [8] Cohen, p. 1299-1301. [9] Moss, p. 1297. [10] Cohen, p. 1300. [11] Cappelen, p. 478-480. [12] Cappalen, p. 478-480. [13] Cappelen, p.479. [14] Cappelen, p. 479. [15] Cappelen, p. 479 [16] Cohen, p. 1301. [17] Cappelen, p. 478. [18] Cohen, p. 1299-1301. [19] Cohen, p. 1301. [20] Cappelen, p. 476-480. [21] Cappelen, p. 476-480. [22] Kawachi, I. (2005). Why the United States is not number one in Health. Healthy, Wealthy, and Fair, 18–33. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195170665.003.0013 [23] Kawachi, p. 18-33. [24] Kawachi, p. 18-33. (shrink)