This chapter contains sections titled: Philosophy in Non‐Philosophy Departments Definitions and Wittgensteinean Themes Tradition and Philosophy's Pitfalls Science, Poetry, Real Politics, and History: Antidotes to Scholasticism, and Their Side Effects Institutional Structures and the Road Not Taken Acknowledgments References.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Empty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural InterpretationEdward R. FallsEmpty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation. By Jay L. Garfield. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 306 + xi pp.Jay L. Garfield's Empty Words is a collection of (mostly) previously published essays bearing on the interpretation of Buddhist thought. Emphasizing the Indo-Tibetan tradition while indebted to Euro-American philosophy, Empty Words belongs in a class (...) with books such as Tom Tillemans's Scripture, Logic and Language: Essays on Dharmakīrti and His Tibetan Successors (1999) and Matthew Kapstein's Reason's Traces: Identity and Interpretation in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Thought (2001). Below is a précis of Empty Words, followed by remarks on some points that especially caught this reviewer's interest.The essays in Empty Words are gathered into three sections according to subject matter: (1) Madhyamaka, (2) Yogācāra, and (3) Ethics and Hermeneutics. There are five essays in section 1, clustered around three themes: Nāgārjuna's theory of causality (ch. 2, 4), parallels between Madhyamaka and the European skeptical tradition (ch. 1), and paradox in Madhyamaka (ch. 3, 5).Section 2 begins with an essay interpreting Vasubandhu on the three natures and three naturelessnesses, arguing that "Vasubandhu subordinates the naturelessnesses [End Page 196] to the natures pedagogically and describes them as characteristics of, but not (with the exception of the third) identical to the three natures" (p. 121). As for the other three essays in section 2, chapter 7 consists of a translation of and commentary on Vasubandhu's Trisvabhāvanirdes´a, chapter 8 presents an interesting experiment in cross-cultural interpretation in which the history of European idealism is viewed through a Buddhist idealist lens, and chapter 9 (one of the two previously unpublished essays in Empty Words—ch. 14 is the other) attempts to bring together Garfield's views on the limits of expressibility in Madhyamaka and his interpretation of the three natures in Yogācāra.Section 3 includes three essays concerning issues in ethics or political philosophy and two essays discussing the hermeneutical issues involved when Euro-American and Tibetan philosophers attempt to understand each other's traditions. The topics of the former essays are as follows. Is the Dalai Lama's advocacy of human rights (which are grounded in liberal moral theory) compatible with Buddhist ethics, which emphasizes a compassion-based morality (ch. 10)? Are Buddhist values and democracy incompatible (ch. 11)? How does Samdhong Rinpoche's approach to nonviolence relate to Gandhi's (ch. 12)? In the final two essays of the book, Garfield advocates a strategy of cross-cultural interpretation which would avoid the pitfall of orientalism, drawing heavily on Gadamerian-Heideggerian hermeneutics.The remarks that follow bear exclusively on points from essays in section 1 on Madhyamaka. In chapter 4, Garfield critiques the claim, attributed to Dharmakīrti (by rGyal tshab in his commentary on the pramānasiddhi chapter of Pramānavarttika) that belief in rebirth is necessary for the cultivation of bodhicitta. Garfield argues that if this claim is correct, then the "I" in the bodhisattva vow is doing real metaphysical work, functioning as the basis for a real causal relation, contra Nāgārjuna's analysis of causality (which is supposed to involve the rejection of real causal powers). Otherwise, a simpler account of bodhicitta would suffice, in which striving for personal enlightenment could be replaced by striving for someone's attaining enlightenment some time in the future. On this account, practitioners would resolve to contribute to the accumulation of causes of someone's eventually attaining enlightenment, where this accumulation of causes turns out to be something like "universal moral improvement."But what if practitioners just do not know how to bring about universal moral improvement? Garfield acknowledges that buddhas sometimes act counter to the "moral" good, and this suggests an important cognitive difference between buddhas and ordinary beings: ordinary beings can only (fallibly) infer what the best thing to do is, whereas buddhas simply know. Hence, the importance, from a practitioner's standpoint, of the Buddha's teaching, which is a path of personal attainment (and who knows whether it is incidentally a... (shrink)

This article offers the motivation for organising a conference on philosophy as it is practised across several faculties and departments at the University of Cambridge. It also offers an overview of the main themes that emerge in the essays collected in this issue of Metaphilosophy, which derive from the aforementioned conference. In particular it focuses on the risk of scholasticism and dogmatism that philosophy faces when it divorces itself from its own history, other disciplines, and real (...) life. It then discusses the potential problems that can arise from the practice of philosophy in close conjunction with other disciplines, such as the natural sciences and the history of philosophy. Finally, it briefly comments on how institutional/academic structures have an influence on the way philosophy is practised. (shrink)

Philosophy is an ambitious, speculative practice, aimed at finding out what wisdom is and how to attain it, in so far as that can be done by explicit discussion and argument. A likely pitfall of any such enterprise is that it loses touch with concerns in human life outside itself and becomes scholastic, in the pejorative sense. Academic institutions which encourage wide and outward-looking intellectual sympathies, and which do not reward narrow point-scoring specialism, are helpful in resisting the (...) tendency to scholasticism. The Moral Sciences Tripos at Cambridge might have provided some of the elements of such a setting, by framing an academic structure in which philosophy was studied in conjunction with other subjects in the humanities and social sciences. As things actually developed, that possibility was not realised. Nevertheless, philosophy at Cambridge maintained vigour and significance, through the intellectual freedom and encouragement it provided to some notable individual philosophers. (shrink)

