The 2018 Varsity Medical Ethics debate convened upon the motion: “This house believes that the constant monitoring of our health does more harm than good”. This annual debate between students from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge is now in its tenth year. This year’s debate was hosted at the Oxford Union on 8th of February 2018, with Oxford winning for the Opposition, and was the catalyst for the collation and expansion of ideas in this paper.New technological devices have the (...) potential to enhance patient autonomy, improve patient safety, simplify the management of chronic diseases, increase connectivity between patients and healthcare professionals and assist individuals to make lifestyle changes to improve their health. However, these are pitted against an encroachment of technology medicalising the individual and home, an exacerbation of health inequalities, a risk to the security of patient data, an alteration of the doctor-patient relationship dynamic and an infringement on individual self-identity. This paper will draw upon and develop these concepts, while contending arguments for and against constant health monitoring. This is not a review of medical devices and health monitoring, but a reflective development and more detailed elaboration of the main points highlighted in the 2018 Varsity Medical Ethics debate. (shrink)

Reform of the federal income tax system has become a perennial item on the domestic policy agenda of the United States, although there is considerable uncertainty over specifics. Indeed the recent report of the President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform recommended not one but two divergent policy directions. In Fundamental Tax Reform, top experts in tax policy discuss a wide range of issues raised by the prospect of significant tax reform, identifying the most critical questions and considering whether the (...) answers are known, unknown--or unknowable. The debates over tax reform usually concern the advantages and disadvantages of income-based taxation as opposed to any of the several alternative forms of consumption-based taxation. The book opens with chapters that discuss the strengths, weaknesses, and political feasibility of these options. Other chapters consider the effect of tax reform on businesses, especially their investment behavior, and include a discussion of possible problems in any transition to a consumption-based tax; international taxation issues arising in an era of globalization; and individual behavioral response to tax reform, including a view of the topic from the perspective of the relatively new field of behavioral economics. ContributorsRosanne Altshuler, Alan J. Auerbach, John W. Diamond, Harry Grubert, Arnold C. Harberger, Kevin A. Hassett, Thomas J. Kniesner, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Edward J. McCaffery, Kathryn Newmark, David Rapson, Daniel Shaviro, Joel Slemrod, James P. Ziliak, George R. ZodrowDiscussants James Alm, Henry J. Aaron, Charles L. Ballard, Leonard E. Burman, Robert S. Chirinko, Robert D. Dietz, Malcolm Gillis, Roger H. Gordon, Jane G. Gravelle, Timothy S. Gunning, James M. Poterba, Thomas S. Neubig, Alan Viard, George Yin John W. Diamond is Edward and Hermena Kelly Fellow in Tax Policy and Adjunct Professor of Economics at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University. George R. Zodrow is Professor of Economics and Rice Scholar at the Baker Institute and International Research Fellow at the Centre for Business Taxation, Oxford University. (shrink)

Legal norms serve as practical standards for individuals and officials. While this ‘normative aspect’ of law is widely acknowledged, its significance for theories of law remains contested. In this paper, I examine three views on the matter. First, that we should explain legal norms as reason-giving. Second, that we should explain legal discourse as being about reasons for action. Third, that we should explain law as capable of being reason-giving. I survey some challenges associated with each of these views. What (...) they have in common is an implicit assumption about the form that normative explanation must take: that it must be a linear, non-reductive explanation. There is an alternative model for normative explanation available, however. That model explains normative notions in terms of the practices and attitudes involved in recognizing, offering, and demanding them. I highlight the potentials, and limitations, of this practice-centered alternative. (shrink)

The desirability of what actually occurs is often influenced by what could have been. Preferences based on such value dependencies between actual and counterfactual outcomes generate a class of problems for orthodox decision theory, the best-known perhaps being the so-called Allais Paradox. In this paper we solve these problems by extending Richard Jeffrey's decision theory to counterfactual prospects, using a multidimensional possible-world semantics for conditionals, and showing that preferences that are sensitive to counterfactual considerations can still be desirability maximising. We (...) end the paper by investigating the conditions necessary and sufficient for a desirability function to be an expected utility. It turns out that the additional conditions imply highly implausible epistemic principles. (shrink)

