This chapter contains sections titled: Works cited.

David Hume is the greatest and also one of the most provocative philosophers to have written in the English language. No philosopher is more important for his careful, critical, and deeply perceptive examination of the grounds for belief in divine powers and for his sceptical accounts of the causes and consequences of religious belief, expressed most powerfully in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion. The Dialogues ask if belief in God (...) can be inferred from the nature of the universe or whether it is even consistent with what we know about the universe. The Natural History of Religion investigates the origins of belief, and follows its development from harmless polytheism to dogmatic monotheism. Together they constitute the most formidable attack upon the rationality of religious belief ever mounted by a philosopher. This edition also includes Section XI of The Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and a letter concerning the Dialogues, as well as particularly helpful critical apparatus and abstracts of the main texts, enabling the reader to locate or relocate key topics. (shrink)

How did the concept of Western liberalism, rooted in the notions of religious toleration and universal human rights, evolve into the "anything goes" moral relativism of our own late twentieth century society? This is the question at the heart of David Peterson's fascinating examination of the Positivist tradition, one of the most far-reaching philosophical movements of the past two centuries. The book begins prior to the official birth of Positivism with the rise of British Empiricism under (...) class='Hi'>David Hume and John Locke. From there, Peterson shifts focus to the writings of the French free thinker Auguste Comte, before moving on to the work of the late nineteenth century "Vienna Circle," and finally to the corpus of three seminal thinkers of the twentieth century: Bertrand Russell, Friedrich von Hayek, and Karl Popper. By weaving together contemporary social and political debates with their antecedents in modern intellectual history, Revoking the Moral Order not only brings to life seemingly arcane philosophical texts but also provides important context for contemporary issues that sometimes seem to be without precedent. This book will especially appeal to philosophers and historians and to the educated general reader seeking historical insight into the social and intellectual dilemmas of our time. (shrink)

Russell and Strawson sparked a well known debate on the subject of Linguistic Presupposition inspiring many linguists and philosophers to follow suit, including Frege, whose work initiated the modern study in this area. Beaver begins with the most comprehensive overview and critical discussion of this burgeoning field published to date. He then goes on to motivate and develop his own account based on a Dynamic Semantics. This account is a recent line of theoretical work in which the (...) Tarskian emphasis on truth conditions is questioned. The central plank of the theory of meaning is a formal account of the change in information effected by use of language on hearers or readers. The proposal thus consolidates ideas of Stalnaker, Karttunen and Heim, all of whom had suggested that such an account was needed. At the same time it provides a new impulse and motivation to Dynamic Semantics itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus’s “Outlines of Pyrrhonism.” by Benson MatesDavid K. GliddenBenson Mates. The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus’s “Outlines of Pyrrhonism.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. x + 335. Cloth, $55.00, Paper, $22.95.Benson Mates’s translation and commentary of Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism appears nearly half a century after Mates first began his pioneering work on Sextus and Hellenistic philosophy. This publication coincides with (...) another new translation of the Outlines by Annas and Barnes, who provide only an abbreviated commentary (Cambridge University Press, 1994). After decades when the only available English translation was by Bury from the Loeb, there are now choices available which allow Sextus to be taught to different sorts of English readers.In comparing the two translations, this reader found the Annas and Barnes version more mellifluous. Mates is not as sweet. His style is plain-spoken, but this approach has merits when the arguments get going. The Annas and Barnes version uses footnotes for commentary, along with a brief introduction. Their notes cite parallel passages in other works by Sextus, provide brief guidance for interpretation when it is most needed, and connect the reader with a focused list of bibliographical references, inviting readers themselves to turn toward scholarly debates over certain controversial passages. Consequently, Annas and Barnes opens out to a wide audience of classicists, historians, students of literature, general readers interested in scepticism, as well as philosophers of whatever ideology. [End Page 460]The Mates edition is directed toward philosophers alone. It is much less oriented toward historical scholarship, preferring to read Sextus as a contemporary professional philosopher might. In this way, Mates will approach a passage from the Outlines in terms of a passage in Hume or Berkeley, even though, of course, these latter-day philosophers derived their views from reading Sextus. Mates employs philosophese with ease, constructing a version of Sextus from the professional philosopher’s interpretive stance, in the language of propositions and Fregean intensions. The audience Mates is writing for and the viewpoint he is writing from more or less correspond to the “analytical” faction of the American Philosophical Association. Postmodern Foucaultians, contextualist historians, and Hellenistic scholars might find this approach unhelpful, even irritating. But busy, mainstream American philosophers could find Mates’s approach sufficiently sympathetic to actually read some Sextus, in the way Chisholm once had done, finding a passage on the Cyrenaics in Sextus which led to the reinvention of “adverbial appears locutions” and which, in turn, played for decades in the epistemological arcades.Mates begins his edition with a systematic introduction to the Outlines and follows his translation with another hundred pages of narrative, reflecting primarily what Mates finds interesting about certain selected passages. Although, like Annas and Barnes, he provides parallel passages, ancient references, and highly abbreviated accounts of scholarly disputes, his own narrative line dominates both his introductory essay and his commentary. Mates writes in a somewhat chatty style prone to the blunt Cephalean confidence that comes with considerable experience and success as a professional philosopher. His narrative line is clear, connected, often compelling, as for instance when he argues that for Sextus “dogmatizing and believing turn out to be one and the same” (61).Fashion has returned to favor Pyrrhonism in the late twentieth century, just as the cycle had come around before, toward the end of the sixteenth century, sparking a philosophical renaissance. This time around the import may be different. Both Annas and Barnes as well as Mates find Sextus worth reading as serious philosophy. This is a considerable improvement in the fortuna of the Outlines. For decades Sextus was banned in American philosophy departments, as no philosopher at all. He was not taught, he was not read. One highly prominent American philosopher was expressly forbidden to write a dissertation on him, around the time Mates and Chisholm had the courage to publish on him. Sextus is now welcome in the Canon.If Sextus now is one of us, a serious philosopher, then the dogmatists (Stoics, Epicureans, Peripatetics, etc.) he ridiculed were merely failures. The game continues. So, Mates, Annas and Barnes can embrace Sextus as ours. His readers won’t... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 98-115 [Access article in PDF] Tristram Shandy, David Hume and Epistemological Fiction Christina Lupton I LAURENCE STERNE's Tristram Shandy, the nine-volume novel which dominated London's literary marketplace during the years of its publication between 1759 and 1767, has served over the course of its reception as a case in point for reading literature and philosophy side by side. Yet even in this (...) lengthy and variegated history of Sterne appreciation, "side by side" has more often than not proved to be a question of reading philosophy as literature's source and the key to its logic. In most secondary work on the novel, Sterne's references to empirical psychology appear as clues to a line of influence which leads, depending on the turn of the critic and his or her milieu, either back to a Lockean faith in self-knowledge and to a Humean skepticism with its residual stress on the realm of social accountability and the merits of mental association, or forward to the terrain of modernism, with its insistence on the constitutive power of language itself. From the ongoing measured attempts to monitor Sterne's use of Locke to the conviction, instigated by John Traugott in 1954, that Sterne's dramatization of rationalism shares much with David Hume's positive account of association, this complex critical history is well rehearsed, and its variants soundly warranted by Sterne's liberal borrowing from each of the well-stocked Rabelaisian, empiricist, and Augustan shelves of his own library.In recent decades, this critical debate runs towards a view of Sterne working self-consciously with an emergent sense of the aesthetic as a response to the epistemological quandaries of rationalism under pressure. In this essay, I will diverge from the critical tradition which has [End Page 98] combed the texts of British empiricism for the right "key" to Tristram Shandy. 1 I want to avoid this avenue of investigation not because it promises poor results—in the case of Sterne, rich moments of "unlocking" are undeniable—but because it relies on lining up philosophy and literature in a particular generic relation to one another. In general, this method assigns problem-raising to philosophy and problem-echoing to literature. Established Sterne critics, including John Traugott, Melvin New, and Arthur Cash, routinely ask how Tristram Shandy follows up or even solves the formal articulations of a problem raised by Locke or Hume.Despite the importance to date of this philosophical-problems-played-out-in-literature model for reading Tristram Shandy, the model of reading literature and philosophy together which I want to introduce in this piece is much more a side-by-side one. More specifically, I want to suggest that the epistemological problem which shows up in Tristram Shandy is less a rearticulation of grand philosophical concerns at a local register than a transformation of the problem of epistemology at the site of its articulation. While knowledge can be seen as the problem which Locke's rationalism, Hume's rhetorical and social projects, or Kant's account of aesthetic judgment set out to solve, for Sterne, I will argue, epistemological uncertainty is less a problem than the basis of the productive relationship Tristram Shandy develops between, on one hand, literature as an object of knowledge and, on the other, the acknowledgement that words, particularly literary words, depend on subjective responses. By comparing Hume's Treatise and Tristram Shandy, my aim is to show how the closely allied texts diverge in their strategies for exploring and containing the fracturing implications of skepticism. II Like many other literary authors of the eighteenth century, Sterne is engaged in debates crossing what we now think of as the disciplinary boundary between philosophy and literature and, despite its celebrated status as an inaugural work of modern fiction, Tristram Shandy intimately incorporates nonfictional forms of political and philosophical inquiry. 2 One of Tristram's more celebrated briefs to his reader is a witty but revealingly knowing description of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding: "I will tell you in three words what the book... (shrink)

The story of the greatest of all philosophical friendships—and how it influenced modern thought David Hume is widely regarded as the most important philosopher ever to write in English, but during his lifetime he was attacked as “the Great Infidel” for his skeptical religious views and deemed unfit to teach the young. In contrast, Adam Smith was a revered professor of moral philosophy, and is now often hailed as the founding father of capitalism. Remarkably, the (...) two were best friends for most of their adult lives, sharing what Dennis Rasmussen calls the greatest of all philosophical friendships. The Infidel and the Professor is the first book to tell the fascinating story of the friendship of these towering Enlightenment thinkers—and how it influenced their world-changing ideas. The book follows Hume and Smith’s relationship from their first meeting in 1749 until Hume’s death in 1776. It describes how they commented on each other’s writings, supported each other’s careers and literary ambitions, and advised each other on personal matters, most notably after Hume’s quarrel with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Members of a vibrant intellectual scene in Enlightenment Scotland, Hume and Smith made many of the same friends, joined the same clubs, and were interested in many of the same subjects well beyond philosophy and economics—from psychology and history to politics and Britain’s conflict with the American colonies. The book reveals that Smith’s private religious views were considerably closer to Hume’s public ones than is usually believed. It also shows that Hume contributed more to economics—and Smith contributed more to philosophy—than is generally recognized. Vividly written, The Infidel and the Professor is a compelling account of a great friendship that had great consequences for modern thought. (shrink)