It has long been shown that medieval builders primarily used geometrical constructions to design medieval architecture. The thought processes involved, however, have been considered to be remote from the natural philosophical speculations of the Scholastics, who, following Aristotle, had taken the basis of physics to be the study of dynamics, or change. However, investigations of the Expertises of Chartres, Florence, Milan, and other documents related to medieval building suggest that medieval architects, in speaking of their work, resort to recognizable dynamic (...) arguments, structured similarly to the speculations of Scholastic philosophers. These dynamic explanations of structural behaviour persist at least into the 17th century, but thereafter lost out to the arguments based on statics made by modern scholars attempting to explain the endurance of these structures. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of the relation between mortal and immortal time in the Iliad as it is represented by the physical act of falling. I begin by arguing that falling serves as a point of reference throughout the poem for a concept of time that is specifically human. It is well known that mortals fall at the moment of death in the poem, but it has not been recognized that the movement of the fall is also connected with (...) the time of birth, aging, and generation. In light of the significance of falling for mortals, I then go on to examine the problematic case of two particular immortals who fall in the Iliad. When Hephaestus tumbles down to earth from Olympus, and when Ares is knocked flat on the battlefield, both gods, I argue, also “fall into” human time. This complicates their status as ageless and eternal beings, and draws into question the different temporal registers at work in the narrative . The single action of falling brings together several key concepts in the poem which hinge on the issue of the separation between the mortal and immortal spheres in the Iliad. (shrink)

In this brief essay Stiegler synthesizes his critical approach to Simondon’s philosophy of individuation. He states his debt toward Simondon’s concept of a systemic indeterminacy in the processes of transindividual individuation, and focusses on his underdeveloped intuition concerning the role played by technics in anthropogenic processes. Situating himself in the phenomenological lineage of Husserl through Derrida, Stiegler explains his own “pharmacological” understanding of “technical individuation” as, at the same time, the intrinsic condition of individuation and the inevitable risk (...) of disindividuation defining the political as such. On this basis he critically extends Simondon’s understanding of religion and psychanalysis. This allows him to move beyond the political optimism implicit in Simondon’s “theoretical indecision” concerning the binding power of technical individuation yet relying on his very study of the question of individuation, which “is political through and through.”. (shrink)

This paper examines the shift from Scholasticism to Renaissance humanism by focussing on the Italian humanist, Gasparo Contarini (1483-1542). The politico-religious climate of 15th-16th century Italy represents the arena in which Contarini developed his philosophy. His studies at the University of Padova where Padovan Aristotelianism dominated reflected the basis of his intellectual formation. The Platonic revival of Renaissance Italy also made its way into Contarini’s humanist philosophy.

This paper discusses the establishment of a governance framework to secure the development and deployment of “good AI”, and describes the quest for a morally objective compass to steer it. Asserting that human rights can provide such compass, this paper first examines what a human rights-based approach to AI governance entails, and sets out the promise it propagates. Subsequently, it examines the pitfalls associated with human rights, particularly focusing on the criticism that these rights may be too Western, too individualistic, (...) too narrow in scope and too abstract to form the basis of sound AI governance. After rebutting these reproaches, a plea is made to move beyond the calls for a human rights-based approach, and start taking the necessary steps to attain its realisation. It is argued that, without elucidating the applicability and enforceability of human rights in the context of AI; adopting legal rules that concretise those rights where appropriate; enhancing existing enforcement mechanisms and securing an underlying societal infrastructure that enables human rights in the first place, any human rights-based governance framework for AI risks falling short of its purpose. (shrink)

A narrative history of Notre Dame's world renowned philosophy department, which divides the nearly 80 decades into three distinct periods: textbook Thomism, pluralism, and professionalism.

Let me begin with what may seem a very minor point, but one which I think reveals something about how many philosophers today conceive of their subject. During the past few decades, there has been an increasing tendency for references in philosophy books and articles to be formatted in the ‘author and date’ style (‘see Fodor (1996)’, ‘see Smith (2001)’.) A neat and economical reference system, you may think; and it certainly saves space, albeit inconveniencing readers by forcing them (...) to flip back to the end of the chapter or book to find the title of the work being referred to. But what has made this system so popular among philosophers? A factor which I suspect exerts a strong subconscious attraction for many people is that it makes a philosophy article look very like a piece of scientific research. For if one asks where the ‘author-date’ system originated, the answer is clear: it comes from the science journals. And in that context, the choice of referencing system has a very definite rationale. In the progress-driven world of science, priority is everything, and it's vitally important for a career that a researcher is able to proclaim his work as breaking new ground. Bloggs (2005) developed a technique for cloning a certain virus; Coggs (2006) showed how certain bits of viral DNA could be spliced; and now Dobbs (2007) draws on both techniques to develop the building blocks of a new vaccine. The idea is that our knowledge-base is enhanced, month by month and year by year, in small incremental steps (perhaps with occasional major breakthroughs); and in the catalogue of advances, the date tagged to each name signals when progress was made, and by whom. (shrink)

While intended more for intellectual historians than for philosophers or Harvardians, this book will be found valuable by all three of these groups, hitherto considered distinct. The author announces three themes: the Harvard curriculum of moral philosophy in the seventeenth century; the transition in that century from scholasticism to Cartesianism, as visible in the great change in Harvard texts from 1650 to 1710; and a more specific argument that the influence of eighteenth-century sentimentalism was prepared by seventeenth-century Puritan (...) religious thought. These themes are articulated in chapters that are roughly chronological and show the stages of the critical transition, or change, from Aristotle to modern moral philosophy. One should note that Fiering has also produced a sequel to this book, Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context, with the same publisher. (shrink)

