Giddens's analysis of the writings of Marx, Durkheim and Weber has become the classic text for any student seeking to understand the three thinkers who established the basic framework of contemporary sociology. The first three sections of the book, based on close textual examination of the original sources, contain separate treatments of each writer. The author demonstrates the internal coherence of their respective contributions to social theory. The concluding section discusses the principal ways in which Marx can be (...) compared with the other two authors, and discusses misconceptions of some conventional views on the subject. (shrink)

For anyone wishing to understand the modern world, Marx's Capital is indispensable. It is also, unfortunately, a difficult book to read. Some of these difficulties are inevitable since the ideas are unfamiliar and complex, but it seems more forbidding than it really is and the reader who persists will find it worth the effort. The Guide is intended to be read in conjunction with Capital (though it can be read on its own). It goes through Marx's masterpiece, chapter (...) by chapter, setting each in the context of the whole and picking out the main threads of the argument. Each of Marx's technical terms if explained when it is first used and is also defined in the glossary for easy reference. The introduction outlines the development of Marx's thought and relates it to the philosophical, political and economic ideas of his time. The Guide does not take sides for Marx or against him. Its aim is to contribute to a better understanding of his work. (shrink)

Revitalizing the Classics is a lively introductory text that relates classical social theories to contemporary social events. This updated definition of "the classics" avoids the Eurocentrism and androcentrism of many textbooks of social theory by including both non-European and women social thinkers. Besides highlighting the work of Ibn Khaldun and first wave feminist scholars, this book utilizes interactive figures, original source sidebars and current illustrative examples to provide a critical alternative to the standard texts in the field. In the process, (...) Tony Simmons shows just how relevant classical social theories are in our present world, offering us analysis and clarification of a range of issues, from war, poverty and environmental destruction, to the sensory overload experienced in the digital age and even our personal relationships and interactions. Social theories are helpful - even necessary - to help us understand and, most importantly, be critical of the issues, systems and institutions in our world today. Revitalizing the Classics introduces students to a wide range of classical theorists and applies their theories to present-day examples: thus Durkheim's ideas are invoked to explore "anomie" in the digital world as well as the "altruistic" elements of suicide bombings in contemporary combat zones. Similarly, Ibn Khaldun's concept of "asabiyya" is used to explain the tribal code of the Taliban; Marx is summoned to explain the ever-widening gap between the rich and poor in Canada and around the world; and Pareto is enlisted to describe the "circulation of elites" in post-communist and post-colonial societies. Other sections explore and analyze the global war on terrorism and the Arab Spring. The book also includes a glossary of key concepts, giving readers an instant explanation of major terms and ideas used in each chapter. The combination of accessible writing and contemporary analysis provides a text that will empower readers to theorize and analyze many current events for themselves. (shrink)

This illustrated edition of Sir Anthony Kenny's acclaimed survey of Western philosophy offers the most concise and compelling story of the complete development of philosophy available. Spanning 2,500 years of thought, An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy provides essential coverage of the most influential philosophers of the Western world, among them Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. Replete with over (...) 60 illustrations - ranging from Dufresnoy's The Death of Socrates, through to the title page of Thomas More's Utopia, portraits of Hobbes and Rousseau, photographs of Charles Darwin and Bertrand Russell, Freud's own sketch of the Ego and the Id, and Wittgenstein's Austrian military identity card - this lucid and masterful work is ideal for anyone with an interest in Western thought. (shrink)

Here is the concluding volume of Sir Anthony Kenny's monumental four-volume history of philosophy, the first major single-author narrative history to appear for several decades. In this volume, Kenny tells the fascinating story of the development of philosophy in the modern world, from the early nineteenth century to the end of the millennium. Alongside (and intertwined with) extraordinary scientific advances, cultural changes, and political upheavals, the last two centuries have seen some of the most intriguing and original developments in (...) philosophical thinking, which have transformed our understanding of ourselves and our world. In the first part of the book, Kenny offers a lively narrative introducing the major thinkers in their historical context. Among those we meet are the great figures of continental European philosophy, from Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche to Heidegger, Sartre, and Derrida; the Pragmatists such as C.S. Pierce and William James, who first developed a distinctively American philosophical tradition; Marx, Darwin, and Freud, the non-philosophers whose influence on philosophy was immense; and Wittgenstein and Russell, friends and colleagues who set the agenda for analytic philosophy in the twentieth century. Kenny then proceeds to guide the reader lucidly through the nine main areas of philosophical work in the period, offering a serious engagement with ideas and arguments about logic, language, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, politics, and the existence of God. Graced with many beautiful illustrations, Philosophy in the Modern World concludes Kenny's stimulating history of the intellectual development of Western civilization, allowing readers to trace the birth and growth of philosophy from antiquity to the present day. (shrink)