Sprott reviews the writings on suicide which appeared in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is interested in efforts, most notably those of Donne and Hume, to argue, in the face of religious and other opposition, that suicide can be committed without involving moral offense. He is also interested in the actual cases of suicide during the period and endeavors to correlate the literature with fluctuations in the suicide rate and with legal attitudes toward (...) suicides and their families.--A. C. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:David Hume and Adam Smith: A Japanese Perspective by Tatsuya SakamotoEstrella TrincadoTatsuya Sakamoto. David Hume and Adam Smith: A Japanese Perspective. London and New York: Routledge, 2021. Pp. 297. ISBN 9780367683023. Hardback. £130.This book is a collection of essays and articles by the Japanese scholar Tatsuya Sakamoto. In the foreword, Ryu Susato, professor of the Faculty of Economics at Keio University, Tokyo, notes that (...) in Japanese society Marxism has been the dogma of the history of social and economic thought. As a consequence, Japanese society has been labelled as “collectivist.” In this context, only a privileged intellectual background allowed Sakamoto to find his own way, as he graduated from Keio University and was part of its faculty. The Faculty of Economics of Keio University has spread the academic culture of liberalism that descended from Yukichi Fukuzawa (1834–1901), a reformer and founder of Keio and one of the most influential liberal thinkers in Meiji Japan (1868–1930). In addition, the family background of Sakamoto and the interest of his mother in the English language left a mark on him. Sakamoto was one of the rare Japanese scholars to study abroad in the 1980s, in particular at the University of Glasgow for two years (1984–1986) under the academic guidance of Andrew Skinner. There, he took interest in biographical and bibliographical studies. During his initial research, he found on a note by George Chalmers some evidence for David Hume’s authorship of an anonymous review of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in the Critical Review of May 1759.1 Then, along with David D. Raphael, Sakamoto transcribed the material with a commentary in the Journal of the History of Philosophy2 (Chapter 6 of the reviewed book) and he published “Hume’s Early Memoranda and the Making of His Political Economy” in Hume Studies3 (Chapter 4). There, Sakamoto gives interesting insights on Hume’s Early [End Page 163] Memoranda of manuscripts published by Mossner.4 This manuscript compilation shows the desire of Hume to pursue a systematic discourse on political economy. These efforts resulted in a large number of works published by Hume from 1748 to 1757 and even after his death, in Essays, Moral and Political, in The Natural History of Religion, and in Political Discourses.Later, Sakamoto published various articles on Hume’s economic thought in English (Chapters 1 and 5). In addition, he published his first monograph in Japanese.5 He argued that the “civilized society”—an idealization of Western societies—which was thought to be a prerequisite in Japan for the socialist revolution, concealed the different eighteenth-century historical realities of European countries in which Hume and Smith lived. Sakamoto received for this monograph the Suntory Academic Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities in 1996 and the Japan Academy Prize in 2001. In his Japanese monographs, Sakamoto interprets Hume as a firm defender of modernity and civilization, using his empiricist theory to inspire the spirit of serving the public good of a civilized society. Hume is a main character of the historiographical odyssey of the conflict between order and liberty.6 Hume tried to bridge the gap between the practical empiricism of mercantilist literature7 and the normative rationalism of natural jurisprudence,8 developing the science of economics on a philosophical foundation.After a brief leave spent at Boston University under the care of Knud Haakonssen, Sakamoto coedited a collection of essays written by Japanese scholars9 (Sakamoto’s contribution is included in Chapter 3). Another of Sakamoto’s important contributions is Chapter 9 of this book, originally published in The Adam Smith Review in 2017.10 There, we learn of Yoshihiko Uchida (1913–1983), a Japanese historian of social thought who specialized in Smith and Marx, and paid much early attention to the Smith-Rousseau connection in his The Birth of Economic Science (never published in English). As Sakamoto says, Uchida’s original view of this great Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith, proves that scholars infuse new life into classical texts, no matter how distant they may be from the object of their study in space and time. Besides, by discussing in English previous Japanese scholars’ contributions, Sakamoto is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 719 Metaphor and Religious Language. By JANET MARTIN SosKICE. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1985. Pp. 191. Cloth, $25.00. This book combines two excellent studies: the first is a critical analysis of theories of metaphor and topics in contemporary philosophy of language which are especially relevant to theories of metaphor; the second is an examination of the way in which models and the metaphorical (...) class='Hi'>language based on them are understood in a critical realism concerning scientific explanation, and so can support the possibility of a critical realism in theology. The second study is premised on the first, but the first (Chapters I-V) can be read independently and is valuable in its own right whether or not the reader has theological concerns. Though the author's ultimate aim is to provide a defense of the "theist's right to make metaphysical claims" (a defense of "theological realism") by arguing for the "conceptual possibility" of a referential religious language (148), she is well aware that any adequate account of religious language has to be informed by a proper understanding of the variety of forms (literal and non-literal) our non-religious language takes. In particular, "no philosophical account of religious language will be either complete or sufficient if it fails to take account of the way forms of figurative discourse, like metaphor, function in the task of saying that which cannot be said in other ways " (63). The first five chapters of the book then are devoted to a detailed and comprehensive analysis of metaphor in ordinary language, beginning with classical accounts (Ch. 1), distinguishing metaphor both from non-linguistic entities and from other figures of speech (Chs. II and IV), and critically examining standard theories of metaphor (Ch. III) and issues concerning' metaphorical meaning,' 'metaphorical truth,' and the irreducibility of metaphor (Ch. V). Soskice begins (and ends) by defining metaphor as a "figure of speech whereby we speak about one thing in terms which are seen to be suggestive of another" (15, 49) and argues for an "interanimative" account of metaphor (which is presented as a refinement of the insights of I. A. Richards). In relatively small compass she presents a formally comprehensive survey and critical analysis of competing theories of metaphor. The criticisms are simple, straightforward, and radical. For example, she concludes that, at bottom, emotive accounts are inadequate because " there must be some guiding cognitive features which the emotive response is the response to" (27). (This sort of consideration later figures in her criticism of accounts which see a merely affective role for models.) She argues that theories which see the heart of metaphor in a self-contradictory at- 7~0 BOOK REVIEWS tribution ignore those acknowledged metaphors which do not imply logical conflict, those metaphors which are such only because of context or intention; however, they fail adequately to distinguish such logical conflict from nonsense (32ff). Substitution theories and comparison theories fail to see that " the very thinking is undertaken in terms of the metaphor " (25)-there are not two things antecedently known. Here begins her criticism of a thesis-the 'two subjects' thesis-which underlies much theorizing about metaphor. The criticism is an important and sustained one; it is addressed to sophisticated versions of the potentially promising "interactive " accounts of metaphor, like Black's (46ff), and comes into play '..:1 her analysis of Ricoeur's work on metaphor (Ch. V). Though I have only pointed in a sketchy way to the kind of criticism the author offers of the major theories of metaphor, I should emphasize that her criticism is detailed, careful, and cogent, and engages in illuminating give-and-take with contemporary philosophical discussions of metaphor and related linguistic issues (a la Davidson, Searle, et al.). It is, moreover, presented with such clarity and helpful examples as to make it both an excellent introduction to the topic and a useful study for those with some familiarity with the contemporary debate. The " interanimative " theory of metaphor which Soskice proposes holds that metaphor is in an important sense 'two ideas for one,' though it does not involve a duality of reference. Metaphor is not generated simply by " conflict of meaning" or by " interaction of two... (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)

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

This work explores the complex relationship between science and politics. More specifically, it focuses on the problem of scientism. Scientism is a deformation of science, which unnecessarily restricts the scope of scientific inquiry by placing a dogmatic faith in the method of the natural sciences. Its adherents call for nothing less than a complete transformation of society. Science becomes the idol that can magically cure the perpetual maladies of modern society and of human nature itself. Whitney demonstrates that scientism (...) is intellectually impoverishing and politically dangerous. Whitney surveys the development of scientism from early modernity to the present day, beginning with Francis Bacon, arguing that Bacon stands as the founder, not only of the experimental method, but also of scientism. This is most evident in his presentation of a scientific utopia in New Atlantis. After briefly noting the impact of Isaac Newton and the French Encylopedists, Whitney then moves on to the other great representative figure of scientism: Auguste Comte, who demonstrates the religious fervor that accompanies the scientistic attitude. Continuing on the path set forth by Bacon, Comte argues for a reorganization of society based on the precepts of positive science. The solution to scientism, Whitney advances, lies in a new (or revised) science of politics; the foundation of which is based on the Classical sources that were either discredited or banned outright by the proposals of Bacon and Comte. He concludes the work with contemporary examples of scientism, including the climate change debates, genetic engineering, and the New Atheism movement. (shrink)

Rumelhart and McClelland's chapter about learning the past tense created a degree of controversy extraordinary even in the adversarial culture of modern science. It also stimulated a vast amount of research that advanced the understanding of the past tense, inflectional morphology in English and other languages, the nature of linguistic representations, relations between language and other phenomena such as reading and object recognition, the properties of artificial neural networks, and other topics. We examine the impact of the (...) Rumelhart and McClelland model with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight. It is not clear who “won” the debate. It is clear, however, that the core ideas that the model instantiated have been assimilated into many areas in the study of language, changing the focus of research from abstract characterizations of linguistic competence to an emphasis on the role of the statistical structure of language in acquisition and processing. (shrink)

This essay has two purposes—first, to identify Adam Smith as intervening in the debate between Montesquieu and Hume regarding the nature, age, and robustness of English liberty. Whereas Montesquieu took English liberty to be old and fragile, Hume took it to be new and robust. Smith disagreed with both: it was older than Hume supposed, but not fragile in the way Montesquieu claimed. The reason for this was the importance of the common law (...) in England’s legal history. Seeing this enables the essay’s second purpose: achieving a more thorough and nuanced understanding of Smith’s account of liberty. This requires us to go beyond repeating Smith’s famous claim that modern liberty was the result of the feudal barons trading away their wealth and power for inane status goods. As I demonstrate, this is only one part of a much wider story: of liberty requiring, and also being constituted by, the rise of the regular administration of justice, and ultimately the rule of law. Although Smith’s history of the English courts and common law has been almost entirely neglected by scholars, it is indispensable to understanding both his reply to Montesquieu and Hume and his wider political theory of modern freedom. (shrink)

Preface Phillip R. Sloan, Gerald McKenny, Kathleen Eggleson pp. xiii-xviii In November of 2009, the University of Notre Dame hosted the conference “Darwin in the Twenty-First Century: Nature, Humanity, and God.‘ Sponsored primarily by the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at Notre Dame, and the Science, Theology, and the Ontological Quest project within the Vatican Pontifical... 1. Introduction: Restructuring an Interdisciplinary Dialogue Phillip R. Sloan pp. 1-32 Almost exactly fifty years before the Notre Dame conference, the (...) world’s largest centenary commemoration of Darwin’s legacy was held at nearby University of Chicago. This event, organized by a committee spearheaded by University of Chicago anthropologist Sol Tax, drew nearly 2,500 registrants. In attendance were the primary leaders... Part 1. Nature 2. Evolution through Developmental Change: How Alterations in Development Cause Evolutionary Changes in Anatomy Scott F. Gilbert pp. 35-60 For the past half-century, the mechanisms of evolution have been explained by the fusion of genetics and evolutionary biology called “the Modern Synthesis.‘ The tenets of the Modern Synthesis have been generally formulated as such: 1. There is genetic variation within the population. 2. There is competition... 3. The Evolution of Evolutionary Mechanisms: A New Perspective Stuart A. Newman pp. 61-89 The Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, based on Charles Darwin’s concept of natural selection in conjunction with a genetic theory of inheritance in a population-based framework, has been, for more than six decades, the dominant scientific perspective for explaining the diversity of living organisms. In recent years, however, with the growth... 4. The Evolvability of Organic Forms: Possible, Likely, and Unlikely Change from the Perspective of Evolutionary Developmental Biology Alessandro Minelli pp. 90-115 Confronted with the extraordinary diversity of animal form, we can ask questions about function and adaptation. How does this animal move? How does it feed? How does it defend itself from its enemies? But we can also ask questions about development, reproduction, and heredity. What mechanisms produce these forms? How are these... 5. Accident, Adaptation, and Teleology in Aristotle and Darwinism David J. Depew pp. 116-143 Charles Darwin framed the Origin of Species to meet criteria for inductive science set out by John Herschel in his Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. Accordingly, he was distraught when he learned that Herschel, to whom he had sent a copy of his newly published book, was not... 6. The Game of Life Implies Both Teleonomy and Teleology Gennaro Auletta, Ivan Colagè, Paolo D’Ambrosio pp. 144-164 The present contribution is mainly aimed at suggesting the importance of teleonomy and teleology as explanatory mechanisms in biology in the light of recent achievements in the field, and at showing that they play an actual and relevant role in the realm of life. The issue of finality in biology still provokes lively debates in the... Part 2. Humanity 7. Humanity’s Origins Bernard Wood pp. 167-181 One of Charles Darwin’s many achievements is that he began the process of converting the Tree of Life from a religious metaphor into a biological reality. All types of living organisms, be they animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, or viruses, are at the end of twigs that reach the surface of the Tree of Life, and all the types of organisms... 8. Darwin’s Evolutionary Ethics: The Empirical and Normative Justifications Robert J. Richards pp. 182-200 In the increasingly secular atmosphere of the nineteenth century, intellectuals grew wary of the idea that nature had any moral authority. In an earlier age, one might have looked upon the dispositions of nature as divinely sanctioned, and thus one could call upon natural law to ground moral judgment. Certain behaviors, for instance, might have... 9. Crossing the Milvian Bridge: When Do Evolutionary Explanations of Belief Debunk Belief? Paul E. Griffiths, John S. Wilkins pp. 201-231 Two traditional targets for evolutionary skepticism are religion and morality. Evolutionary skeptical arguments against religious belief are continuous with earlier genetic arguments against religion, such as that implicit in David Hume’s Natural History of Religion. Evolutionary arguments are also... 10. Questioning the Zoological Gaze: Darwinian Epistemology and Anthropology Phillip R. Sloan pp. 232-266 This quotation from Darwin’s Descent of Man illuminates an under-explored issue in Darwin’s work---not the issue of evolutionary ethics itself, but the epistemology of experience assumed in his work, and the consequences of his application of this “zoological gaze‘ to human beings. I will term this epistemological stance in this chapter “natural historical... Part 3. God 11. Evolution and Catholic Faith John O’Callaghan pp. 269-298 To begin to examine the relation of orthodox Catholic Christian faith to evolutionary theory and the question of human origins, consider words of the fourth pope, St. Clement: Let us fix our gaze on the Father and Creator of the whole world, and let us hold on to his peace and blessings, his splendid and surpassing... 12. After Darwin, Aquinas: A Universe Created and Evolving William E. Carroll pp. 299-337 At the 2000 Jubilee Session for scientists, held at the Vatican in May of that year, Archbishop Józef Życiński offered an eloquent assessment of contemporary discourse on the relationship between the natural sciences and theology. He ended his address with the comment that what is needed today is a new Thomas Aquinas. I remember... 13. Evolutionary Theism and the Emergent Universe Józef Życiński pp. 338-354 The 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species has been celebrated in the context of an animated debate concerning both scientific and philosophical issues implied by the theory of evolution.1 One finds a deep diversity of attitudes, both methodological and semantic, in the current debates on evolutionary... 14. Beyond Separation or Synthesis: Christ and Evolution as Theodrama Celia Deane-Drummond pp. 355-380 The fervor with which popular discourse on science and religion has continued to bubble up in the anniversary year celebrating Darwin’s achievements shows that the publically perceived conflict between science and religion will not go away. Academic discussion on such matters is therefore not just peripheral to cultural concerns but takes... Part 4. Past and Future Prospects 15. Imagining a World without Darwin Peter J. Bowler pp. 383-403 What would have happened if Charles Darwin had not lived to write On the Origin of Species? Perhaps his bad health caused the early death he feared, or maybe he fell overboard while on the voyage of the Beagle. Would the world have still experienced the Darwinian Revolution under another name, or would the history of science, and... 16. What Future for Darwinism? Jean Gayon pp. 404-423 What future for Darwinism? I will propose some criteria for exploring this question in the domains of both evolutionary biology and the human sciences. Do not expect me to tell you where we will stand thirty years from now. It will be enough to identify a few general tendencies. For the sake of brevity, I will not devote a preamble to explain... Contributors pp. 424-430. (shrink)