Some self-knowledge must be arrived at by the subject herself, rather than being transmitted by another’s testimony. Yet in many cases the subject interacts with an expert in part because she is likely to have the relevant knowledge of their mind. This raises a question: what is the expert’s knowledge like that there are barriers to simply transmitting it by testimony? I argue that the expert’s knowledge is, in some circumstances, proleptic, referring to attitudes the subject would hold were she (...) to reflect in certain ways. The expert’s knowledge cannot be transmitted by testimony because self-knowledge cannot be proleptic. (shrink)

À partir d’une approche anthropologique des prises en charge médicales de la tuberculose et du paludisme, ainsi que des conceptions et usages de la prévention dans des milieux urbains d’Afrique de l’Ouest , ce texte interroge la nature du métier de soignant. Après nous être penchés sur les spécificités de ce type d’étude anthropologique en milieu médical, nous nous attachons à décrypter les processus d’occultations des singularités du malade qui caractérisent les messages et discours de prévention. Dans les structures de (...) santé, sont étudiées les négociations des normes de diagnostic et de traitement à l’œuvre ; les attitudes des soignants qui oscillent entre sur- et sous-estimations des risques sanitaires ; et le hiatus entre la demande et les besoins réels de formations continues. Enfin, nous nous penchons sur la rencontre entre les soignants et les malades qui peut se trouver transformée par les spécificités de la maladie et de son traitement. On constate alors que les fondements de la professionnalisation tendent à disparaître au profit d’un mode de régulation du rapport au malade, au collègue et plus largement au savoir médical qui témoigne de l’émergence d’une culture soignante qui est, de fait, une culture organisationnelle. Elle se caractérise à la fois par la délégation des tâches à des non-professionnels, la production et la résolution des conflits mettant en évidence des réseaux clientélistes ainsi que par une routinisation des gestes.Drawing on an anthropological approach of tuberculosis and malaria care in West African cities , and on an analysis of prevention modes, this paper examines the characteristics of medical work. We first examined the conditions of an anthropological field study in health care centres. The concealment of both patients’ singularities and populations’ specificities targeted in the prevention messages were then studied. The negotiation of diagnosis and treatment standards, and the under- and over-estimations of nosocomial risks were also analysed. We also focused on the gap between demands and actual needs for training, and on the relationships between health care providers and patients, which can be modified by the specificities of the disease. We noticed a decay of professionalization, a kind of regulation of relationships between health care workers and patients, and among medical staff, which expresses an emerging medical culture, which is also an organizational culture. Its main features are the delegation of tasks to non-professionals workers, a strategy of conflict management based on clientelism, and the development of routine action. (shrink)

Second scholasticism, ​analytical metaphysics, and Christian apologetics are the three topics characteristic of the lifelong efforts of the eminent Czech philosopher Stanislav Sousedík, who celebrated his 90th birthday in 2021. To honour this anniversary, a conference named accordingly was organized in Prague. The papers presented at this event — further elaborated by their authors and supplemented with Sousedík’s remarkable “Brief Autobiography” — constitute the gist of this book: a collective homage to Professor Sousedík and an attempt to promote and (...) develop his intellectual legacy. (shrink)

Most philosophers would agree that loving one’s romantic partner (i.e., being in love) is, in principle, a good thing. That is, romantic love can be valuable. It seems plausible that most would then think that the process leading to being in love—i.e. falling in love—can be valuable too. Surprisingly, that is not the case: among philosophers, falling in love has a bad reputation. Whereas philosophy of love has started to depart from traditional (and often unwarranted or false) tropes surrounding (...) romantic life, this tendency has not yet reached the analysis of falling in love. The phenomenon continues to be looked at mostly through a compendium of generalisations taken as metaphysical truths—the view of falling in love being akin to “losing one’s mind” or “not being able to think about anything else”. Here, I analyse some of these generalisations to show that although they may reflect some experiences of what falling in love feels like, they wrongly reduce falling in love to two related, but distinct, phenomena: limerence and infatuation. My aim is to refine the current terminology to lay the foundations for a neutral view of falling in love. (shrink)

As a 4th century BCE Confucian text, Mencius provides a rich reflection on moral emotions, such as empathy and compassion, and moral cultivation, which has drawn attention from scholars around the world. This two-part discussion dwells on the idea of natural moral motivation expressed through the analogy of the four sprouts—particularly the sprout of ceyin zhixin (the heart of feelings others' distress)—as the starting point, the focus, and the drive of moral cultivation. In this paper, Part 1, I stress the (...) importance of holding an integrated view of the sprouts as consisting of three components: cognitive, affective, and motivational. Through examining scholarly accounts that do not adhere to such a view, I demonstrate why the integrative perspective is necessary for understanding the dynamic nature of human moral potential and the centrality of moral cultivation in Mencian ethics. (shrink)