Introduction: What is the critical spirit?--Utopianism, ancient and modern, by M.I. Finley.--Primitive society in its many dimensions, by S. Diamond.--Manicheanism in the Enlightenment, by R.H. Popkin.--Schopenhauer today, by M. Horkheimer.--Beginning in Hegel and today, by K.H. Wolff.--The social history of ideas: Ernst Cassirer and after, by P. Gay.--Policies of violence, from Montesquieu to the Terrorist, by E.V. Walter.--Thirty-nine articles: toward a theory of social theory, by J.R. Seeley.--History as private enterprise, by H. Zinn.--From Socrates to Plato, by H. Meyerhoff.--Rational (...) society and irrational art, by H. Read.--The quest for the Grail; Wagner and Morris, by C.E. Schorske.--Valéry; Monsieur Teste, by L. Goldmann.--History and existentialism in Sartre, by L. Krieger.--German popular biographies; culture's bargain counter, by L. Lowenthal.--The Rechtsstaat as magic wall, by O. Kirchheimer. (shrink)

We prove that modal logic formulated in a language with the cover modality is exponentially more succinct than the usual box-and-diamond version. In contrast with this, we show that adding the so-called public announcement operator to the latter results in a modal system that is exponentially more succinct than the one based on the cover modality.

The essays collected in this volume to honor Ernest Nagel reflect his wide interest in all topics relating philosophy to the natural and social sciences. The essays, written by distinguished philosophers and scientists form a mixed bag, but most of them are very good. The first part, "Science and Inquiry" begins with notes taken by Patrick Suppes of Nagel's lectures on Dewey's logic delivered in 1947. It follows with essays on knowledge by Stuart Hampshire, on intensions and the law of (...) inverse variation by R. M. Martin, and four essays on problems of induction and confirmation which contribute markedly to this well-worn field. The eleven essays of the second part, "Structure of Science" range from discussions of physics and ontology, mechanism and evolution to essays on functionalism in anthropology and ethics and legal theory. In between there are very good essays by C. Hempel on reduction, S. Morgenbesser on the realist-instrumentalist controversy, essays on the identity thesis, extensive measurement, causation and action, philosophy of language, and the differences between the natural and social sciences. Part three contains six essays on the role of values in various settings, e.g., ethical theory, the social sciences, legal theory and existentialism. The fourth and final part contains a variety of historical studies: Clagett on the quadrature of lunes in medieval science, I. Bernard Cohen on Newton, A. Koslow on the law of inertia, Charles Parsons on Kant's philosophy of arithmetic, Philip Wiener on a Soviet view of Peirce's pragmatism and S. Diamond on John D. Rockefeller and the historians.--R. H. K. (shrink)

Epistemic modals have peculiar logical features that are challenging to account for in a broadly classical framework. For instance, while a sentence of the form $$p\wedge \Diamond \lnot p$$ (‘p, but it might be that not p’) appears to be a contradiction, $$\Diamond \lnot p$$ does not entail $$\lnot p$$, which would follow in classical logic. Likewise, the classical laws of distributivity and disjunctive syllogism fail for epistemic modals. Existing attempts to account for these facts generally either under- (...) or over-correct. Some theories predict that $$ p\wedge \Diamond \lnot p$$, a so-called epistemic contradiction, is a contradiction only in an etiolated sense, under a notion of entailment that does not always allow us to replace $$p\wedge \Diamond \lnot p$$ with a contradiction; these theories underpredict the infelicity of embedded epistemic contradictions. Other theories savage classical logic, eliminating not just rules that intuitively fail, like distributivity and disjunctive syllogism, but also rules like non-contradiction, excluded middle, De Morgan’s laws, and disjunction introduction, which intuitively remain valid for epistemic modals. In this paper, we aim for a middle ground, developing a semantics and logic for epistemic modals that makes epistemic contradictions genuine contradictions and that invalidates distributivity and disjunctive syllogism but that otherwise preserves classical laws that intuitively remain valid. We start with an algebraic semantics, based on ortholattices instead of Boolean algebras, and then propose a possibility semantics, based on partial possibilities related by compatibility. Both semantics yield the same consequence relation, which we axiomatize. We then show how to lift an arbitrary possible worlds model for a non-modal language to a possibility model for a language with epistemic modals. The goal throughout is to retain what is desirable about classical logic while accounting for the non-classicality of epistemic vocabulary. (shrink)