This contains an extended and wide ranging bibliography, beginning with the seventeenth century, of works relevant to the problem of miracles and Hume’s essay. It is especially useful for the problem in its historical setting.

Historically, many Christians have understood God’s transcendence to imply God’s properties categorically differ from any created properties. For multiple historical figures, a problem arose for religious language: how can one talk of God at all if none of our predicates apply to God? What are we to make of creeds and Biblical passages that seem to predicate creaturely properties, such as goodness and wisdom, of God? Thomas Aquinas offered a solution: God is to be spoken of only through (...) analogy (the doctrine of analogy). Gavin Hyman argues Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy was neglected prior to the early-modern period and the neglect of analogy produced the conception of a god vulnerable to atheistic arguments. Contra Hyman, in this paper, I show early-modern atheism arose in a theological context in which there was an active debate concerning analogy. Peter Browne (1665–1735) and William King (1650–1729) offered two competing conceptions of analogical predication that were debated through the 19th century, with interlocutors such as the freethinker Anthony Collins (1676–1729), theologian/philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753), and skeptic David Hume (1711–1776). Lastly, I discuss the 18th century debate over theological analogy as part of the background relevant to understanding Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. (shrink)

Based on two presentations during a February 2020 South African academic visit at the University of Pretoria and the University of Johannesburg, in this contribution, the authors of this article engage with one of the bestselling recent volumes in philosophy, Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free (here, the 2020 edition; initial publication date, 2019). In this book, Hägglund propagates ideas akin to those promoted within secular humanism. Whilst on the one hand this article elaborates the shortcomings (...) of Hägglund’s criticism of religion, on the other hand it also strives for an empathetic reading of his secular humanist philosophy. The authors place this conversation within the post-secular religio-cultural climate currently rising internationally, along with some further contextualising remarks. The most important part of this article is the last section (‘Pitting some theological voices…’) in which the authors engage Hägglund’s main arguments theologically, which elaborate on the finitude of human life all the whilst denying it a prospect of immortality. The debate in this section procceeds along the lines of religious thought of Emmanuel Falque, Ebenhard Jüngel and Dewi Zephania Phillips, with a view to reconcile the radical awareness of finitude and temporality of human life, characteristic for modern discourse(s), with the religious language practices sustaining belief in eternal life. Contribution: This article engages with how Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free does not fairly convey aspects of the sense of secularism, and can additionally on the senses of finitude and temporality be improved by insights from Emmanuel Falque, Ebenhard Jüngel and Dewi Zephania Phillips. (shrink)

In the Western media, stories about China seem to fall into one of two categories: China’s astounding economic development or its human rights abuses. As human rights discourses follow increasingly hegemonic conventions, especially with regard to China, many of their key assumptions remain unexamined. This special issue—the second in a two-part series beginning with “Cosmologies of the Human”—critically investigates the relationship between China and the human as it plays out in law, politics, biopolitics, political economy, labor, medicine, (...) and culture. The contributors interrogate the evolving meanings of “China” and “the human,” both inside China and internationally. The issue tracks the ways in which global discourses treat China—still officially socialist—as similar to, different from, and alternative to Western capitalist modernities. Several essays probe the modern theoretical underpinnings of human rights abuses in China, including a crucial distinction between “the human” and “the people.” Others review the impact of Maoism on Marxist debates in China and in the West, as well as the specific influences of Mao’s writings on French politics and theory in the 1960s. A visual dossier compares eight contemporary Chinese artists, directors, and public image-makers in order to discuss the figure of the human from Tiananmen Square to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. While many contributors discuss China and the West comparatively, the issue interrogates the universalizing claims of both Western and Chinese norms of the human by privileging the local, particular, and eccentric. Contributors: Ackbar Abbas, Michael Dutton, David L. Eng, Doug Howland, Petrus Liu, Camille Robcis, Teemu Ruskola, Shuang Shen, Shu-mei Shih, Wang Xiaoming David L. Eng is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of _The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy_ and _Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America_, both also published by Duke University Press. Teemu Ruskola is Professor of Law at Emory University and Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University. Shuang Shen is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese at Pennsylvania State University. (shrink)

This edition contains the thirty-nine essays included in Essays, Moral, and Literary, that made up Volume I of the 1777 posthumous Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. It also includes ten essays that were withdrawn or left unpublished by Hume for various reasons. The two most important were deemed too controversial for the religious climate of his time. This revised edition reflects changes based on further comparisons with eighteenth-century texts and an extensive reworking of the index. - (...) Publisher. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 109-111 [Access article in PDF] Seventh International Buddhist-Christian Conference David W.Chappell Soka University of America Pack your bags! The annual meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies in Nashville decided that the next international conference will be held August 5-12, 2003, in Chiang Mai, Thailand.An invitation was extended to the society by Dr. John Butt, director of the Institute for the Study of Religion (...) and Culture (ISRC), and by the president of Payap University, Dr. Boonthong Poocharoen. As a Presbyterian faculty member of the McGilvary Faculty of Theology, John has extensive interreligious experience in Thailand and participated in the society's last international conference held in Tacoma, Washington, in August 2000.The institute's associate director, Professor Saeng Chandrangam, is a former Buddhist monk and is one of Thailand's most highly respected Buddhist laymen. He was Chair of the Department of Oriental Studies and the Department of Modern Languages and was Dean of Humanities of the government's Chiang Mai University, where he taught philosophy and theology. Currently he teaches at a Buddhist university in Chiang Mai as well as serving as the associate director ofISRC. Also, Donald Swearer, who has been active with the society since the first international conference in 1980, will be in residence in Chiang Mai in the springs of 2002 and 2003 and can help plan the conference.Payap University was founded in 1974 by the Church of Christ in Thailand, a consortium ofThai Christian congregations begun by Presbyterian, American Baptist, and Disciples missionaries. However, about 95 percent of Payap University's nine thousand students are Buddhist since Chiang Mai is centrally located in the Burmese-Thai axis with the heaviest concentration of Buddhists in the world. As a result, the conference will be set in a context of Protestant missions within a Theravadin Buddhist culture. This setting will increase the presence of conservative and evangelical Christians, as well as Theravadin Buddhists, to serve as an important balance to the already strong Mahayana and Catholic dialogue leaders in our international conferences. John wrote that "Holding the next conference here would demonstrate that there are other forms of Christian faith quite different from that represented by the evangelical missionaries" and that there are other ways of understanding and approaching other different religious communities. Accordingly, a possible theme [End Page 109] might be "Rethinking Mission Motivation and Practice (both Buddhist and Christian) for the Twenty-first Century."Chiang Mai is a city of a population of about three hundred thousand that preserves much of the charm of traditional Thai culture, while also having modern conveniences like Western fast foods and ATMs, but has not yet succumbed to the congestion of Bangkok. Its weather should be in the eighties or nineties and its hotels are inexpensive (about twenty-five dollars per day for two). The meetings at Payap University will be in air-conditioned rooms in a picturesque setting. Payap has three campuses and is affiliated with the McCormick Hospital. It offers twenty-four undergraduate degrees, as well as master's degrees in divinity, linguistics, business administration, international business, Teaching English as a Foreign Language, philosophy, and Christianity.Payap University can draw on considerable experience for hosting foreign programs. The vice president for external affairs, Martha Butt (wife of John), heads a committee that has planned, developed, and operated the in-country segments of all the Thai Elderhostel programs involving over three thousand participants. Also, they will be joined by faculty members from Mahidol, Chulalongkorn, and Thammasat Universities, including Dr. Parichart Suwanbubbha of Mahidol University, a Thai Buddhist (with a degree from Chicago comparing the concepts of karma and grace), who attended the Tacoma conference in 2000.ISRC is located on the Crystal Spring campus of Payap University and was founded in 1996 to serve as a research and study center for scholars and others interested in the comparative study of religion and culture. The institute's primary goal is to provide and nurture a broad ecumenical religious vision for the people ofThailand and Southeast Asia and for others visiting or working... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Concerning Creativity: A Comparison of Whitehead, Neville, and Chu HsiDavid L. HallJohn Berthrong. Concerning Creativity: A Comparison of Whitehead, Neville, and Chu Hsi. SUNY Series in Religious Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Pp. xvii + 254. Hardcover $65.50. Paper $24.50.Given the irenic and deferential tone of John Berthrong's prose in his Concerning Creativity: A Comparison of Whitehead, Neville, and Chu Hsi, his readers (...) might not readily suspect that an intellectual drama of real significance is being played out in its pages. In this brief review I will attempt to provide the outlines of that drama, and to assess Berthrong's directing skills.We begin with the rather startling fact that before the "Dictionary Supplement" to the 1971 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published, one would have searched that work in vain for the principal word in the title of Berthrong's book. The OED entry on "creativity" contains three illustrations of its use-one from a literary critic (1875) and the other two from A. N. Whitehead's Religion in the Making (1926).Berthrong is to be congratulated for recognizing, as most process thinkers have not, that Whitehead introduced not only a new word into our philosophical vocabulary but also a radically novel means of interpreting the world and our experience of it-one that answers to feelings and forms of understanding that have been seriously marginalized in the West. What this means, of course, is that Whitehead's understanding of "creativity" in terms of the spontaneous emergence of novelty requires a radical transvaluation and reconstruction of the nature and import of ontological speculations within the Western tradition. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Western philosophy simply lacks interpretative insights permitting a responsible elaboration of Whitehead's understanding of creativity. Berthrong must look beyond Western culture to find resources with which to defend [End Page 571] Whitehead's novel understanding of creativity properly against the criticisms of mainstream ontologists such as Robert Neville.It is Whitehead's placement of ontological issues within his speculative scheme against which Neville's criticisms are directed. And, as we shall see, it is this same issue that leads Berthrong to appeal to the Chinese Neo-Confucian Chu Hsi to defend Whitehead against Neville.It is important to recognize that by the time that Berthrong was awakened from the contented slumber of a Whiteheadian scholastic by Neville's Calvinesque critique, he was already expert in the mainstream thought of an alternative cultural milieu. While other champions of Whitehead's novel speculations have been forced to work within the Western philosophical tradition, Berthrong is able to access a tradition in which discussions of creativity as the spontaneous emergence of novelty employ terms such as ch'i ("matter-energy," "energizing field"), tzu-jan ("self-soing"), i ("change," "becoming"), and ch'eng ("self-actualization," "creativity") that did not come late to Chinese dictionaries. Neville is certainly familiar with Chinese philosophical thought, but he approached the Asian traditions in a serious manner only after his principal intuitions had been systematically articulated. Thus, while Berthrong looks to the Chinese Neo-Confucians for assistance in formulating Whitehead's defense, Neville expects these same thinkers to offer exemplifications of his own solidly wrought reflections. The consequence of this state of affairs is that, in his debate with Neville, Berthrong has the advantage of a somewhat greater flexibility.Berthrong's flexibility is demonstrated by his method of engaging his principal interlocutors. He employ's Wayne Booth's "coductive" method, which avoids dialectical sublation or analytic reduction in favor of the analogical correlations of concepts and doctrines. Coduction is essentially an ethos-based method expressed through conversations or debates that aim not at refutation or the establishment of a final view but at an enlargement of understanding leading to what Whitehead termed "wide intellectual tolerance."In his triangulation of Whitehead, Neville, and Chu Hsi, Berthrong provides accurate and balanced presentations of the pertinent ideas of each of the principals. He succinctly articulates Whitehead's understanding of the world as comprised by "actual entities," whose coming into being and passing away express the creative process that is the general... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:110 DAVID HUME'S INVISIBLE HAND IN THE WEALTH OF NATIONS THE PUBLIC CHOICE OF MORAL INFORMATION Introduction The thesis I shall defend is that there are systematic aspects of Adam Smith's economics which make little sense when read in isolation from a literature in which David Hume provides the signal contributions. Consequently, parts of Hume's own work are stripped of meaning, isolated as they (...) are from later developments. The puzzles about Smith's analysis which I find illuminated by Hume's are the following: 1. Why does Smith both defend the importance of economic growth for the material of well-being of the working class and claim that property originates as spoil, impoverishing the working class? After all, in the classical system the existence of property is one requisite for economic growth. 2. Why does Smith exalt the assumption of self-interested behavior in private activity but claim that irrationality dominates the political process? 3. Why does Smith deny the importance of benevolence in Wealth of Nations and insist on the importance of morality Sentiment morality in Theory of Moral its?3 The three questions have a common feature: they are related to the question of how public goods are provided. The particular public good in question is the institution of private property. As with all true I am obligated to the Center for Study of Public Choice for generous support of my research. Suzanne Levy gets the credit for the extent to which this approaches English. I have benefited from acute comments from Charles Rowley and Charles Griswold. The errors and obscurities which remain are solely my responsibility. Ill public goods, society considered as a whole benefits from having such an institution, but each individual considered separately can gain by anti-social behavior.4 Public goods provide a considerable difficulty for any social institution; neither competition in the market nor government requests that individuals reveal how much they wish to be taxed are certain to be efficient. There are aspects of the classical economic analysis which stress the importance of moral information as a partial solution to the public goods problem. By "moral information" I only require that the theory is employed as a guide and that if an individual acts contrary to the theory, this choice is not cited as "falsifying" the theory. Rather, something is said to be "wrong" or "wicked" about the choice.6 Much of modern economic analysis assumes that individuals have perfect information; this postulate rules out any significant role for moral information in the provision of the public goods. To avoid assuming away such a role for morality, we will drop the perfect information assumption and then examine if we can make sense of the classics' attack on the public goods problem. Of course, the specification that individuals see their own interests very poorly is consistent with Smith's general approach. The technique employed below is to look at the issue which Hume and Smith addressed as a problem in modern economics. The key difficulty is to determine under what conditions moral information could guide individuals with very imperfect perceptions to maximize their utility. In particular, suppose we find that moral guidance tells an individual how efficiently to produce. Is this morality self-enforcing or are resources required to persuade people to act in accord with these teachings? If resources are required, we will not pay much attention to just how this persuasion 112 is provided, e.g., whether we tell people that theft is "evil" or whether we hang a few thieves. General production theory tells us we probably will do both, but this is a separate issue. The argument to be advanced is that moral information has self-enforcement properties in private activities but these properties are missing in public activities. In this account, then, real resources will be required for implementing the morality. This consideration in turn raises an interesting issue. If the government expends these resources, what reason is there to believe that they will be provided to serve the public interest and not the interest of the government? Is it possible that the government can prosper by keeping people ignorant or by giving them advice... (shrink)