It is necessary to distinguish between Boltzmann’s original lecture notes, his extemporaneous lectures, the fair copy of philosophy lectures 3 to 18 by an unknown hand which are mostly on mathematics, and the multi-published versions which only include lectures 1 and 2. There is a difference between his real thought in his notes (or “honne” in Japanese) and what seems to have survived in lectures 1 and 2 for public consumption (“tatamae”). We have stuck with honne, but where it (...) is too abbreviated to make initial sense, we have put it in grammatical and intelligible form as what we think he most probably intended or believed. It was precisely his linguistic philosophy and the relativistic and pragmatic way of presenting it which was largely suppressed or at least toned-down in the fair copy and published versions. Listeners remembered how witty he was when speaking, and the shortened published accounts are also interesting, but his first thoughts, his honne, before prudence set in will interest most readers, though alas as happens with notes there is also some extraneous material. In translating most of the notes for the first three lectures we have ended where mathematics begins to predominate. (shrink)

The problem of whether "Chinese philosophy" exists and deserves a place in Philosophy departments has not only remained unsolved but has even hardly led to any meaningful debate. The fact that repeated appeals to universality and fairness have largely remained unanswered indicates the limits of rationality in this matter. I have argued in the past that the futility of rational arguments is related to our emotional attachment to entities that fall beyond our control, such as the institutions where (...) we are trained, and that, like a family, shape our views on a subconscious level.1 This essay is not yet another argument in favor of Chinese philosophy, but turns to the institutional level, more specifically the European... (shrink)

The source and inspiration of French “eclecticism” in the first half of last century was historical; its immediate purpose, the reconstitution of philosophical doctrines of the past; its riper though remoter effects, the formation of a tradition which insisted on reinterpretation as an indispensable preliminary to further construction. And it is largely a result of this that we to-day find commonplace the declaration: “A peculiarity of systems that are epoch-making is that their influence should extend beyond their own generation, and (...) that they should prepare, as it were in secret, the thought that is to come.” So far as fuller and comparative scholarship have been applied to the elucidation of Cartesian philosophy and science, the results appear to fall into three groups. First, largely a result of the impetus of Cousin's teaching at the École Normale, there is the ample story of the development and modifications of Cartesianism in Bouillier's Histoire, and the Cartésianisme of Bordas-Demoulin. Later in the century, after the reaction against Cousin, come the invaluable study of Liard, insisting on the greater importance of Descartes' methodology and physics and the priority of the latter over his metaphysics, and the elegant monograph of Fouillee stressing the “voluntarist” tendencies in Descartes. (shrink)

The paper addresses the question of whether authenticity is a conceptual possibility for Dasein given Heidegger’s insistence in Being and Time that Dasein is necessarily fallen into its mode of everydayness and that fallenness is necessarily inauthentic. By exploring the relationship between Dasein and existentials, I reveal a structure of possibility in allexistentials that provides the seeming paradox a resolution. I use the concept of “logical existentialism” to explore what Heidegger may have meant when he talks of existentials and (...) I look at some passages from The History of the Concept of Time to read propensity as the substance of falling. In the process, l address and discard the only two real attempts in the secondary literature to cope with the paradox: that of Hubert Dreyfus and Rudi Visker.L’article se penche sur la question de savoir si l’authenticité est une possibilité conceptuelle du Dasein, étant donnée I’insistance de Heidegger dans Être et Temps à I’effet que le Dasein est nécessairement déchu dans ses modes de quotidienneté, et que la déchéance est nécessairement inauthentique. À travers I’exploration de la relation entre le Dasein et les existantiaux, je révèle une structure de possibilité dans tous les existantiaux qui permet une résolution du paradoxe apparent. J’utilise le concept d’ «existentialisme logique»pour explorer ce que Heidegger voulait sans doute dire par les existantiaux, et je considère certains passages des The History of the Concept of Time pour interpréter la propension comme substance de la déchéance. Ce faisant, j’aborde et rejette les deux seules tentatives de résolution du paradoxe dans la littérature secondaire: celle de Hubert Dreyfus et de Rudi Visker. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel’s Hermeneutics by Paul ReddingTerry PinkardPaul Redding. Hegel’s Hermeneutics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Pp. xvi + 262. Cloth, $39.95. Paper, $16.95.Following on the heels of fruitful reception of Kant at work in the last several decades in English-speaking philosophy, one of the most productive lines of interpretation of [End Page 327] Hegel has tried to reconstruct Hegel’s thought in light of its relation to Kantianism. Paul (...) Redding’s new work carries this line further. As Redding sets matters up, Hegel builds explicitly on the unfinished “Copernican” move in Kant’s work, which, as the “Copernican” metaphor suggests, stresses the way in which our particular perspectives on the world must be understood as located within a set of conditions that, although not themselves experienced, are conditions of that experience. It calls, that is, for an investigation of how and whether “subjective” and “objective” points of view relate to each other. The “communicative” interpretation of Kant’s “Copernican” move sets up the Hegelian development of it: For one agent to be able to understand the claims of another’s experience, he must be able to conceive the other as an object-agent in the world and a subjective-agent that has a point of view on the world, and the other must likewise see him in the same way. Redding’s thesis is that Hegel appropriated the way that Kant, Fichte, and Schelling tried to provide such an account, and without falling into the pitfalls they did, developed a recognitive, “intersubjective,” theory of consciousness that successfully gives the proper account of how these two points of view are both necessary and relate to each other.Redding’s interpretation thus lays great weight on the short section of “master and servitude” in the Phenomenology as the key to the structure of all of Hegel’s thought. Each agent can recognize his own point of view only by virtue of recognizing the points of view of other agents, and this kind of recognition can arise when “an intention is common to subjects facing each other from opposed points of view” (111). The structure of recognition that emerges is, of course, quite complex and full of self-reflexive moments, but what emerges is Geist, spirit, the “I that is a We and the We that is an I,” which is not itself an entity having a point of view but a structure of self-conscious, mutually recognizing beings. Thus, at the basis of Hegel’s philosophy is a hermeneutical theory of how agents address and understand each other—that is, how they interpret each other’s acts, intentions, and expressions. Redding puts this interpretation to work in a short account of the progression of the Phenomenology, which he takes to be an account of the way in which the European community has historically failed to realize the kind of institutional and social structures of mutual recognition that would create the “conditions adequate for rational and free intentionality” (141) until modern times. The end of the Phenomenology—“absolute knowing”—is thus not the achieving of a “body of complete or final knowledge” but of the “(tragic) insight that particular and determinate bodies of knowledge are always conditioned and so perspectival” and thus calling for hermeneutical activities of interpretation (140).To make good on his account of the central status of “recognition” (and therefore of “hermeneutics”) to Hegel’s enterprise, Redding gives a short but quite insightful sketch of how Hegel’s notorious Science of Logic might be understood as a formalization of the logic of such recognitive practice, an account of how it is that agents can adopt these complex patterns of recognizing their own points of view as being recognized by others. Hegel’s Logic depends on the rejection of there being any “immediate” truths that can serve as absolute starting points or premises and from which we can then derive “mediated” true conclusions. There are no such “truths” outside of the circle of thought; this is, Redding argues, “characteristic of that ‘hermeneutic circle’ within [End Page 328] which, according to Heidegger and Gadamer, thought always moves,” namely, “a structure of reciprocal recognition... [as... (shrink)