According to a common judgement, a social planner should often use a lottery to decide which of two people should receive a good. This judgement undermines one of the best-known arguments for utilitarianism, due to John C. Harsanyi, and more generally undermines axiomatic arguments for utilitarianism and similar views. In this paper we ask which combinations of views about (a) the social planner’s attitude to risk and inequality, and (b) the subjects’ attitudes to risk are consistent with the aforementioned judgement. (...) We find that the class of combinations of views that can plausibly accommodate this judgement is quite limited. But one theory does better than others: the theory of chance-sensitive utility. (shrink)

Publisher's description: The realistic spirit, a nonmetaphysical approach to philosophical thought concerned with the character of philosophy itself, informs all of the discussions in these essays by philosopher Cora Diamond. Diamond explains Wittgenstein's notoriously elusive later writings, explores the background to his thought in the work of Frege, and discusses ethics in a way that reflects his influence. Diamond's new reading of Wittgenstein challenges currently accepted interpretations and shows what it means to look without mythology at the (...) coherence, commitments, and connections that are distinctive of the mind. (shrink)

Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going On To Ethics is a collection of seven essays, divided into three parts. The essays bring out connections between Wittgenstein's thinking and questions of continuing interest in the philosophy of language, logic, and ethics. A dialogue with Anscombe runs through the essays, which take up questions about how we should respond to thinking that has miscarried or gone off the rails. The main issues discussed in this book concern how we are to understand thoughts, forms (...) of words, and uses of language that seem crucially important to our understanding or self-understanding, but cannot fit in the template we instinctively bring to bear on questions about how language and thought are related to reality. The book presents Wittgenstein as a responsive philosopher, and it does this through a continuing dialogue with Anscombe. (shrink)

This essay is a critical review of two recent collections, Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, edited by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby and Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell. While the collections differ in their manner of addressing the critical sources that have inspired them-the former relying upon a single theorist, the latter attempting to move through some of the philosophical history that constitutes our present theoretical terrain-both attempt to (...) think through and thus revisualize some of the categories of difference which we have inherited. Though the best essays from these collections are celebrated for demonstrating how "feminism as critique" can work to move us toward a clearer and more inclusive feminist theory, questions are raised about what the inattention to race in these volumes suggests about our own role in the construction of power and knowledge, and the erasures that help to secure them both. (shrink)

This paper is a response to a certain sort of argument defending the rights of animals. Part I is a brief explanation of the background and of the sort of argument I want to reject; Part II is an attempt to characterize those arguments: they contain fundamental confusions about moral relations between people and people and between people and animals. And Part III is an indication of what I think can still be said on—as it were–the animals' side.

I want to argue for the importance of the notion human being in ethics. Part I of the paper presents two different sorts of argument against treating that notion as important in ethics. A. Here is an example of the first sort of argument. What makes us human beings is that we have certain properties, but these properties, making us members of a certain biological species, have no moral relevance. If, on the other hand, we define being human in terms (...) which are not tied to biological classification, if we treat as the properties which make us human the capacities for reasoning or for self-consciousness, then indeed those capacities may be morally relevant, but if they are morally significant at all, they are significant whether they are the properties of a being who is a member of our species or not. And so it would be better to use a word like ‘person’ to mean a being that has these properties , to bring out the fact that not all human beings have them and that non-human beings conceivably might have them. (shrink)

In Mortal Imitations of Divine Life, Diamond offers an interpretation of De Anima, which explains how and why Aristotle places souls in a hierarchy of value. Aristotle’s central intention in De Anima is to discover the nature and essence of soul—the prin­ciple of living beings. He does so by identifying the common structures underlying every living activity, whether it be eating, perceiving, thinking, or moving through space. As Diamond demonstrates through close readings of De Anima, the nature of (...) the soul is most clearly seen in its divine life, while the embodied soul’s other activi­ties are progressively clearer approximations of this principle. This interpretation shows how Aristotle’s psychology and biology cannot be properly understood apart from his theological conception of God as life, and offers a new explanation of De Anima’s unity of purpose and structure. (shrink)