Hume contrasts two different ways in which we might speak about the attributes of the first cause of all: first, in an attempt to describe the actual nature of this ultimate being or principle; or second, in ascribing attributes to it as so many honorifics, with no intention to describe but merely to express our own reverence. I survey Hume’s skeptical critique of the former, descriptive kind of talk, and also examine his purposes in considering and, through (...) his character Philo, apparently valorizing the latter, reverence-expressing kind of religious speech. (shrink)

This book addresses several dimensions of the transformation of English Nonconformity over the course of an important century in its history. It begins with the question of education for ministry, considering the activities undertaken by four major evangelical traditions to establish theological colleges for this purpose, and then takes up the complex three-way relationship of ministry/churches/colleges that evolved from these activities. As author Dale Johnson illustrates, this evolution came to have significant implications for the Nonconformist engagement with (...) its message and with the culture at large. These implications are investigated in chapters on the changing perception or understanding of ministry itself, religious authority, theological questions, and religious identity.In Johnson's exploration of these issues, conversations about these topics are located primarily in addresses at denominational meetings, conferences that took up specific questions, and representative religious and theological publications of the day that participated in key debates or advocated contentious positions. While attending to some important denominational differences, The Changing Shape of English Nonconformity, 1825-1925 focuses on the representative discussion of these topics across the whole spectrum of evangelical Nonconformity rather than on specific denominational traditions.Johnson maintains that too many interpretations of nineteenth-century Nonconformity, especially those that deal with aspects of the theological discussion within these traditions, have tended to depict such developments as occasions of decline from earlier phases of evangelical vitality and appeal. This book instead argues that it is more appropriate to assess these Nonconformist developments as a collective, necessary, and deeply serious effort to come to terms with modernity and, further, to retain a responsible understanding of what it meant to be evangelical. It also shows these developments to be part of a larger schema through which Nonconformity assumed a more prominent place in the English culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 217 [Access article in PDF] Bogoljub Sijakovic. Bibliographica Praesocratica: A Bibliographical Guide to the Studies of Early Greek Philosophy in its Religious and Scientific Contexts with an Introductory Bibliography on the Historiography of Philosophy. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2001. Pp. 700. Cloth, €18,00. Professor Sijakovic has given us an invaluable reference work for the Presocratics and for early Greek (...) thought generally: a bibliography of 17,664 entries covering the period 1450-2000. It has some advantages over its principal predecessor, Paquet et al., Les Présocratiques: Bibliographie Analytique (Montreal and Paris, 1988-95), which covers work up to 1980. Sijakovic includes more recent material and aims at complete coverage of works in the Slavic languages and Modern Greek. He does not cover the Sophists, but does include works on topics that extend more widely than the Presocratics. Unlike Paquet, Sijakovic does not provide summaries of articles nor does he list reviews of books, unless they have interest in their own right, or include translations of works into other modern languages. He provides indexes of subjects, Greek terms, proper names, and authors.The ambition of the work is revealed by the subject headings other than those on familiar Presocratic thinkers and the issues they treated. The bibliography begins with a long section on Historiography and Philosophy of the History of Philosophy (with 932 entries) and concludes with one on Presocratics in the Intellectual Tradition (590) from before Plato to the present, with subsections on figures such as Francis Bacon (5), Nietzsche (74), Heidegger (56), and Popper (6). Other sections are labelled Theories of Myth (550), Greek Mythmaking and Religion (667), Orpheus and Orphism (642), Homer (154), Hesiod (147), Theogonies, Greek and Oriental (159), From Myth to Philosophy (365), Mathematics (137), Medicine (86), and Hippocrates of Cos (199). It is here that ambition leads to weakness, since the section on Homer, for example, is obviously not a complete bibliography of Homeric studies, and yet it is not restricted to works on Homer that bear on "presocratic" topics. The absence of an explanatory preface to these sections leaves the principles of selection mysterious and decreases their usefulness.Another feature that limits the value of the book is the arrangement within sections. This is generally chronological, but not always. The irregularities are so pervasive that the cause must be due to some unannounced division into unlabelled subsections, and the result is that we must read through more entries than we should have to. Two other minor complaints: the language of the book is English (aside from the trilingual prefatory material), but there are mistakes of usage and grammar which a copyreader should have caught; and there are occasional unexplained words at the end of entries, frequently in a different type-face, that are not part of the bibliographical entry.I do not mean to detract from the great service Professor Sijakovic has done (seemingly laboring alone over many years) for all who work in the area of early Greek thought—and principally, he notes in a preface, written as NATO was bombing his country, scholars from Western Europe and the United States. We are deeply indebted to him. The book has replaced Paquet as my primary bibliographical resource on the Presocratics. Richard McKirahan Pomona College... (shrink)

Just as it is impossible to understand the American religious landscape without some familiarity with evangelicalism, one cannot grasp the shape of contemporary Christian ethics without knowing the contributions of evangelical Protestants. This newest addition to the Library of Theological Ethics series begins by examining the core dynamic with which all evangelical ethics grapples: belief in an authoritative, inspired, and unchanging biblical text on the one hand, and engagement with a rapidly evolving and increasingly post-Christian culture (...) on the other. It explores the different roles that scholars and popular figures have played in forming evangelicals' understandings of Christian ethics. And it draws together the contributions of both senior and emerging figures in painting a portrait of this diverse, vibrant, and challenging theological and ethical tradition. This book represents the breadth of evangelical ethical voices, demonstrating that evangelical ethics involves nuance and theological insight that far transcend any political agenda. Contributors include David P. Gushee, Carl F. H. Henry, Jennifer McBride, Stephen Charles Mott, William E. Pannell, John Perkins, Soong-Chan Rah, Gabriel Salguero, Francis Schaeffer, Ron Sider, Helene Slessarev-Jamir, Glen H. Stassen, Eldin Villafañe, Allen Verhey, Jim Wallis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and John Howard Yoder. The Library of Theological Ethics series focuses on what it means to think theologically and ethically. It presents a selection of important, and otherwise unavailable, texts—English-language texts and translations that have fallen out of print, new translations, and collections of significant statements about problems and themes of special importance—in an easily accessible form. This series enables sustained dialogue on new and classic works in the field. (shrink)