Knowledge is power. Knowledge about human psychology is increasingly being produced using natural language processing (NLP) and related techniques. The power that accompanies and harnesses this knowledge should be subject to ethical controls and oversight. In this chapter, we address the ethical pitfalls that are likely to be encountered in the context of such research. These pitfalls occur at various stages of the NLP pipeline, including data acquisition, enrichment, analysis, storage, and sharing. We also address secondary uses of the results (...) and tools developed through psychometric NLP, such as profit-driven targeted advertising, political campaigns, and domestic and international psyops. Along the way, we reflect on potential ethical guidelines and considerations that may help researchers navigate these pitfalls. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Method in Ancient PhilosophyDavid K. GliddenJyl Gentzler, editor. Method in Ancient Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. viii + 398. Cloth, $72.00.The fifteen papers in this collection constitute revisions of conference proceedings and reflect the varied interests of participants. The ensemble exhibits a thoroughly modern methodology. Whatever and however various ancient methods of philosophy may have been, in Anglo-American scholarship it is standard practice to first (...) address established scholarly interpretations as the primary entry point to critical discussionóoften displacing antiquity with a critical vocabulary of philosophical modernity. Scholars may come to understand each other better, but at the risk of asking the wrong questions or sacrificing ancient texts themselves as mere means of producing papers.Most scholars are progressives. They believe philosophy has advanced past the comparatively primitive wisdom of antiquity, and so such scholars feel perfectly entitled to make better sense of ancient texts, by patiently explaining what the ancients would have meant had they only been able to get it right. There are, of course, exceptions. And some papers in this collection suggest deeper faith in our philosophic fathers. So, the battle between the ancients and the moderns is joined once more, between those who would adorn their papers with footnotes for their peers and those who would attempt more anthropological an inquiry into ancient philosophic practices.Ian Mueller and Robert Bolton each address the same passage in Plato's Phaedo, both beginning with an article from Vlastos, first published in 1969. Mueller thoughtfully explores three different yet related accounts of what we might call scientific method in explaining Plato's views on natural change. Bolton wonders whether scholars are asking the wrong questions. Patricia Curd attempts a progressivist account of Eleatic thought, notwithstanding her recognition of the paucity of ancient sources. Complete with elaborately numbered sentences, Gail Fine focuses primarily on Burnyeat (1976) on Plato on Protagoras. Constance Meinwald presents a rather near-sighted account of two passages in the Philebus that employ the peras-apeiron distinction, with a view toward Plato's allegedly modernist mathematization of understanding. Lesley Brown revisits five pages of the Sophist that were hotly debated in the 1960s. With charity and elegance, she offers several plausible solutions to puzzles posed by previous scholars. Sometimes time smoothes over differences.A. A. Long's essay on Plato's presentation of Socrates in the Theaetetus might appear more philosophically anthropological. Yet Long reveals progressive sympathies, suggesting that Plato dispatches Socrates in the Theaetetus, so as to prepare the way for a more rigorously academic form of philosophizing, such as that exhibited in the Sophist. [End Page 111] In this way, Long speculates, Plato abandoned practical ethics for the academic life of research, so familiar to university professors and conference participants. It might be hard to square such speculation with Plato's Laws and the reception of Plato's writings among his own contemporaries. Still, Socrates' shifting role in Plato's dialogues is well worth pondering.By comparison, T. H. Irwin's contribution is wonderfully old-fashioned. His paper addresses the background knowledge to be presumed by ancient readers of Plato's dialogues and how that knowledge is artfully put to use in Plato's depiction of Socrates' reflections on the unity of virtue. By speculating on Plato's relation to his ancient readers, Irwin displaces many modernist preoccupations, though not without himself falling victim to that peculiar scholarly obsession of dating Plato's dialogues by their doctrines.With characteristic conservatism, Gisela Striker cautions scholars not to over-read Aristotle's Prior Analytics. While that extraordinary work may have deep implications for the history of formal logic, it probably was instead intended to be part of a general account of argument. In a similar vein, Charlotte Witt attempts to rescue Aristotle from scholars who would delimit Aristotle's multifarious uses of the "for the sake of" explanation, which altogether pervade his metaphysics, physics, biology and ethics. Yet, Witt soon finds herself competing in a contest over interpretive distinctions, a sport that will certainly never capture Aristotle's own authorial intentions.Facing another mass of scholarship, in this case on Aristotle's dialectic, C. D. C. Reeve sensibly attempts to... (shrink)