I am concerned in this paper with a range of phenomena, which, in the first four sections of the paper, I shall suggest by some examples. In the last three sections, I try to connect the topic thus indicated with the thought of Stanley Cavell. First example: a poem of Ted Hughes’s, from the mid-50s, called “Six Young Men.” […] What Hughes gives us is a case of what I want to call the difficulty of reality. That is a phrase (...) of John Updike’s, which I want to pick up for the phenomena with which I am concerned, experiences in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability. We take things so. And the things we take so may simply not, to others, present the kind of difficulty – of being hard or impossible or agonizing to get one’s mind round. (shrink)

In “The Human Prejudice”, Bernard Williams discusses our treating human beings differently in our moral thinking from the ways we treat other creatures. He criticises the idea that this expresses a prejudice, speciesism, analogous to racism and sexism. His essay has been misunderstood by some of its critics, including Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan. My essay sets out several questions one may have about Williams's essay, and explains how they can be answered. I make clear the connections between “The Human (...) Prejudice” and some main elements in Williams's thinking about ethics, including his criticisms of moral theory. (shrink)

There is a natural view of nonsense, which owes what attraction it has to the apparent absence of alternatives. In Frege and Wittgenstein there is a view which goes against the natural one, and the purpose of this paper is to establish that it is a possible view of nonsense.

P.M.S. Hacker has argued that there are numerous misconceptions in James Conant's account of Wittgenstein's views and of those of Carnap. I discuss only Hacker's treatment of Conant on logical syntax in the _Tractatus. I try to show that passages in the _Tractatus which Hacker takes to count strongly against Conant's view do no such thing, and that he himself has not explained how he can account for a significant passage which certainly appears to support Conant's reading.

Increasing the “truth per dollar” of money spent on science is one legitimate long-run goal of the economics of science. But before this goal can be achieved, we need to increase our knowledge of the successes and failures of past and current reward structures of science. This essay reviews what economists have learned about the behavior of scientists and the reward structure of science. One important use of such knowledge will be to help policy-makers create a reward structure that is (...) more efficient in the future. (shrink)

My essay explains and examines Anscombe's disagreement with Wittgenstein about what the Tractatus supposedly excludes. I also discuss her apparent disagreement with Geach about propositions that lack an intelligible negation. My discussion of these disagreements leads to the topic of Anscombe on the relation between the “business of thinking” and truth. I suggest that she takes the business of thinking to include thinking that helps to keep thinking on track. Since there is a tie between thinking truly and the business (...) of thinking being done well and since helping to keep thinking on track belongs to the business of thinking, helpings-of-thinking can be described as true. (shrink)

I look at a disagreement between Elizabeth Anscombe, on the one hand, and Peter Winch and Ilham Dilman, on the other, about whether it is legitimate to call something an error that counts as knowledge within some alien system of belief; and I look also at the question what Wittgenstein's view was. I try to show that our understanding of what is real cannot be adequately elucidated if we consider only its role within language-games, and I argue that an important (...) element in our thinking about what is and is not real emerges in our response to conflicting modes of thought. (shrink)

We analyze the notion of guessing model, a way to assign combinatorial properties to arbitrary regular cardinals. Guessing models can be used, in combination with inaccessibility, to characterize various large cardinal axioms, ranging from supercompactness to rank-to-rank embeddings. The majority of these large cardinal properties can be defined in terms of suitable elementary embeddings j:Vγ→Vλ. One key observation is that such embeddings are uniquely determined by the image structures j[Vγ]≺Vλ. These structures will be the prototypes guessing models. We shall show, (...) using guessing models M, how to prove for the ordinal κM=jM) many of the combinatorial properties that we can prove for the cardinal j) using the structure j[Vγ]≺Vj. κM will always be a regular cardinal, but consistently can be a successor and guessing models M with κM=ℵ2 exist assuming the proper forcing axiom. By means of these models we shall introduce a new structural property of models of PFA: the existence of a “Laver function” f:ℵ2→Hℵ2 sharing the same features of the usual Laver functions f:κ→Hκ provided by a supercompact cardinal κ. Further applications of our analysis will be proofs of the singular cardinal hypothesis and of the failure of the square principle assuming the existence of guessing models. In particular the failure of square shows that the existence of guessing models is a very strong assumption in terms of large cardinal strength. (shrink)

Le chapitre 9 du livre de Michael Walzer, Guerres justes et injustes1, s’ouvre sur un paragraphe intitulé : « Soldats nus ». Dans ce paragraphe Walzer cite cinq histoires, toutes racontées par d’anciens soldats à partir de leur propre expérience ; ces histoires ont toutes pour sujet des situations dans lesquelles ils ont choisi de ne pas tirer sur des soldats ennemis, bien..