_I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to start._ These are the opening words of Ernst Bloch's first major work, _The Spirit of Utopia,_ written mostly in 1915-16, published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years later, 1923, in the version here presented for the first time in English translation. _The Spirit of Utopia_ is one of the great historic books from the beginning of the century, but it is not an (...) obsolete one. In its style of thinking, a peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns, in its analytical skills deeply informed by Simmel, taking its information from both Hegel and Schopenhauer for the groundwork of its metaphysics of music but consistently interpreting the cultural legacy in the light of a certain Marxism, Bloch's _Spirit of Utopia_ is a unique attempt to rethink the history of Western civilizations as a process of revolutionary disruptions and to reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives to continue disrupting. The alliance between messianism and Marxism, which was proclaimed in this book for the first time with epic breadth, has met with more critique than acclaim. The expressive and baroque diction of the book was considered as offensive as its stubborn disregard for the limits of "disciplines." Yet there is hardly a "discipline" that didn't adopt, however unknowingly, some of Bloch's insights, and his provocative associations often proved more productive than the statistical account of social shifts. The first part of this philosophical meditation—which is also a narrative, an analysis, a rhapsody, and a manifesto—concerns a mode of "self-encounter" that presents itself in the history of music from Mozart through Mahler as an encounter with the problem of a community to come. This "we-problem" is worked out by Bloch in terms of a philosophy of the history of music. The "self-encounter," however, has to be conceived as "self-invention," as the active, affirmative fight for freedom and social justice, under the sign of Marx. The second part of the book is entitled "Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse." _I am. We are._ That's hardly anything. But enough _to start._. (shrink)

These twelve essays, together with the editor's introduction, examine the relationship of ideology to philosophy and politics. Part one deals with theoretical underpinnings of ideology: definitions are posited, and the relationship of ideology to thought itself, to use and abuse of theory, to social theory, to the epistemology of politics, to technology, and to political culture are discussed. Part two treats ideology in its historical context, dealing with the word as introduced by Destutt de Tracy in 1798 and looking both (...) forward and backward at such enquirers in the field as Aristotle, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Karl Mannheim, and Leo Strauss. The volume presents original and provocative insights into the meanings and uses of ideology, as well as into specific "ideologies." The essays will be of importance to students of philosophy and sociology of knowledge, political scientists, and historians. (shrink)

Following the collapse of the communist states it was assumed that Marxist philosophy had collapsed with it. In _Introduction to Non-Marxism_, François Laruelle aims to recover Marxism along with its failure by asking the question “What is to be done with Marxism itself?” To answer, Laruelle resists the temptation to make Marxism more palatable after the death of metaphysics by transforming Marxism into a mere social science or by simply embracing with evangelical fervor the idea of communism. Instead Laruelle proposes (...) a heretical science of Marxism that will investigate Marxism in both its failure and power so as to fashion new theoretical tools. In the course of engaging with the material of Marxism, Laruelle takes on the philosophy of Marx along with important philosophers who have extended that philosophy including Althusser, Balibar, Negri as well as the attempt at a phenomenological Marxism found in the work of Michel Henry. Through this engagement Laruelle develops with great precision the history and function of his concept of determination-in-the-last-instance. In the midst of the assumed failure of Marxism and the defections and resentment that followed, Laruelle’s non-Marxism responds with the bold declaration: “Do not give up on theory!”. (shrink)

Written by a team of distinguished scholars, this is an authoritative and comprehensive history of Western philosophy from its earliest beginnings to the present day. Illustrated with over 150 color and black-and-white pictures, chosen to illuminate and complement the text, this lively and readable work is an ideal introduction to philosophy for anyone interested in the history of ideas. From Plato's Republic and St. Augustine's Confessions through Marx's Capital and Sartre's Being and Nothingness, the extraordinary philosophical dialogue between great (...) Western minds has flourished unabated through the ages. Dazzling in its genius and breadth, the long line of European and American intellectual discourse tells a remarkable story--a quest for truth and wisdom that continues to shape our most basic ideas about human nature and the world around us. That quest is brilliantly brought to life in The Oxford History of Western Philosophy. With spectacular illustrations--including sixteen pages of full-color plates--this splendidly written volume takes the reader on a magnificient chronological tour through the revolutions of thought that have forged the Western philosophical tradition from ancient times to the present. Throughout, the six contributors--an internationally renowned team of philosophers including Roger Scruton, Anthony Quinton, and Anthony Kenny--bring the astonishingly diverse, wide-ranging landscape of intellectual history into sharp focus, emphasizing how notions seen today as part of an inevitable march of ideas were in their own time often considered radical, if not revolutionary. Thus we are treated, for example, to lively accounts of how Plato's "theory of forms" and Aristotle's pioneering exercises in logic broke with the past to irrevocably alter the course of Western thought. The authors also reveal the relationships between landmark thinkers, and the ways they drew on their intellectual heritage. They show, for instance, how St. Augustine and Aquinas, though advancing the cause of Christian doctrine, picked up where their pagan Greek forebears had left off. We witness how, during the Renaissance, the profound empiricist ideas underlying Descarte's famous utterance--"I think, therefore I exist"--lived in a tense but complementary relationship with Locke's rationalist theories. Moving into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the book explores how Hume greatly influenced Kant's conception of the "transcendental aesthetic," and how Hegel drew upon the lesser known (but groundbreaking) work of Fichte and Schelling. The authors bring the story up to our own time, vividly recounting the existential trend from Nietzsche ("God is dead") to Sartre, along with other increasingly fractious schools of thought. Along the way, we not only encounter the vast intellectual riches of the Western mind, but we also meet the personalities behind the great thoughts, from the saintly Hume (described by Adam Smith as having "come as near to perfection as anybody could") to the ill-mannered outcast Fichte. And the hundreds of maps and striking illustrations (including full-color reproductions of art ranging from medieval manuscripts to the works of Raphael, Ingres, and Magritte) form an integral part of the book, revealing the interweaving of art and ideas through the ages, as artists have striven to give visual immediacy to philosophical concepts. The Oxford History of Western Philosophy is the most authoritative single-volume account ever written for the general reader. Engagingly written and astonishingly far-reaching, it provides the consummate introduction to the intellectual bedrock upon which Western civilization is built. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the role of tragedy in the ancient emergence of philosophical interiority and in the recent return of exteriority that marks the birth of theory. I argue that tragedy names a kind of epistemic threshold between systems of knowledge predicated on exteriority and interiority. I conclude by arguing that Derrida's late effort to articulate a messianic model of the tragic in Specters of Marx and elsewhere, his effort to “think the ghost,” both confirms and complicates (...) tragedy's place in the history of theory. (shrink)