This book analyses the process of development of Byzantine thought, which carries original solutions to fundamental philosophical questions and an original understanding of the world and humanity. The author defines the contents and characteristics of Byzantine philosophy, discusses the most important factors of its development as well as the role of Greco-Roman world and the place of Christian thinkers in this process. He also takes into consideration the Alexandrian school and the School of Antioch, the relationship between Byzantine (...) philosophy and Greek Patristics and the attempts to restore the Byzantine neptic thought after the fall of Constantinople. The study is based on Byzantine sources, written in Greek. (shrink)

Although there have never been so many professional philosophers as today, most of the questions discussed by today’s philosophers are of no interest to cultured people at large. Specifically, several scientists have maintained that philosophy has become an irrelevant subject. Thus philosophy is at a crossroads: either to continue on the present line, which relegates it into irrelevance, or to analyse the reasons of the irrelevance and seek an escape. This paper is an attempt to explore the (...) second alternative. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey: Idealist and Pragmatic Christians on Politics, Philosophy, Religion, and WarBradley BurroughsReinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey: Idealist and Pragmatic Christians on Politics, Philosophy, Religion, and War Kevin Carnahan Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010. 302 pp. $75.00.In a time when the “war on terror” and the polarization of American political culture have raised acute questions about politics, war, and the use of power, (...) Kevin Carnahan believes ethicists could benefit from the legacies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey. During a similarly vexed period, Niebuhr and Ramsey found themselves at odds over the morality of the Vietnam War. Carnahan’s project seeks to elucidate the underlying sources of this disagreement, examining in turn how each thinker construes the task of moral theology, the nature of political society, and the moral status of war. Throughout these treatments, Carnahan illustrates how Niebuhr and Ramsey elaborated “overlapping but divergent” positions profoundly influenced by their respective encounters with pragmatism and idealism.Even as he shows how Niebuhr modified the pragmatist inheritance and Ramsey the idealist, Carnahan highlights how both were shaped especially by the way in which these traditions sought to counter specific moral dangers. For pragmatists, the key danger lay in the kind of moral fanaticism that blithely assumes its own righteousness. Sensitized to this threat, Niebuhr articulated a moral theology centered upon an understanding of love as an ideal that is always relevant yet never fully realizable in history, a construal that subverts all pretensions to righteousness. Idealism, on the other hand, sets itself against the danger of atomistic individualism, which Ramsey opposed by depicting social institutions in their essential forms as “‘garments of skin’... with which God... clothed naked human relations” (129) and by characterizing love as fundamentally a matter of upholding the covenants implied in such institutions. Ultimately, Niebuhr’s opposition to fanaticism predisposed him to focus upon the idolatries at play in political society and war and allowed him rather early on to descry the pretentiousness of the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Ramsey’s thought included a presumption in favor of supporting the policies developed by social and political leaders that led him to defend American intervention in Vietnam until sometime around 1973. [End Page 218]The book’s expository work is generally surefooted and illuminative, although it at times falls into redundancy, baldly reiterating its thesis. Nonetheless, it complements existing scholarship on Niebuhr and Ramsey with an investigation of the philosophical premises of their ethical thought that each was eager to conceal. Such work will benefit scholars of Niebuhr and Ramsey as well as advanced students seeking to grasp the general architecture of their thought. Moreover, many will find Carnahan’s interpretations of Niebuhr and Ramsey impressive. For example, Carnahan portrays Niebuhr as a more Barthian and ecclessially minded thinker than most accounts. Although Carnahan understandably does not treat such indictments in detail, his rendering undercuts charges leveled by many of Niebuhr’s critics, including Bennett, Yoder, and Hauerwas. Unfortunately, though, Carnahan’s arguments on some of these disputed points are predicated upon a relatively narrow selection of essays. Still, the book unsettles assumptions and suggests further possibilities for inquiry.In addition to his expository work, Carnahan also makes a further contribution as he subjects both Niebuhr and Ramsey to constructive criticism that exposes—and identifies ways of reinforcing—some of the weaknesses of pragmatism and idealism. Eschewing a synthesis, Carnahan instead offers a mutually constructive dialogue capable of helping thinkers of both stripes think through the issues that confront contemporary America. Even if he does not elaborate on a more precise application of his insights to contemporary politics, he offers advice helpful to pragmatists and idealists alike and leaves many of us hoping that he has more to say on such matters. [End Page 219]Bradley BurroughsEmory UniversityCopyright © 2012 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Brian Lleiter : Leiter reports -- Jason Stanley : philosophy as the great naïveté -- Eric Schwitzgebel : the splintered skeptic -- Mark Rowlands : hour of the wolf -- Eric T. olson : the philosopher with no hands -- Craig Callender : time lord -- Kieran Setiya : what Anscombe intended and other puzzles -- Kit Fine : metaphysical kit -- Patricia Churchland : causal machines -- Valerie Tiberius : mostly elephant, ergo -- Peter Carruthers : mind reader (...) -- Joshua Knobe : indie rock virtues -- Alfred R. Mele : the four million dollar philosopher -- Graham Priest : logically speaking -- Ursula Renz: after Spinoza : wiser, freer, happier -- Cecile Fabre: on the intrinsic value of each of us -- Hilde Lindemann : no ethics without feminism -- Elizabeth S. Anderson : the new leveller -- Christine Korsgaard: treating people as end in themselves -- Michael Lynch : truth, reason and democracy -- Timothy Williamson : classical investigations -- Ernie Lepore : meaning, truth, language, reality -- Jerry Fodor : meaningful words without sense, and other revolutions -- Huw Price : without mirrors -- Gary Gutting : what philosophers know. (shrink)