In her Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus , Elizabeth Anscombe took it to be a fault of the Tractatus that it excluded the statement “‘Someone’ is not the name of someone”, which she took to be obviously true. It is not a bipolar proposition, and its negation, she said, peters out into nothingness. I examine the question whether she is right that the Tractatus excludes such propositions, and I consider her example in relation to other propositions which, arguably at least, have (...) no intelligible negation. In considering the particular case of Frege’s response to Benno Kerry about the concept ‘horse’, I try to develop an account of the place in Wittgenstein’s philosophy for certain sorts of proposition which do not have an intelligible negation. (shrink)

My essay is concerned with two kinds of case of asymmetries in thinking about thought. If one says that there is nothing else to think but that so and so, one may mean either that there are no considerations which could make it reasonable to think the opposite, or that to think anything else is to be in a muddle, not really to be thinking anything. A case of the latter sort is important in Elizabeth Anscombe’s criticism of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, (...) while a case of the former sort is important for David Wiggins’s thought about truth in ethics. After setting out the issues, I examine Anscombe’s view and situate it in relation to ideas of Frege’s and Wittgenstein’s. I then turn to ethics and consider the relation between Anscombe’s view and that of Wiggins. (shrink)

There is a famous quip of F.P. Ramsey's, which is my second epigraph. According to a widespread legend, the quip is a criticism of Wittgenstein's treatment in the Tractatus of what cannot be said. The remark is indeed Ramsey's, but he didn't mean what he is taken to mean in the legend. His quip, looked at in context, means something quite different. The legend is sometimes taken to provide support for a reading of the Tractatus according to which the nonsensical (...) propositions of the book were intended to convey what cannot be said. But, since the legend has no basis in reality, it provides no evidence in favor of any such reading of the Tractatus. The quip has great interest if it is read in the context of Ramsey's discussion of generality; it is closely related to issues of importance in the development of Wittgenstein's thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Human Nature in Early Franciscan Thought: Philosophical Background and Theological Significance by Lydia SCHUMACHERJohn Marshall DiamondSCHUMACHER, Lydia. Human Nature in Early Franciscan Thought: Philosophical Background and Theological Significance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. xiv + 343 pp. Cloth, $120.00Lydia Schumacher’s recent work, Human Nature in Early Franciscan Thought: Philosophical Background and Theological Significance, is a welcome contribution to the study of the development of scholastic thought on the (...) subject of human nature. Schumacher’s work explores the various facets of theological anthropology in the first half of the thirteenth century by focusing primarily on scholars belonging to the Franciscan Order such as Philip the Chancellor, Alexander of Hales, and William of Auvergne, as well as early Dominican scholars such as Roland of Cremona and Hugh of St. Cher. Of central focus in the study is John of La Rochelle, whom the author notes “was the only member of his generation to deal robustly and comprehensively” with not only traditional questions on the soul but also matters of philosophy that had previously been considered beyond the purview of the theologian, topics that included the processes of the body and the psychological makeup of the human being. In addition, John was among the first to embrace the newly translated Arabic sources into his work, most notably the writings of Avicenna.The work is divided into eleven chapters, the first four of which provide a theological background on various authors and their views on the relation between the body and soul and the powers of the soul. The fifth and sixth chapters focus on two works of John of La Rochelle, the Tractatus and the Summa de anima, followed by a study of the reception of Averroes in the first half of the thirteenth century. The work concludes with chapters on the cognitive powers, the affections, free choice, and angels. Schumacher’s study is thorough, providing robust examinations of the individuals and topics, even those who are not central to the study, such as Roland of Cremona and Guerric of St. Quentin. [End Page 161]The book is well written and clearly elucidates the complex schemas of the topics at hand, particularly the nature of the intellect. This is particularly evident in the middle chapters, which examine the ideas of John of La Rochelle, in whose works one finds a multifaceted account of the human intellect. In addition, Schumacher notes an interesting facet of John’s view of cognition, according to which “the mind ‘predetermines’ or influences its understanding of the world.” Thus John’s theory of the act of human rationality, as Schumacher summarizes it, is “arguably achieved at the level of perception, and perception, in turn, is permeated and guided by reason’s quest to know the ‘thing in itself’ apart from matter.” John’s view is then briefly compared to that of William of Auvergne, who argued that perception is “virtually irrelevant” for human understanding. This comparison underscores the rifts that took place during the development of early thirteenth-century thought regarding the nature and function of the intellect as it underwent a profound change from traditionally Augustinian ideas to attempts to reconcile the former with the ideas found in the newly available works of Aristotle and his Arab commentators, namely, Avicenna.The only criticism one might have is that, at times, the chapters seem out of order. For example, after the two chapters that deal extensively with the works of John of La Rochelle, the following chapter is “The Reception of Averroes in Early Scholasticism,” which examines the possible sources “of the three-fold intellectual schema” that is found in John of La Rochelle’s works. Possible sources include not only Averroes but also Aristotle and Alexander of Aphrodisias, as well as two anonymous works that John knew and utilized. The chapter itself is presented effectively but makes the work feel somewhat disjointed. On occasion, readers might also find themselves wondering if Schumacher uses John of La Rochelle as a primary example of Franciscan thought in the early thirteenth century, or if the book is indeed about him, and the other figures are considered only to better explain John’s preceding and current... (shrink)