Dennis C. Rasmussen has produced an excellent account of “the greatest of all philosophical friendships” between two of the great thinkers of the underappreciated “Scottish Enlightenment”, Adam Smith, Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, and, in his The Wealth of Nations, often seen as the founder of capitalism and creator of the modern science of economics, and David Hume, who never became an academic but who took “British Empiricism” to its logical sceptical conclusion and (...) is often seen as the most influential philosopher ever to write in the English language. -/- The book covers the span between Smith’s and Hume’s first meeting in 1749 until Smith’s eulogy upon Hume’s death in 1776. It describes how they commented on each other’s work, supported each other’s careers and literary ambitions and advised each other on personal issues. They had many of the same friends, joined the same clubs, and were interested in many of the same subjects beyond philosophy, including psychology, history, politics and Britain’s conflict with the American colonies. -/- Each chapter focuses on an historical episode and theme, beginning with an introduction to Hume and his works (Chap. 1), Smith’s discovery of Hume’s writings and acquaintance with Hume (Chap. 2), their developing friendship (Chap. 3), Hume’s conflict with the Church of Scotland (Chap. 4), Smith’s work on The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Chap. 5), Hume’s fruitful sojourn in France (Chap. 6), Hume’s friendship and eventual conflict with the moody paranoid Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chap. 7), the last years of Hume’s and Smith’s friendship (Chap. 8), Smith’s publication of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chap. 9), the dispute over Smith’s reluctance to publish Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Chap. 10), Hume’s final days (Chap. 11), Smith’s Eulogy to Hume (Chap. 12), and Smith’s final years in Edinburgh (Epilogue). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Religious Voices in Public PlacesTimothy A Beach-VerheyReligious Voices in Public Places Edited by Nigel Biggar and Linda Hogan New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 330 pp. $53.91Religious Voices in Public Places grew out of a conference at the University of Leeds in 2003. It makes an important contribution to continuing debates about religion and contemporary liberalism. Acknowledging that John Rawls provides the paradigmatic model for articulating (...) class='Hi'>modern liberal ideals, the authors take [End Page 203] his work as a starting point; yet through critical engagement with his work, they move the discussion about liberal ideals forward in new directions. Although they recognize that the United States has long stood as the classical instance of a liberal polity, they widen their attention to other liberal nations that have different ways of relating to the religious sphere.The book is helpfully divided into four parts dealing with philosophical views, theological views, public policy issues, and national contexts. Each section investigates the proper role of religious voices in an increasingly global and pluralistic political environment. While the authors bring different perspectives to this principle concern, they all tend to agree that religious voices contribute to public discourse and that liberal democracy does not require their exclusion. “Indeed,” as Linda Hogan writes in the introduction, “running throughout the volume is an affinity for approaches that believe that the route to a durable political culture lies in serious and systematic engagement with different, and even opposing, comprehensive doctrines” (7).The essays in the section on philosophical views engage critically with John Rawls. Nicholas Wolterstorff and Raymond Plant each argue that Rawls’s version of public reason requires a degree of moral consensus that is both unrealistic and illiberal. Rawls’s view of public reason, they argue, stacks the deck in favor of particular (liberal) assumptions, making its ideals of freedom and equality a sham. In turn, Maureen Junker-Kenny looks for a more adequate conception of public reasoning in the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas. In the section on theological views, Luke Bretherton, P. Travis Kroeker, and Robert Gascoigne mine the Christian tradition for resources that engage pluralistic societies in ways that neither retreat into particularistic enclaves nor jettison Christianity’s distinctive faith for the sake of intelligibility. In their various ways, they call into question the prevailing view that religious convictions are a threat to a pluralistic society that values freedom, equality, and solidarity. In the section on public policy, Nigel Biggar, Paul Weithman, and Linda Hogan examine these questions through the lens of physician-assisted suicide, religion in public education, and international human rights; they make cogent arguments for including religious perspectives, in all their complexity and multiplicity, in the political life and public discourse of liberal democratic societies. The last section, on particular national contexts, makes it clear that there is more than one way for liberal societies to deal with religious voices. Peter Sedgwick examines the role of the Anglican Church in English public life; Brian Stiltner and Steven Michels study the role of religion in US political campaigns; and Jocelyne Cesari compares the way different liberal democratic polities in the West have responded to the expanding role of Islam in their societies.This fine volume of essays demonstrates that the discussion about religion and public life is moving beyond the stale binary categories of secular liberalism [End Page 204] and religious traditionalism. These essays exemplify and contribute to the more interesting discussion that is beginning to take place as we leave behind simplistic models in favor of more nuanced, rich, and realistic assessments of public discourse and political decision making in an increasingly diverse yet interdependent social environment. Nigel Biggar and Linda Hogan are to be thanked and commended for bringing this volume to fruition.Timothy A Beach-VerheyFaison Presbyterian ChurchCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

David Hume wrote prolifically and influentially on economics and was an enthusiast for the modern commercial era of manufacturing and global trade. As a vocal critic of the Church, and possibly a nonbeliever, Hume positioned commerce at the vanguard of secularism. I here argue that Hume broached ideas that gesture toward those offered by Max Weber in his famous Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5). Hume discerned a strong correlation between economic flourishing (...) and Protestantism, and he pointed to a “spirit of the age” that was built on modern commerce and fueled by religious tolerance. The Roman Catholic Church, by contrast, came under considerable attack by Hume, for fostering intolerance and draining and diverting funds. Hume recognized several of the dispositions that later appealed to Weber: an increased work ethic and tendency to frugality, enterprise, and investment in Protestant regions. A neo-Weberian literature now points to additional factors, the spread of literacy and the fostering of a network of trust among strangers, both of which Hume noted. Insofar as modern commerce both feeds upon and fosters more liberties and representative government, Hume also linked these with the advent and spread of Protestantism. My aim is not to suggest that these arguments have merit—there is good reason to question each and every assertion under the historical microscope—but rather to highlight the broader religious and cultural context in which Hume’s economics was broached. (shrink)

I do not for a moment question the fact that many people have experiences of a special type which may be termed “religious”, The extent to which religious experience may be regarded as a reasonably common phenomenon in present-day Britain is shown clearly by David Hay in his Exploring Inner Space, Harmondsworth 1982. that such experiences often involve reference to something which appears to display a radical unlikeness to all else and that they are therefore in some (...) sense inexpressible. Doubtless the ideas I have put forward about the possible source of such unlikeness and ineffability might suggest models of God which would not find much theological approval, at least within any mainstream theistic tradition, since some sort of pantheism seems inevitably to be implied. But however this might be, the concept of radical unlikeness as it has been analyzed here can, I think, help us towards understanding certain problematic areas in religion quite apart from the issue of intelligibility, which has been the focus of this discussion. To begin with, radical unlikeness suggests a way in which the historical continuity of concepts of the transcendent might be upheld against the discontinuity suggested by the diversity of interpretations through which they have moved. Ancient and modern outlooks on, say, God differ enormously, as indeed do the range of co-temporal accounts at many particular moments. But, by and large, theologians firmly maintain that it is a single and unchanging phenomenon which is being dealt with. Unless we can point to some common element which is both specific enough to create a binding sense of common tradition, yet never completely expressed by any attempt at understanding it within that tradition (thus persistently demanding new attempts to apprehend it), then given the widely differing views of God within, for example, the Christian community, it is difficult to see how we could assume that in fact they all stemmed from the same source and were talking about the same thing. The idea of radical unlikeness could provide an element with just these required characteristics: it could be seen as what all the accounts attempt to net, with varying degrees of adequacy, within their offered interpretations. It could be seen as what remains constant, constantly elusive yet constantly generative of fresh attempts to apprehend it, throughout a history of intra-religious diversity. This sort of explanation could, presumably, be applied to the intra-religious diversity of the non-Christian traditions too.Secondly, radical unlikeness might suggest a possible way of understanding inter-religious diversity in a way which allows that whilst such diversity exists, whilst the differences between religions are real, they are grounded in a similar root-experience. It may, at first sight, seem difficult to continue thinking of the various religious traditions as truly separate phenomena if they are taken as being grounded on experiences whose ineffability stems from the unlikeness of experiencing things as a whole. Here we must stress again that if they are to be considered intelligible, radically unlike experiences cannot be considered completely so - or putting this another way, we cannot more than approach experience of totality. Sense can be given to religious claims of ineffability by suggesting experience of near totality, where we reach the last point on the scale of inclusiveness which complies with the logical criteria demanded of something for it to be possible for us to be aware of it. We might thus attempt an explanation of inter-religious diversity based on the view that Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam etc. acquire their differences from the different elements included in their experience of near totality. Taking totality to be represented by the scale of one to ten, Hinduism might be seen as grounded on experience of 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-9-10, Buddhism on experience of 1-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10 and so on. The resulting dissimilarities are thus centred not on different types of experience, but on different areas of inclusiveness. This is, of course, to suppose that the various religious traditions are all based on the same degree (as opposed to the same elements) of inclusiveness, but it is by no means clear that such a supposition is justified. Continuing with our decimal analogy, might it not be suggested that whilst Christianity stemmed from experience of 2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10, Jainism was founded on a less extensive encounter with the divine (say 4-5-6-7-8-9-10)? It is, however, uncertain how we can compare and evaluate different religious traditions in such a way as to be able to comment on such claims. A definite danger of comparative religion is that by concentrating on establishing and exploring inter-religious likenesses, it may obscure the radical unlikeness of religious phenomena. It should be borne firmly in mind that such likenesses as may be established within comparative studies may not win religious phenomena a place within our understanding comparable to objects of more everyday concern. Statements found in the Old Testament, the Qur'an and the Vedas, for example, may, on occasion, be alike, but at the end of the day such things are often alike only, or chiefly, in so far as they display the same radical unlikeness in relation to the non-religious elements in our outlook.The analysis of radical unlikeness and ineffability which has been advanced might also suggest a way in which certain passages in religious writings could be understood, passages which at first sight can be seriously perplexing. If, for example, to return to the quotation given in the introductory section of this paper, we continue to think of accounts of the nature of Shiva as being attempts to describe some discrete, objective entity, then it is inevitable that either we will share the Puranic writer's puzzlement or that much of what we read about Shiva will appear as the muddled and extravagant thinking thrown up by an uncritical and over-fertile mythological imagination, consisting of little more than a hotch-potch of contradictory elements. But if we see such accounts as attempting to say something about everything, as symbols of near totality stemming from experiences which verge on the holistic, then what we read - with all its ambiguities - may become somewhat more meaningful. Thus W.D. O'Flaherty comments that Shiva “embodies all of life in all its detail at every minute” (Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Shiva, London 1973, p. 315). Similarly Alain Dani41ou sees Shiva, ultimately, in terms of his being "the supreme state of reality" beyond whom there is only "non-existence" (Hindu Polytheism, London 1964, p. 190).This analysis of ineffability and intelligibility seeks to introduce for debate a possible way of understanding the radical unlikeness which accounts of religious experience apparently attempt to speak about. It does not, however, claim to present an exhaustive treatment of the issues raised, on the contrary, I am conscious of many shortcomings and omissions. For instance, it remains to be seen under precisely what conditions something counts as being an elucidating likeness (presumably all experiences are, for example, temporal, yet temporality alone would not seem to offer a particularly elucidating comparison). Moreover, the degree to which appeal to likeness is allowed operation in actual accounts of religious experience needs to be explored. In addition, the notion of categorizing experiences according to the extent to which they approach a point of total inclusion requires careful clarification. To begin with, according to what criteria could we establish that one experience was more inclusive than another? However, such issues can only be mentioned here, any adequate consideration of them would require a separate paper.In conclusion, I would suggest that to use radical unlikeness and/or ineffability simply as devices by which to halt any process of investigation, proclaiming that the thing in question is not like anything and so is beyond all words, risks making unintelligible and placing beyond all further inquiry an important and extensive area of human experience. As William Alston put it, to label something ineffable in an unqualified way is to shirk the job of making explicit the ways in which it can be talked about. William P. Alston, “ineffability”, Philosophical Review 65 (1956), 522. It is surely more accurate to take ineffability as a “qualifier”I.T. Ramsey, Models and Mystery (Oxford 1964), p. 60. which “multiplies models without end”Ibid. than as an absolute which prevents the construction of any elucidating models. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:172. THE HUME LITERATURE FOR 1981 The Hume literature from 1925 to 1976 has been thoroughly covered in my book Fifty Years of Hume Scholarship : A Bibliographical Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 1978; jê9.50), which also lists the main earlier writings on Hume. Publications of the years 1977 to 1980 were listed in Hume Studies for the last four Novembers. What follows here will (...) bring the record up to the end of 1981. Readers are invited to inform me of any omissions, and to send me offprints of their own articles and reviews. The intention is to maintain a complete bibliographical record of critical work on Hume, by the regular publication in Hume Studies of an annual bibliography covering the previous year, with addenda consisting of items omitted through ignorance in previous years. References to recently-appearing reviews (of books from earlier lists) are given at the end. The following abbreviations of journal titles are used here: APQAmerican Philosophical Quarterly JHIJournal of the History of Ideas JHPJournal of the History of Philosophy JPJournal of Philosophy PASProceedings of the Aristotelian Society PBPhilosophical Books PQPhilosophical Quarterly PRPhilosophical Review RIPReview Internationale de Philosophie RMReview of Metaphysics TLSTimes Literary Supplement Other abbreviations should be obvious enough, and mainly fol· low the British Standard (no. 4148). BAGOLINI, L. 'Legal Obligation in Hume', Hume Studies 7, 85-93. BAIER, A. 'Frankena and Hume on Points of View', The Monist 64, 342-58. BATTERSBY, C. 'An Enquiry concerning the Humean Woman', Philosophy 56, 303-12. 173. BEAUCHAMP, T. L. & ROSENBERG, A. Hume and the Problem of Causation, (xxv, 340 pp.) New York. [PB 23 (1982) 129-48 (Mackie, Flew, Beauchamp & Rosenberg) ] BOTWINICK, A. 'Hume on Is-Ought', Auslegung 8, 19-30. BURNS, R. M. The Great Debate on Miracles, esp. chs. 6-8. Lewisburg, London & Toronto. COSTA, M. J. 'Hume and Justified Belief, Can. J. Phil. 11, 219-28. CRONIN, R. Shelley's Poetic Thoughts, 77-83. London. DE MARTELAERE, P. 'Hume's "Gematigd" Scepticisme: Futiel of Fataal', Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 43, 427-64. DILMAN, I. Studies in Language and Reason, chs. 4-5. London. FARR, W. Hume and Kant: Studienbuch zum Erkenntsnisproblem. (250 pp.) Freiburg & Munich. FEINSTEIN, R. 'Some Problems in Humean Philosophy', Ind. phil. Q. 8, 527-32. FLAGE, D. E. 'Hume's Relative Ideas', Hume Studies 7, 55-73. GARCIA ROCA, J. Positivismo e Ilustración : La filosofía de David Hume. (304 pp.) Valencia. GARRETT, D. 'Hume's Self-Doubts about Personal Identity', PR 90, 337-58. GUPTA, B. 'Scepticism: Ancient "East" and Modern "West"', Ind. phil. Q. 9, 29-44. HAAKONSSEN, K. The Science of a Legislator, the Natural Jurisprudence? of David Hume and Adam Smith. Cambridge. HALL, R. 'The Hume Literature for 1980', Hume Studies 7, 184-90. íiARRISON, J. Hume's Theory of Justice. (xxvi, 304 pp.) Oxford. [THES no. 440 (3 Apr. 1981) 15] IMLAY, R. A. 'Hume's Of Scepticism with regard to reason: A Study in Contrasting Themes', Hume Studies 7, 121-36. JOHNSON, 0. A. 'Hume's "True" Scepticism', Pacific phil. Q. 62, 403-10. JONES, G. E. 'Vindication, Hume, and Induction', Can. J. Phil. 12, 119-29. 174. KING, J. 'Hume's Classical Theory of Justice', Hume Studies 7, 32-54. KULENKAMPFF, J. 'David Hume (1711-1776)', in 0. Hoffe, Klassiker der Philosophie, vol. 1, 434-56. Munich. LOEB, L. E. From Descartes to Hume, sec. 39 (354-63). Ithaca & London. MACLEOD, A. "Rule-Utilitarianism and Hume's Theory of Justice', Hume Studies 7, 74-84. MAHER, P. 'Probability in Hume's Science of Man', Hume Studies 7, 137-53. MALHERBE, M. 'Les études humiennes: anatomie et problèmes1, Archives de Philosophie 44, 637-71. MILLER, D. Philosophy and Ideology in Hume's Political ThoughtT (218 pp.) Oxford. [London Rev, of Bks 4 (1982), no. 7, 22-4; PB 23 (1982) 206-9] MONTEIRO, J. P. 'Hume's Conception of Science', JHP 19, 327-42. NEWMAN, R. 'Hume on Space and Geometry', Hume Studies 7, 1-31. NIELSON, H. A. 'Inference and Experience in Hume's Enquiry', Phil. Res. Archives 7, no. 1471. NORTH, T. 'What if I'm Indifferent?', Phil. Investigations 4, 24-37. PAPPAS, G. S. 'On McRae's Hume', Hume Studies... (shrink)