Some Thoughts on Thinking is a work dealing with the issues one faces when one attempts to construct non-arbitrary beliefs about ourselves and our surroundings. The text opens up with a discussion of the similarities and differences between science, theology, philosophy and tradition. This initial discussion provides the foundation for a deeper push into what is, and what is not, a recommendable and non-arbitrary belief. No previous exposure to philosophy is assumed and the language of the work (...) is free of complex philosophical terms. (shrink)

Breaking Bad, hailed by Stephen King, Chuck Klosterman, and many others as the best of all TV dramas, tells the story of a man whose life changes because of the medical death sentence of an advanced cancer diagnosis. The show depicts his metamorphosis from inoffensive chemistry teacher to feared drug lord and remorseless killer. Driven at first by the desire to save his family from destitution, he risks losing his family altogether because of his new life of crime. In defiance (...) of the tradition that viewers demand a TV character who never changes, Breaking Bad is all about the process of change, with each scene carrying forward the morphing of Walter White into the terrible Heisenberg. Can a person be transformed as the result of a few key life choices? Does everyone have the potential to be a ruthless criminal? How will we respond to the knowledge that we will be dead in six months? Is human life subject to laws as remorseless as chemical equations? When does injustice validate brutal retaliation? Why are drug addicts unsuitable for operating the illegal drug business? How can TV viewers remain loyal to a series where the hero becomes the villain? Does Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty rule our destinies? In Breaking Bad and Philosophy, a hand-picked squad of professional thinkers investigate the crimes of Walter White, showing how this story relates to the major themes of philosophy and the major life decisions facing all of us. (shrink)

Background Implementation science presents ethical issues not well addressed by traditional research ethics frameworks. There is little empirical work examining how clinicians whose work is affected by implementation studies view these issues. Accordingly, we interviewed clinicians working at sites participating in an implementation study seeking to improve patient handoffs to the intensive care unit (ICU).Methods We performed semi-structured interviews with 32 clinicians working at sites participating in an implementation study aiming to improve patient handoffs from the operating room to the (...) ICU. We analyzed the interviews using an iterative coding process following a conventional content analysis approach.Results Clinicians’ greatest concern about involvement was possible damage to interpersonal relations with more senior clinicians. They were divided about whether informed consent from clinicians was necessary but were satisfied with the study’s approach of sending out mass communications about the study. They did not think opting out of the implementation portion of the study was feasible but saw this inability to opt out as unproblematic because they equated the study with routine quality improvement. Those clinicians who helped launch the study at their sites recounted several different ways of doing so beyond simply facilitating access.Conclusions The risks that clinicians identified stemmed more from their general status as employees than their specific work as clinicians. Implementation researchers should be attuned to the ethical ramifications of involving employees of varying ranks. Implementation researchers using hybrid designs should also be sensitive to the possibility that practitioners affected by a study will equate it with quality improvement and overlook its research component. Finally, the interactions that go into facilitating an implementation study are more various than the “gatekeeping” typically discussed by research ethicists. More research is needed on the ethics of the myriad interactions that are involved in making implementation studies happen. (shrink)

This syllabus was submitted to the Rhodes College Office of Academic Affairs by the course instructor.