Dans son Introduction au Tractatus de Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe considérait que le livre avait le défaut d’exclure la proposition « “Quelqu’un” n’est pas le nom de quelqu’un » qu’elle considérait comme évidemment vraie. Ce n’est pas une proposition bipolaire et sa négation n’est pas intelligible. J’examine la question de savoir si elle a raison de dire que le Tractatu s exclut de telles propositions, et je considère son exemple en relation avec d’autres propositions qui, du moins en théorie, n’ont pas (...) de négation intelligible. En considérant le cas particulier de la réponse de Frege à Benno Kerry sur le concept de ‘cheval’, j’essaie de développer une approche de la place que donne la philosophie de Wittgenstein à certains types de proposition qui n’ont pas de négation intelligible. (shrink)

I explore a puzzle at the heart of the so-called ‘practice theory of rules’: how can rules, operating as normative standards, be determined by the very actions they govern? I demonstrate how this puzzle has shaped criticism of the practice theory and limited its ability to account for mistake and disagreement within social practices. I identify the reason for these difficulties: an exclusive focus on individual deliberative attitudes which ignores the dynamic interaction between plural and individual deliberation within social practices. (...) Drawing on recent work in social ontology, I construct a framework to capture this dynamism. I distinguish between two deliberative contexts in social practices: background rule-setting and foreground move-making. Social practices involve a complex interplay between these two contexts. With this, I account for the possibility of divergence between practices and the rules governing them, while at the same time retaining an analysis of social rules’ dependence on practices. (shrink)

This article explores the tension between competing discourses within the European Union, as this regional trading bloc seeks to capture further gains from market integration, whilst simultaneously attempting to soften the social impact of regional competition within its borders. This article analyzes the difficulty of maintaining the European social model, or a revised version of it, in the context of increased market integration. Through a close reading of two cases decided by the European Court of Justice in 2007, the article (...) interrogates the extent to which discourses on social rights at the EU level can be made sufficiently robust to ensure the application of international or national labor standards as a buttress against increasingly mobile capital, in order to prevent “social dumping." It concludes, however, that the terms on which the foundational texts of the EU integration project operate—elevating “market" rights to equal, fundamental, status with social and labor rights—means that the exercise of social rights such as the right to strike is ultimately contingent on their compatibility with market integration. (shrink)

Aristotle’s chapter on productive mind (De Anima III.5) and its comparison of this mind to light are best understood as a careful revision to Plato’s Sun-Good analogy from Republic VI. Through a rigorous juxtaposed reading of De Anima II.7 on vision and III.5 on thinking, one can see how Aristotle is almost wholeheartedly taking up Plato’s analogy between vision and thought. When one accounts for all the detail of Aristotle’s explanation of light and vision in II.7 by seeing that chapter (...) as anticipating III.5, an interpretation of productive intellect emerges which reconciles the main opposing views on the question that have long divided interpreters: whether the productive intellect discussed in De Anima III.5 is human or divine. (shrink)