Contraception works by preventing fertilization of an egg or preventing implantation of a fertilized embryo. For those who believe pregnancy begins at implantation, contraceptives preventing implantation are not abortifacient. However, for those who assert that pregnancy begins at fertilization, any agent causing the intentional loss of an embryo, even prior to implantation, is abortifacient, both morally and for lack of a different term to describe the postfertilization, preimplantation loss. In the debate on this topic, much of the discourse on (...) both sides wrongly focuses on the opposing side's perceived ignorance in denying scientifically proven definitions rather than on the substance of the conflict. Indeed, both sides accuse the other of prioritizing its “subjective” views over “objective” facts. In this essay, we unpack the scientific, cultural, and religious factors that underlie this debate. We argue that the only way to move forward is to clarify our terminology and engage with the substance of the argument, rather than merely the rhetoric. (shrink)

In the opening sections of his Brahma-sutra-bhasya , Ramanuja makes a very forceful assault on Sankara's Advaita theory. This assault anticipates in a striking way modern western attacks on metaphysical religious positions, attacks which stem from Hume and are associated today with names like A. J. Ayer and Antony Flew. In this paper I wish to argue that certain aspects of Sankara's position, as enunciated in his Brahma-sutra-bhasya , suggest that Ramanunja's assault, and therefore by implication (...) a modern western attack on Sankara also, depends for its success on a misinterpretation of Sankara's views. I wish then to suggest a possible alternative interpretation of Sankara's Advaita in terms viable for today, drawing, though indirectly, on such writers as R. B. Braithwaite and R. M. Hare. An incidental implication of this paper is that these two philosophers of religion would meet less opposition from the religious if they were Hindu rather than Christian! A more important implication is that light could be thrown on the present religious controversy in the west by a study of Indian philosophy of religion, if only we were more disposed to treat it as a living tradition which might teach us something, rather than as an antique. (shrink)

Although a fascination with language is a familiar feature of 20th-century empiricism, its origins reach back at least to the early modern period empiricists. John Locke offers a detailed (if sometimes puzzling) treatment of language and uses it to illuminate key regions of the philosophical topography, particularly natural kinds and essences. Locke's main conceptual tool for dealing with language is 'signification'. Locke's central linguistic thesis is this: words signify nothing but ideas. This on its (...) face seems absurd. Don't we need words to signify things as well? But its very absurdity – our inclination to dismiss Locke as a 'linguistic idealist'– should signal to us that we have not yet understood Locke. Doing so must begin with an analysis of signification. Each of the three main interpretations on offer allows Locke to escape the charge of linguistic idealism, although they do so in very different ways. Locke's text also offers an influential account of linguistic particles, words like 'is', 'and' and 'if'. These signify, not ideas, but acts of the mind. These acts can either take place within a proposition, uniting its constituent ideas into a thought that admits of a truth-value, or they can take propositions as their objects, in which case they express attitudes like doubt, assertion and so on. Even this seemingly innocuous sketch of Locke's view is controversial, and many writers, from J.S. Mill onwards, have argued that Locke cannot make sense of propositional attitudes. Apart from the intrinsic interest of these questions, understanding how Locke thinks language works is a prerequisite for understanding his arguments against scholastic essentialism. It also illuminates later discussions of language in Berkeley, Hume and Mill. Author Recommends: 1. Losonsky, Michael. 'Language, Meaning, and Mind in Locke's Essay. ' The Cambridge Companion to Locke's Essay . Ed. Lex Newman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 286–313. In addition to making some original points, Losonsky provides an excellent overview of the three main competing positions on Lockean signification: the Fregean reading, the Scholastic reading and the Indicator theory (see entries 2–5 in the following). 2. Kretzmann, Norman. 'The Main Thesis of Locke's Semantic Theory.' Locke on Human Understanding . Ed. I. C. Tipton. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975. 123–40. Kretzmann's influential paper offers a broadly Fregean analysis, according to which primary signification is sense and secondary, reference. Locke can then avoid the charge of linguistic idealism, as it is not the case that words signify only ideas. 3. Ashworth, E. J. 'Do Words Signify Ideas or Things?' Journal of the History of Philosophy 19 (1981): 299–326. Ashworth rejects Kretzmann's view, partly on the grounds of anachronism, and sets Locke in his historical context. As she reads Locke, he holds a scholastic position, according to which signification amounts to 'making known' or 'expressing'. This preserves the portmanteau analysis of Kretzmann: words can primarily signify or express ideas, while secondarily signifying things. 4. Lowe, E. J. 'Language and Meaning,' chapter 4. Locke . London: Routledge, 2005. This is a spirited defense of Locke's claim that words signify ideas against contemporary prejudices. Like Ian Hacking (see entry 7 in the following), Lowe argues that Locke is not offering a semantic theory in anything like the contemporary sense; rather, he is concerned with explaining human communication. 5. Ott, Walter. Locke's Philosophy of Language . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. On the interpretation offered in chapter 1, Lockean signification is indication: words signify ideas in the same sense in which clouds signify rain. If this view is correct, Locke is departing from the particular scholastic tradition Ashworth focuses on, and embracing instead a tradition running from the Stoics through Thomas Hobbes. http://www.springerlink.com/content/xv362655719101n3/ 6. Winkler, Kenneth. 'Signification, Intention, Projection.' Forthcoming, Philosophia . http://www.springerlink.com/content/xv362655719101n3 Although previous commentators acknowledge the role of intentions in Locke's view (see especially Kretzmann's argument from the uses of words), Winkler claims that they are far more central to Locke's view than has been supposed. In particular, Winkler uses these considerations to criticize the indicator interpretation. 7. Hacking, Ian. Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975. Much broader in focus than these other works, Hacking's classic text has much to say about early modern views on language. Hacking argues that Hobbes and Locke do not, properly speaking, even have theories of meaning. Online Materials The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Locke, by William Uzgalis: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/ > The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Locke, author unknown: http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/l/locke.htm > Sample Syllabus Weeks 1–2: What is Locke's linguistic thesis? Is it a semantic thesis at all? Ashworth, E. J. 'Do Words Signify Ideas or Things?' Journal of the History of Philosophy 19 (1981): 299–326. Kretzmann, Norman. 'The Main Thesis of Locke's Semantic Theory.' Locke on Human Understanding . Ed. I. C. Tipton. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975. 123–40. Locke, Essay III. i–iii. Lowe, E. J. 'Language and Meaning,' chapter 4. Locke . London: Routledge, 2005. Week 3: Propositions and attitudes Locke, Essay III. vii. Ott, Walter. 'Propositional Attitudes in Modern Philosophy.' Dialogue 41 (2002): 1–18. Owen, David. 'Locke on Judgment.' The Cambridge Companion to Locke's Essay . Ed. Lex Newman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 406–35. If one wanted to explore whether and how Locke applies his semiotic theory in his anti-essentialist argument, one might add (or perhaps replace Week 3 with): Week 4: Applications Bolton, Martha. 'The Relevance of Locke's Theory of Ideas to his Doctrine of Nominal Essence and Anti-Essentialist Semantic Theory.' Locke . Ed. Vere Chappell. Oxford: OUP, 1998. pp. 214–225 Locke, Essay III. vi; III.xi. 4–22. Ott, Walter. 'Locke's Argument from Signification.' Locke Studies 2 (2002): 145–76. Focus Questions 1. What is a semantic theory? What do we want out of such a theory, and does Locke even purport to provide one? 2. What are the differences among the three main competing readings of Locke? What is at stake here? What, if anything, turns on which of them accurately captures Locke's view? 3. How does Locke think his linguistic thesis tells against competing views, such as those of the scholastics? 4. What is the difference between a proposition and a list? Can Locke account for this difference? 5. There is clearly a difference between merely thinking that the cat is on the mat and asserting that it is. Can Locke account for this difference? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HUME'S THEORY OF IMAGINATION* Historians of philosophy seem increasingly to agree with the view that David Hume is the greatest philosopher ever to have written in English. This high esteem of the Scottish empiricist, however, is a phenomenon of the last decades. As late as 1925 Charles W. Hendel could write "that Hume is no longer a living figure." And Stuart Hampshire reports (...) that in the Oxford of the Thirties the results of Humean philosophizing were regarded as "extravagances of 2 scepticism which no one could seriously accept." A cursory glance at the Hume bibliography edited by Roland Hall demonstrates that it has become standard practice in the English-speaking world to seek an understanding of Hume's arguments when analysing philosophical problems. Critical literature nevertheless continues to neglect the majority of his arguments. It is sufficient, I think, to mention Hume's remarks on space and time, his theory of emotions, his inquiries into the problem of justice, his economic writings and those on the psychology of roliqion. Dut 3 even in the frequently quoted passages of the Treatise Hume's central notion is not, in my opinion, at the heart of the analysis. Here I refer to Hume's remarks on the phenomenon of imagination (fancy). Although he mentions this curious faculty of our cognition on almost every page, there are only a few sporadic attempts at an interpretation of this "supreme Humean faculty." This may be due to the fact that until quite recently the 'problem of imagination' has hardly even belonged to the marginal topics of modern philosophy. This paper therefore attempts to demonstrate not only that Hume dealt with the phenomenon of imagination, but also that an analysis of this concept is of paramount significance for the understanding of his entire philosophy. In the first three sections three different faculties or functions of the imagination will be distinguished. Not only the artist's - 91 92. works, but also the insights of the scientist and the illusions of metaphysicians are, according to Hume, decisively based on this very cognitive faculty. Section 4 contains a brief discussion of the sceptical arguments of the Treatise, particularly of the Humean analysis of causation. Their impact on Hume's reflections on the problem of imagination is the topic of Section 5. I hope to prove that in the Enquiry Hume interprets these sceptical arguments differently than in the Treatise. While in his early work he feels himself exposed to Pyrrhonian doubts, he assumes the position of an 'academic sceptic' in the Enquiry. The concluding section eventually tries to determine which motives may have been decisive for Hume's change of opinion. I shall defend the thesis that in his late work Hume developed an 'ethics of belief on the basis of natural beliefs, in which the artistic capacity of the imagination assumes a decisive role in justifying philosophical and scientific propositions. 1. The Metaphysical Faculty of the Imagination In the Introduction to the Treatise Hume describes his endeavour as developing a propaedeutic basic science which should provide a better understanding of all products of the human mind (science, mathematics, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, politics). In the Abstract he calls his early work "a system of the sciences" (?7). Besides this empirical interest Hume saw the importance of justifying the choice of method, i.e. to extoll the experimental procedure as the only rational one. Metaphysical approaches are interpreted as products of a blind imagination. Beginning with the Introduction to the Treatise it has been a constant motive of Hume's philosophy to constrain metaphysics in order to make way for science. In the sections Of the effects of other relations and other habite (T106-117), Of unphilosophiaal probability 93. (T143-155), Of scepticism with regard to the senses (T187218 ), Of the antient philosophy (T219-225) Hume specifies those beliefs which, in his opinion, are based on figments of our imagination. He "had ^en that all the errors of philosophy arose from the fact that imagination determined men much more than they recognized - there could be no secure truth for him, then, until he had explored this aspect of the nature of man." He compares imagination to a ship which, having... (shrink)