During a controversial Weekend Update, David Spade made the following joke with an image of Eddie Murphy behind him: "Look, children, it's a falling star – make a wish." The crack came at a time when Murphy's career was hurting, and he took offense, refusing to return to the show for twenty years. Like most areas of philosophy, there are a plurality of views when it comes to familial ethics. In this chapter, the author takes this opportunity to consider (...) some of them, and to figure out what each view would say about the Spade‐Murphy family feud. Good news for the Rileys and the Combs, the two families from Dysfunctional Family Feud who can't get through a sentence without being nasty to each other, there is a view of familial ethics that might excuse their behavior. It is known as the No Special Obligations View. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.4 (2001) 322-334 [Access article in PDF] From Mysticism to Skepticism: Stylistic Reform inSeventeenth-century British Philosophy and Rhetoric Ryan J. Stark The idea of stylistic plainness captured the imaginations of philosophers in the seventeenth century. Francis Bacon's early attacks on "sweet falling clauses" and Thomas Sprat's invectives against "swellings of style" are especially quotable, and have been cited often by scholars from R. F. (...) Jones to Ian Robinson as evidence that a new attitude toward style emerged in the seventeenth century in conjunction with the new science. Still, even Robinson, who acknowledges the scientific influence on prose, cannot reconcile the plain style ideology with the less-than-sparse styles of the plain style advocates themselves. "The paradox," Robinson notes, "is that Sprat's language is itself imaginative and rhetorical," adding that Sprat denounced "the imagination... in a quite strongly imaginative way" with his "anti-rhetorical rhetoric" (160). This problem leads Robinson to charge that Sprat, Joseph Glanville, Bishop John Wilkins, and the other plain style advocates contradicted themselves by using highly metaphorical styles to criticize metaphorical styles, or were hypocrites in a stronger phrasing, even "painted hypocrites," to borrow a metaphor from one of Wilkins's complaints against metaphorical language.I will address this persistent argument that members of the Royal Society contradicted themselves by using elaborate metaphors to denounce elaborate metaphors, calling into question the very premise of the plain style mandates. The fact that members of the Royal Society continued to use figurative language in their writings is irrelevant. The plain style advocates did not attempt to remove figurative language from all discourses, or even scientific discourses. 1 "Plainness," instead, denotes a lack of occult influence in language. This forgotten philosophical meaning of "plainness" shows clearly that the plain style advocates did not share an antipathy toward ornamental styles, as is often suggested; rather, they shared an antipathy toward entelechial conceptions of style. The Royal Society's [End Page 322] arguments against obscure styles are arguments against the assumptions of a magical worldview, that enchanted cosmos occupied by Faustus and Macbeth, not arguments against any specific type of sentence structure or kind of metaphor. Technical issues of grammar and syntax played a minor role in these stylistic debates. In an ontological sense, the plain style advocates from Bacon to Sprat reconceptualized the very nature of linguistic form. This reconceptualization is best described as a movement away from mystical understandings of style and toward skeptical understandings of style, and this shift from mysticism to skepticism marks the stylistic reformation in the seventeenth century. 1. Entelechies and ornaments Bacon complains famously against "tropes and figures," "sweet falling of clauses," and "watery writings" in an introductory section of The Advancement of Learning entitled "Discredits to Learning from the Follies of the Learned--Ciceronianism, Scholasticism, Alchemy, and Natural Magic" (24-26). 2 Bacon includes a section for distempers of learning that do not fit neatly into categories, called "Other Errors of Learned Men Which Hinder the Progress and Credit of Learning." The coupling of these styles with alchemy and natural magic is not incidental. Bacon and the subsequent plain style advocates of the Royal Society target Ciceronian and scholastic styles specifically because of their strange cosmic elements, not because of their grammatical structures. For the new scientists, these vital styles recall a mystical worldview full of celestial influences, magical emblems, oneiric visions, and attendant spirits. The introductory section of Bacon's Advancement of Learning codifies in the newly scientific community the negative association between mysterious styles (e.g., Ciceronian, Senecan, baroque, metaphysical) and various kinds of occult behavior. Perhaps more so than any other English text, Bacon's Advancement banishes those mystical high styles of the late Renaissance to the mists and shadows of the credulous past, as Cowley describes in his "Ode to the Royal Society," to the "Kingdom of Darkness and Night" in Pope's Dunciad, or to "the island of savage women and moonlight" in Tennyson's "Locksley Hall."In Sciri Tuum Nihil Est, Glanville defends the plain style programs... (shrink)

This paper is about teaching philosophy to high school students through Lincoln-Douglas (LD) debate. LD, also known as “values debate,” includes topics from ethics and political philosophy. Thousands of high school students across the U.S. debate these topics in class, after school, and at weekend tournaments. We argue that LD is a particularly effective tool for teaching philosophy, but also that LD today falls short of its potential. We argue that the problems with LD are not inevitable, (...) and we offer strategic recommendations for improving LD as a tool for teaching philosophy. Ultimately, our aim is to create a dialogue between LD and academic philosophy, with the hope that such dialogue will improve LD’s capacity to teach students how to do philosophy. (shrink)

Der Beitrag handelt vom Verhältnis der Kantischen Ethik zur empirischen Psychologie seiner Zeit. Einerseits spricht Kant der empirischen Psychologie jede Bedeutung für seine reine praktische Philosophie ab. Andererseits bewegt sich seine Ethik wie selbstverständlich im Bezugsrahmen der Baumgartenschen Dreivermögenslehre. In ersten Teil wird Wolffs und Baumgartens psychologisches Fundament ihrer Moralphilosophie erörtert, im zweiten wird der Einfluß Hutchesons auf Kants praktische Anthropologie beleuchtet, im dritten und vierten Teil werden Kants Lehre von Wille und Willkür in ihrem Verhältnis zu Gefühl und Begehren (...) untersucht und die Gründe für die Irrelanz der Psychologie für die apriorische Bestimmung des Wollens durch das Sittengesetz angegeben.The article deals with the relationship between Kantian ethics and empirical psychology at that time. On the one hand, Kant rejects the relevance of empirical psychology for his pure practical philosophy. On the other, Kant's ethics most obviously fall into place within Baumgarten's theory of three capacities. The first part of the article discusses Wolff's and Baumgarten's psychological foundations for their moral philosophy. The second part explains Hutcheson's influence on Kant's practical anthropology. The third and fourth parts examine Kant's theory of will and choice in their relation to feeling and desire. The reasons why psychology is irrelevant for the a priori determination of the will by the moral law will then be indicated. (shrink)

Peter Cave once again takes the reader on a witty, engaging romp through a glorious compendium of philosophical puzzles. With the aid of tall stories, jokes, common sense, and bizarre insights, Cave tackles some of life’s most important questions and introduces the conundrums that will keep you pondering throughout the night. Illustrated with dozens of quirky cartoons, Do Llamas Fall in Love? leaves no stone unturned, covering a smorgasbord of topics including logic, ethics, art, and politics. It will provide a (...) perfect gift for anyone who puzzles about the world! (shrink)