Wittgenstein avait, pourrait-on dire, une « sensibilité religieuse ». Dans un essai vaste et perspicace sur Wittgenstein et la religion, Peter Winch a décrit l’attitude de Wittgenstein à l’égard de la vie ainsi que son regard sur sa propre vie d’une façon qui met en lumière leur caractère religieux [Winch 1994, p. 109-110]. Mais il n’est pas aisé de voir clairement quelles furent les opinions de Wittgenstein au sujet de la religion et de la croyance religieuse, opinions qui, de fait, (...) changère... (shrink)

Ce témoignage qui fut publié en anglais en 1972, a été traduit puis réédité par Rémy Casals pour l’inclure dans sa collection « Témoignages pour l’histoire ». Née et élevée en Australie, l’auteur, Christine Morrow, arrive en Europe en 1935 pour préparer sa thèse de doctorat à Londres et ensuite à Paris. Lorsqu’elle touche au terme de ce travail en mai 1940, elle se trouve en Bretagne quand les Allemands envahissent la France. Sa nationalité britannique l’oblige à fuir la zone (...) occupée pour tra... (shrink)

In recent years, the doctrine of the divine ideas has garnered the interest of both historians of Christian thought and systematic theologians, particularly their theological basis in the thought of St. Augustine and their eventual decline in the late middle ages. Despite this rise of scholarly interest in what was a commonplace view for centuries, there remains several lacunae of study in its historical study.This absence of research might be due to the usual story of the divine ideas tradition: the (...) divine ideas theory dominated Christian thought on both the epistemological basis of humankind's certainty and the ontological ground of her being, reaching its crescendo in the thought of the great Franciscan doctor... (shrink)

Each chapter in Encountering the Medieval in Modern Jewish Thought addresses a different Jewish return to the medieval by using a language of renewal.

Collingwood was hardly in danger. In 1939, when he wrote that, Festschrift volumes for British scholars were rare; for philosophers they were virtually non-existent. Whitehead had been given two, but then he had put himself at risk by going to America. Recently things have changed, and it is no longer safe to stay at home: half a dozen such volumes—at least—were published in honour of British philosophers between 1977 and 1980. But are they really a Bad Thing?

L'obtention du droit de vote en avril 1944 et une participation active à la Résistance semblent représenter le début de quelque chose de nouveau pour les femmes françaises. Etudier la vie quotidienne des femmes à Toulouse pendant et après la guerre - à travers des sources écrites et orales - montre que les années d'après-guerre, avec la réintégration des hommes, le rétablissement de la politique traditionnelle et le retour de la normalité quotidienne, ont poussé les femmes à reprendre leurs habitudes (...) d'avant-guerre dans l'espace domestique. Il semble que, paradoxalement, les conditions créées par la guerre aient fourni des possibilités nouvelles aux femmes. Elles ont eu accès à une certaine autonomie, ont mesuré leurs capacités professionnelles, ont assumé de nouvelles responsabilités, et elles ont exprimé leurs opinions politiques pour la première fois. (shrink)

: What does one do when the death of a parent demands reentry into an abandoned religious formalism? Raised in an orthodox Jewish home, schooled in the intricate discourse of rabbinic texts and yet long estranged from the ritualism of Jewish law, the prospect is maddening. Filial love compels a yearlong daily synagogue attendance where one recites a mourning prayer laden with myth and superstition. Kaddish is an exquisitely maneuvered headlong plunge into Judaism's expansive intellectual tradition. Thereby the current literary (...) editor of the New Republic fulfils his duty both as a Jew and a son, while never turning his back on another imperative he so cherishes "the moral obligation to be intelligent.". (shrink)