Engaging, accessible, and up-to-date, this work introduces the central debates of English language philosophy since 1945. It begins with a brief description of philosophical debate during the first half of the twentieth century, offering fascinating discussions of writings by Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin, Quine, and Sellars. It then describes several ensuing philosophical debates that have shaped philosophical discussions since the 1960s, addressing the Davidson/Dummett debate on language; the Kripke/Lewis debate on possible worlds; the Popper/Kuhn (...) debate on the justification in epistemology; the debates on materialism, functionalism, and dual-aspect theories of mind; and recent work in moral psychology, metaethics, and normative ethics. It also includes a critical discussion of Rorty's metaphilosophical skepticism and pays extensive attention to writings of Strawson, Putnam, Evans, McDowell, Williams, Nagel, and many other contemporary philosophers. (shrink)

Is it possible for a liberal society to have an established church? After outlining the conditions for liberal establishment, I take from David Hume a secular argument in its favour that points to the moderating effect of establishment on religious discourse and practice. I examine the claim that state support for religion violates liberal equality, and argue that, with respect to state-provided public goods generally, what matters is that the whole package should be of roughly equal (...) benefit to each citizen; it is not required that every citizen should value each distinct good. I claim that religious establishment can have valuable effects for both believers and non-believers, and thereby count as a public good. I then examine the charge that establishment always conveys a message of disparagement to those outside the favoured church, making them into second-class citizens, as both Martha Nussbaum and Cécile Laborde have claimed. Understood as a claim about the experience of minority groups, however, it is unsupported by empirical evidence. Understood as an interpretative claim about the meaning of establishment, it fails to distinguish between privileging an institution and privileging the people attached to it. Finally, I point out that religious minorities may favour an established church as a shield against the pervasive secularism of most modern liberal societies. (shrink)

This volume brings together the published and the previously unpublished works on language by the seventeenth-century thinker George Dalgarno. His 'Art of Signs' - the earliest seventeenth-century work to attempt a fully elaborated universal language scheme - is presented here for the first time with a full English translation alongside the Latin. Also included is a further book-length tract, broadsheets, and correspondence, all of which provide the modern reader with better access to the ideas (...) of this original and stimulating thinker. (shrink)

David Hume is one of the most provocative philosophers to have written in English. His Dialogues ask if a belief in God can be inferred from what is known of the universe, or whether such a belief is even consistent with such knowledge. The Natural History of Religion investigates the origins of belief, and follows its development from polytheism to dogmatic monotheism. Together, these works constitute the most formidable attack upon religious belief ever mounted by (...) a philosopher. This new edition includes Section XI of The Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and a letter by Hume in which he discusses Dialogues. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Theological Empiricism: Aspects ofJohann Georg Hamann's Reception of Hume Hans Graubner The philosophical Enlightenment in Germany executed in none of its phases as clean a break with the theological tradition as the English and especially the French. To its very end it pleaded for a theology of Creation, however thin this plea had become, that is, for an adherence to the first article of the Creed. (...) On the other hand, a philosophical adherence to the second article, that is, to christology, had no chance left owing to the rationalist Bible criticism of the 17th and 18th centuries and was not considered a serious philosophical position in the controversy between natural religion and revealed religion. Its mere link-up with historic facts that were considered epistemologically inferior made it unthinkable in the eyes of the dominating rationalists. In 18th century Königsberg this controversy determined the life-long argument between Hamann and Kant. Hamann attacks Kant and the German philosophy ofthe Enlightenmentfrom the position ofrevealed religion. In doing so, he refers to David Hume from the very beginning. In Hume's thoughts Hamann saw a chance of regaining a serious position for the Christian religion, that is, of its christology, in philosophical discussion. Thisveryaim ofHamann's shows thathe proceeds fromcompletely different philosophical interests than does Hume. But there are certain basic attitudes that make it understandable why Hamann refers to Hume, even declares him to be his philosopher. These attitudes, which they have in common, maybe called criticism ofreason, epistemological empiricism, and subjectivism. In spite of these attitudes, which they share, the difference between their ways ofthinkingleads to Hamann's practise of not adopting any of Hume's ideas unchanged. Instead of speaking ofreception it would be better to speak ofa transformation of Hume's thoughts into the totally different world of Hamann's ideas. The latter is determined by at least three basic motives: Firstly, by the sharp criticism of an over-estimation of reason in philosophy. This criticism is directed both against the rationalism of the recognized German philosophy as well as against Hume's scepticism and Kant's transcendental philosophy. Secondly,- by his personally being affected by Christianity, which renders itimpossible for him to separate the personal from the theoretiVolume XV Number 2 377 HANS GRAUBNER cal, and philosophy from the way a philosopher sees himself and from his own historical background. Thirdly, by a concentration of all philosophical energy on language as the fundamental empirical and historical fact, which, for Hamann, becomes the centre of his theological, ontological and anthropological reflection. It is my intention to show how Hamann unfolds his basic motives by following certain ideas of Hume's, for example, the idea of geometry, that of belief and that of image. In the end I shall summarize Hamann's criticism of scepticism and point out the significance ofanthropomorphism in Hume's and Hamann's understanding ofreligion. Referring to the understanding of Hamann's Hume-reception so far, I want to emphasize three results: 1.Hamann's Hume-reception is due, above all, to his repeated study ofthe Treatise, which musthave begun earlier than was assumed before. 2.Hamann's reference to Hume is not restricted to the discussion of the concept of belief, but is far more extensive. 3.Neither is Hamann's Hume-reception a total "misunderstanding "1 of Hume nor is his passing-on of Hume's ideas to the German romanticism "a strange paradox"; rather it is a conscious transformation ofempiricism into a theology oflanguage, which has had an effect even on romantic and idealistic secularization. Now I shall come to my first point. I. Geometry After having finished his studies in Königsberg and before his conversion experience at London in 1758 that was to determine his whole life, Hamann, from 1752 to 1756, became a private tutor for two aristocratic families in Courland. During this time he definitely read the German translations ofHume's "Political Essays" and ofhis Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. That Hamann, who had a good command of the English language, knew even the Treatise at this time, can, according to my hypothesis, be gathered from his use of Hume's conception ofgeometry in an unpublished philosophic... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:F. R. Leavis (Modern Cultural Theorists)Stephen OgdenF. R. Leavis (Modern Cultural Theorists), by Anne Samson; x & 196 pp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992, $45.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.If it is an overstatement to say that the waves of change currently disturbing the teaching of English in universities originated from the splash made by F. R. Leavis at Cambridge beginning in 1933, Anne Samson’s (...) account of the theorist’s influence scarcely admits it. Her chapter titles—“Leavis and the Growth of English Studies,” “English as a University Subject,” “Literary ‘Theory’ and Constituting the Canon”—indicate not only the range of issues connected with F. R. Leavis’s name but also his significant involvement in their genesis.Samson’s book portrays Leavis as the efficient cause in the establishment of university English as a critical, or more accurately a diagnostic, enterprise. At an early professional cost (he was denied faculty appointment at Cambridge for five years), Leavis helped cut English curricula free from philology, languages, and classical studies; a responsibility Samson partially excuses by connecting Leavis’s motivating principles back through Matthew Arnold to Dickens and Carlyle and even to one “Reverend H. J. Rose, a leading figure in the founding of King’s College, London... declaring in a sermon delivered in 1826 that literature teaches ‘the wisdom of men better and wiser than ourselves’ and prepares for the ‘examination of those moral and intellectual truths which are not only the worthiest exercise of our reason, but most concern our future destiny’” (p. 12).This moralism Samson sees as the central and redeeming principle in Leavis’s system. Specifically, she identifies the Condition of England debate—over the state of culture and economics in a “‘technologico-Benthamite world’” (p. 63)—as the key to Leavis’s literary criticism, his influential journal Scrutiny, and his wide-ranging reform endeavors. “Literature mattered to Leavis because he believed it to be the means, above all others, of combating the ills of a mechanised, constantly changing world and of restoring the heritage of those dispossessed by the machine” (p. 3).Professionally asserting the primacy of criticism over scholarship, then in his writings making no distinction between the literary and the social, Leavis ultimately refused any separation between literature and life. Samson carefully [End Page 360] traces this development in Leavis’s general theory in order to bring out its easily-overlooked implication for the social position of a literary academic. She quotes this crucial passage from Leavis: “The critic... is as much concerned with the health of the mind as any doctor with the health of the body. To set up as a critic is to set up as a judge of values... For the arts are inevitably and quite apart from any intentions of the artist an appraisal of existence” (pp. 15–16). No longer a mere scholar, or the type of irrelevant empiric Leavis so hated in the person of C. P. Snow, the Leavisite theorist is the grand physician diagnosing all society’s ills. Literary artists and their writings, so far from forming the most important part of literature, become perfectly irrelevant—“quite apart”—with the medicocritic prescribing universally “of existence.”Samson’s treatment of Leavis is analytical, though enjoyably and consistently biographical. For instance, her final, and largest, chapter shows the moralist model of the literary critic (the “judge of values”) in action by detailing the history of Leavis’s complete reversal of estimation between T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. Leavis originally gave Eliot “hero-worship” (p. 162) and dismissed Lawrence as “mechanical” (p. 157). But concurrent with Eliot’s progress to Anglo-Catholicism, Leavis’s moral judgments overturned and, true to type, he increasingly censured Eliot’s writings by diagnosing problems in the man, while he grew to idolize Lawrence; ironically for “rescuing life from... inner mechanisation” (p. 169).Such inconstancy, here expressed in every word, Samson sees as an historical mark of character which places Leavis among the “Great Men of Ideas” (p. 172).Stephen OgdenSimon Fraser UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In this article, I examine the relation of religious language and public debate within the context of postsecularism and defend a falsificationist model. I argue that the postsecular public sphere ought to problematize four characteristics of modern thinking; the exclusion of truth and religious language, the asymmetry between religious and secular language, the essentialization of the secular and the religious and, lastly, the exclusivity and exhaustiveness of the secular and religious (...) as categories. Based on these four problematizations, I defend a falsificationist model for the admission of religious language in the public sphere and argue that we ought to allow citizens the right to use the language of their choice in the public sphere, provided that they also provide in their preferred language ‘conditions of falsifiability’, that is, those circumstances upon which the speaking party would accept their argumentation as void. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A History of Scottish PhilosophyManfred KuehnAlexander Broadie. A History of Scottish Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Pp. viii + 392. Cloth, $140.00.Alexander Broadie is well known to those who have an interest in Scottish Philosophy. His 1990 book, The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy: A New Perspective on the Enlightenment (Barnes & Noble), attempted to show that there were two great periods in the history of Scottish culture, (...) the "circle of John Mair" around 1500 and the so-called "Scottish Enlightenment" of the last half of the eighteenth century. Broadie argued that one could "trace a line of philosophical influence from Mair's circle to the philosophers of the Scottish enlightenment."The present book has a much wider scope. It is an attempt to tell the entire story of Scottish philosophy from its beginnings to the 1960s. The book has twelve chapters, including a short Introduction (1–6) and an even shorter Conclusion (365–69). The first philosopher discussed is John Duns Scotus. The next five chapters are called "The Fifteenth Century," "The Circle of John Mair," "Humanism and After," and "Scotland Moves into the Age of Enlightenment," which deals with Gershom Carmichael, George Turnbull, and Francis Hutcheson. Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9, which constitute the bulk of the book, deal with David Hume, Adam Smith, and The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries are treated relatively briefly under the titles "The Nineteenth Century: Ferrier to Seth" and "Realism and Idealism: Some Twentieth-century Narratives." The book has a fairly extensive bibliography and a very useful index.The summaries of the different philosophical positions are lucid, balanced, and fair. They provide very useful introductions to the thought of the philosophers discussed in the book. Someone interested in the background of Hume and Reid and looking for a first orientation could do a lot worse than consulting this book.I do have a problem with the way Broadie places the accents in his history. The two chapters on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries take up only about one sixth of the book, yet they are among the most interesting—at least for me. They would have deserved a more detailed treatment. The discussion of the Middle Ages and Humanism is rather long. The same holds for the eighteenth century. The discussion of Hume in particular, whose philosophy has received much attention of late, could have been significantly shortened. Thomas Brown, Dugald Stewart's successor, who is not as well known, but was a brilliant philosophical mind, would have deserved a section of his own—or so I believe. Since he did discuss Mair and his circle extensively in his earlier publication, this part of the book could also have been abbreviated. Whether Duns Scotus belongs in a "history of Scottish philosophy" I do not know. In any case, it appears that the concerns of his earlier book on The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy exercise an undue influence on the new book.I would have liked to hear a little more about what makes a certain philosopher a Scottish philosopher and what makes Scottish philosophy Scottish. It may well be impossible to write a national history of philosophy in the strictest sense of the word. Philosophy, perhaps still more than Literature and Literary Criticism, knows no national boundaries. As Lewis White Beck once pointed out, any national history of philosophy encounters the problem of figures whose importance transcends the limits of the philosophical discussion in any one nation or language: "No history of English or German philosophy can be understood [End Page 124] without Descartes," Locke or Hume, for that matter. A national history of philosophy may therefore "appear at best episodic, at worst arbitrary. Why not write a history of philosophy mentioning only men whose names begin with the letter 'p'?"Broadie believes that these philosophers "responded to each other partly because they were close by and partly because they were so interested in each other's thinking" (5). This context justifies us or "makes it appropriate to speak of Scottish philosophy, parallel to the way in which writers speak of German philosophy" (6). This point goes both too far and not... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 178-181 [Access article in PDF] Buddhist Perceptions of Jesus. Edited by Perry Schmidt-Leukel with Gerhard Koberlin and Thomas Josef Gotz, OSB. St. Ottilien: EOS-Verlag, 2001. 179 pp. The papers collected here represent a significant step forward in European scholarship on Buddhist-Christian relations. As Perry Schmidt-Leukel remarks in his helpful introduction, they are an experiment in correlating auto-interpretation and hetero-interpretation, introspection and extrospection.Each of the (...) first three sections—on China/Japan, Southeast Asia, and Europe—begins with a historical study. Iso Kern clears up some misconceptions about the Jesuits' approach to mission work in China, stating that they did in fact preach Jesus crucified (37) and the doctrine of Atonement (41) in the face of a grave danger that Christianity would simply be absorbed into Buddhism (33). Whereas Buddhism had no specifically religious clash with the state, Christianity did, and this was eventually sealed by martyrdom in both China and Japan. Introducing part 2, Heinz Murmel gives a sober reassessment of the vehement controversies between a certain segment of Buddhism and a certain type of Christianity in Ceylon. Only the high-caste highland nikayas were protected by the British (63); the more popular, rural Buddhists of the lowlands felt excluded and threatened and gave rise to what became known as "Protestant Buddhism." The "great debates" between bitterly anti-Christian monks and Protestant clergymen were not as important as the records may suggest, and even the fiery Anagarika Dharmapala later disclosed that he felt great devotion to Jesus. Finally, Frank Usarski reviews the heated debates between ill-informed Christians and overaggressive Buddhist converts such as Karl B. Seidenstucker as Buddhism established itself in Germany in the early decades of the twentieth century. The History of Religions school seemed to suggest that Christianity was culturally inferior to Buddhism, which was allegedly proved by Christian attitudes to [End Page 178] vegetarianism and the general anti-intellectualism of Christianity. Christianity was inauthentic, derivative, "Buddhism in Jewish garments" (120).Yet even Seidenstucker, the renegade Protestant, converted to Catholicism toward the end of his life.Each historical contribution is followed by an essay on the contemporary situation in the three regions, and these vary greatly in substance. Shizuteru Ueda offers a profound meditation on the significance of Keiji Nishitani for Buddhist approaches to Christianity. If Nietzsche posed the fundamental question of "life without why " (44-45), the thought of Meister Eckhart contains the answer (curiously, Ueda insists that this answer must be European, because Europe "determines the world" [47]). The "ground" on which we stand, interpreted as Nishida's "place (basho) of nothingness," is "ground-less." This is not nihilism but the overcoming of nihilism by nihilism, the shûnyatâ of shûnyatâ (46). Jesus as the Christ is the God/man and therefore the mediator, the absolute in history (53). He occupies the "place" (basho) of infinite openness, unconditioned ultimacy (55). He is thus unique, but not universal: the ultimate "for me" is not necessary "for the whole of mankind" (56). The actual encounter between Buddhist and Christian absolutes takes place in silence.Santikaro Bhikkhu, the friend and translator of Buddhadâsa Bhikkhu in the last eight years of his life, tells how his mentor gradually overcame his initial suspicion ofChristianity, perhaps because he was not confronted with colonial oppression as Dharmapala was in Ceylon. Distinguishing between "people language" and " dhamma language," he eventually arrived at a certain equivalence between the Christian God and Buddhist dhamma understood as a nonpersonal, nondual transcendent that is nevertheless not outside nature (85, 90). What Jesus the Teacher of Wisdom offers in the Sermon on the Mount, if practiced, is sufficient for salvation (93). In the perspective of dhamma language, however, the God of Christian convention is conditioned, and Jesus as Son of God cannot be unique. Though inconclusive and sometimes obscure because of Buddhadâsa's indifferent grasp of English, this is surely an astonishing journey for one who tried to understand each tradition, including his own, from the sources. It brought him fierce criticism from fellow Buddhists, however, who branded him a... (shrink)