Every work on Jewish thought and law since the twelfth century bears the imprint of Maimonides. A.N. Whitehead's famous dictum that the entire European philosophical tradition 'consists of a series of footnotes to Plato' could equally characterize Maimonides' place in the Jewish tradition. The critical studies in this volume explore how Orthodox rabbis of different orientations--Shlomo Aviner, Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin (Netziv), Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Joseph Kafih, Abraham Isaac Kook, Aaron Kotler, Joseph Soloveitchik, and Elhanan Wasserman--have read and provided footnotes (...) to Maimonides in the long twentieth century. How well did they really understand Maimonides? And where do their arguments fit in the mainstream debates about him and his works? Each of the seven core chapters examines a particular approach. Some rabbis have tried to liberate themselves from the influence of his ideas. Others have sought to build on those ideas or expand them in ways which Maimonides himself did not pursue, and which he may well not have agreed with. Still others advance patently non-Maimonidean positions, while attributing them to none other than Maimonides. Above all, the essays published here demonstrate that his legacy remains vibrantly alive today. (shrink)

This paper explores Sean Kirkland’s thesis that relation is the fundamental concept in Aristotelian political philosophy. While substance is prior to relation in Aristotle’s metaphysics, Kirkland argues that since the human exists only in the context of a city which is defined by the essential diversity of views on the human good, relation precedes substantial unity in politics. I argue that the priority of the substantial unity of the city should not be seen to threaten the importance of political relations. (...) Already in his theoretical ontology, Aristotle sees relation as absolutely essential and integral to the identity and existence of any mortal individual. Because of the essentially dynamic and relational activity of any mortal substance, the city as political substance must include and preserve deep diversity and difference within itself. The priority of the substantial over the relational, which makes possible the constitutive power of relations in the life of substances, is as operative in politics as it is in metaphysics. (shrink)

If all differences in behavior are explainable in terms of universal values pursued under variable constraints, then much ethical theorizing is pointless. A strong presumption in favor of universal values can be established by showing that differences in behavior that were previously thought to be explainable only in terms of differences in values, can in fact be explained in terms of differences in constraints. Eleven such cases are briefly discussed, including cases of differences among racial, religious and other groups in (...) crime, culinary practices and the acceptance of innovation. (shrink)

In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza seeks to separate religion from philosophy and from politics. Yet the true metaphysical understanding of God remains relevant to a proper grasp of the state for Spinoza. Through identifying a common logical structure underlying Spinoza’s conception of God and the two subjects of the TTP - the relation of faith and reason, and the origin of the state and its relation to individual citizens – the paper attempts to demonstrate that Spinoza’s argument for the autonomy (...) of secular reason and the secular state in the TTP is inseparable from his metaphysical theology. (shrink)

The authors argue that there is a world within us filled with memories, perceptions, tastes, preferences, biases, and beliefs that have been encoded and are expressed on an unaware, largely non-conscious level but, nevertheless, alter the quality, substance and trajectory of our lives.

_Philosophy and Animal Life_ offers a new way of thinking about animal rights, our obligation to animals, and the nature of philosophy itself. Cora Diamond begins with "The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy," in which she accuses analytical philosophy of evading, or deflecting, the responsibility of human beings toward nonhuman animals. Diamond then explores the animal question as it is bound up with the more general problem of philosophical skepticism. Focusing specifically on J. M. Coetzee's (...) _The Lives of Animals_, she considers the failure of language to capture the vulnerability of humans and animals. Stanley Cavell responds to Diamond's argument with his own close reading of Coetzee's work, connecting the human-animal relation to further themes of morality and philosophy. John McDowell follows with a critique of both Diamond and Cavell, and Ian Hacking explains why Cora Diamond's essay is so deeply perturbing and, paradoxically for a philosopher, he favors poetry over philosophy as a way of overcoming some of her difficulties. Cary Wolfe's introduction situates these arguments within the broader context of contemporary continental philosophy and theory, particularly Jacques Derrida's work on deconstruction and the question of the animal. _Philosophy and Animal Life_ is a crucial collection for those interested in animal rights, ethics, and the development of philosophical inquiry. It also offers a unique exploration of the role of ethics in Coetzee's fiction. (shrink)

The idea of a fundamental difference between humans and animals may be used to justify subordinating animals to human interests. The presupposition that may need to be examined is that the moral relation to animals must be based on some fundamental property. Much of the discussion concerning animal awareness is framed in Cartesian terms, suggesting that a different perspective might be helpful in improving human-animal relationships and understanding.