Paul Russell begins his book by rightly noting, “almost all commentators over the past two and a half centuries have agreed that Hume’s intentions in the Treatise should be interpreted in terms of two general themes: skepticism and naturalism” (vii). The skeptical reading interprets Hume’s principal aim as showing that “our ‘common sense beliefs’ (e.g. belief in causality, independent existence of bodies, in the self, etc.) lack any foundation in reason” (4). The naturalist reading interprets Hume’s aims (...) according to the “science of man,” derived from experience and observation. As described in the Introduction to the Treatise, this science is meant to explain the “principles of human nature” and thereby put the other sciences “on a foundation entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security.” The “riddle” of the Treatise is how to understand the relationship between the skeptical and naturalistic dimensions of the work—dimensions that “seem to be equally essential to what [Hume] is trying to achieve,” but which nevertheless appear “inherently opposed and irreconcilable” (7). Russell puts forward a novel and challenging solution. He argues that the relationship of the skepticism and naturalism in the Treatise can be made intelligible when we see that “it is problems of religion broadly conceived, that hold the contents of the Treatise together as a unified work” (viii). “More specifically,” he goes on, “the direction and structure of Hume’s thought in the Treatise is shaped on one side by his attack on the Christian metaphysics and morals and on the other by his efforts to construct in its place a secular, scientific account of morality.” ...It is difficult to do justice in such a short review to the sophistication of Russell’s analyses. To take one of many examples, Russell explains how Hume’s theory of ideas, rather than something simply adopted from Locke and Berkeley, instead follows Hobbes and expresses irreligious intentions by defending skepticism about our knowledge of God. Russell shows how religious thinkers tried to respond to the claim made by Hobbes that we have no idea of God. Either they insisted that we have knowledge of God through reason rather than through the senses, or they defended the view that our idea of God comes from analogy with ideas of ourselves and of nature. Hume is largely silent about our idea of God, but it is clear, as Russell argues, that he is aware of these debates and that his theory knowingly undermines claims by religious thinkers to possess knowledge of God. We have no simple impressions from which we can derive the idea of God, nor do we have ideas of the divine attributes (power, unity, intelligence, etc.) sufficient to provide us with a clear idea of the divinity. ..... Any criticisms of The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise, however, must be placed within the broader take-away: this book is a triumph and a model for work in the history of philosophy. It offers a powerful reading of the Treatise and of Hume’s intentions in writing it, while also correct- ing common misunderstandings about Hume’s place in early modern thought. It deserves to be read by anyone interested in Hume or in early modern philosophy. (shrink)

David Hume's writings on history, politics and philosophy have shaped thought to this day. His bold scepticism ranged from common notions of the 'self' to criticism of standard theistic proofs. He insisted on grounding understandings of popular religious beliefs in human psychology rather than divine revelation, and he aimed to disentangle philosophy from religion in order to allow the former to pursue its own ends. In this book, Professors David W Purdie and Peter S Fosl decipher (...) some of Hume's most challenging texts for the modern reader, while preserving the sharp intellect and undaunted nerve for which Hume is famous. Hume's spirit is brought alive for contemporary times and his writing is made accessible for its intended audience: the general public."-- Back cover. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS Search for the Absent God: Tradition and Modernity in Religious Understanding. By WILLIAM J. HILL, O.P., MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, 0.P., ed. New York: Crossroad, 1992. Pp. 224. $27.50 (cloth). In presenting the fruit of a lifetime of exploration on the part of this theological craftsman of the highest merit, the editor has performed an unparalleled service. For William Hill is a clear and courageous thinker, and (...) one whose selfless editorial duties have perhaps curtailed his own writing over the years. Yet these essays make up for that, and afford younger students of theology a starting point for their reflections beyond the fads of the moment, yet seizing the challenge of contemporary proposals. His grasp of classical and of modern idiom, together with his range of reading, make him a theologians' theologian par excellence. For with his classical mentors he is concerned with conceptual coherence, yet equally anxious to respond to the anthropological perspectives of contemporary theological inquiry. Briefly characterized, the work brings Thomas Aquinas into dialogue with Heidegger and with Whitehead, using each of the latter figures to challenge an earlier " Thomistic" synthesis of the thought of Thomas Aquinas, and highlight dimensions of his theology hitherto left quite implicit. This creative recovery of medieval thought begins with an established interpretation of Aquinas's metaphysical transformation of the neoplatonized Aristotle of Avicenna: his insistence that esse {existing ) precedes essence (or possibility). The identification of God as that One in whom essence and existing are identical sets the stage for Hill's explicitly theological treatment of free persons, by analogy with the " persons " of the divine triunity: " each divine person ' posits ' the others as over and against himself and thereby posits himself in his hypostatic identity. What all this bases itself upon is the understanding that the Christian revelation of freedom as radically constituting personhood enables it to function as a category which surmounts the Greek dichotomizing of reality into contingency and necessity " (117). If the identification of existing with essence in God confronts Heidegger's critique of " ontology," Hill's use of classical trinitarian thought to suggest a fruitful distinction in human creatures between nature and freedom allows him at once to correct the caricature of Aquinas proffered by process theologians as "classical theism," and 521 522 BOOK REVIEWS also to profit by their criticisms of the use of hellenistic categories like impassibility in divinity. "The key... lies in the mystery of freedom. Abstractly, freedom is a property of nature, but its exercise is the pre· rogative of person as the existential instantiation of nature. The person viewed ontologically (as subject of the act of existing) thus determines itself though its nature to be the sort of person it is, viewed psychologi· cally and historically" (127). Finite natures need to negotiate all sorts of causal influences in effecting such a determination of themselves; not so " an infinite nature whose freedom is transcendent." Yet when that One freely determines itself to be source and goal of all, and espe· cially of rational creatures (cf. Summa Theologiae 1.2 Prol.), then " that choice is one of willing to be constituted, personally and so relationally, and in this sense to be determined, by other free beings" (127). So the God who (in Aquinas' idiom) is not "really related" to the world in the sense of enduring (in Hill's words) "passive influx," nonetheless freely relates to intentional creatures in such a way as to be responsive to their freedom. So his response to Moltmann's conten· tion that God suffers " in his very deity " is an explicitly Christological one: "first, that God remains immutable and impassible in his own intrinsic godhead, so that his genuine love for creatures cannot entail suffering within divinity as such; but second, that God does choose to enter personally and relationally into the heart of humankind's suffering in his transcendentally free and loving response to it. God truly suffers... in and through his humanity which is one with the humanity of all men and women" (162). If this resolution sounds "classical," it is, both in its concern for conceptual coherence and for bringing out the radical implications of doctrines like that of Chalcedon... (shrink)