This collection of essays contains a selection of readings from the works of the pre-eminent social theorist, Anthony Giddens. A wide range of theoretical issues are covered, including the author's encounter with the writings of Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Parsons and Foucault.

This essay considers the spectacle of slavery that is death, and death only which continually persists as slavery-to-segregation-to-neosegregation or otherwise understood as a system of white-over-black. By observing the motionless movement of death perfecting itself (neither as life nor as historical time, progress, the human, or development), I argue that law makes death sovereign. The essay pursues this line of inquiry by considering a. capitalism as a system of spectacular relationships, a system of legal relationships, that places death atop everything (...) and as a faith expressed in the gospel of legal method and its false promise of perpetual progress. And b. law as a structure analogous to the unconscious since it exists outside of time. In placing these two concerns together, it considers a sort of magical thinking of law—a make-believe realm in which rules appear to somehow govern themselves and an ‘us’ that seemingly masks over and absolves the system of white-over-black. Such banishment, whereby the system of white-over-black banished from the realm of the spectacle, is by that act repatriated to and given sovereignty over the world of the real, the world of historical time. (shrink)

The Situationist International (1957-1972) was a small group of communist revolutionaries, originally organised out of the West European artistic avant-garde of the 1950s. The focus of my thesis is to explain how the Situationist International (SI) became a group able to exert a considerable influence on the ultra-left criticism that emerged during and in the wake of the May movement in France in 1968. My wager is that the pivotal period of the group is to be found between 1960 and (...) 1963, a period marked by the split of 1962. Often this is described as the transition of the group from being more concerned with art to being more concerned with politics, but as I will argue this definitional shorthand elides the significance of the Situationist critique of art, philosophy and politics. The two axes of my thesis are as follows. First, that the significant minority in the group which carried out the break of 1962, identified a homology between the earlier Situationist critique of art — embodied in the Situationist ‘hypothesis of the construction of situations’ — and Marx’s critique and supersession of the radical milieu of philosophy from which he emerged in the mid- 1840s. This homology was summarised in the expression of the Situationist project as the ‘supersession of art’ (dépassement de l’art). Secondly, this homology was practically embodied in the resolution of the debates over the role of art in the elaboration of the Situationist hypothesis, which had been ongoing since 1957. However, it was the SI’s encounter with the ultra-left group Socialisme ou Barbarie that would prove decisive. Via Guy Debord’s membership, the group was exposed to both the idea of a more general revolutionary criticism, but also ultimately what was identified as the insufficiently criticised ‘political militancy’ of this group. Indeed, in the ‘political alienation’ found in Socialisme ou Barbarie, a further homology was established between the alienation of the political and artistic avant-gardes. This identity would prove crucial to the further elaboration of the concept of ‘spectacle’. By way of an examination of the peculiar and enigmatic ‘Hamburg Theses’ of 1961, and the relationship between these ‘Theses’ and the Situationist criticism of art and politics worked out over the first five years of the group, I will argue that the break in 1962 should be conceived as one against politics as much as art (rather than just the latter, as it is more often represented). Additionally, I will outline how the SI, through the paradoxical reassertion of their artistic origins, attempted to synthesise their criticism of art with the recovery of the work of Marx beyond its mutilation as Marxism. Indeed, it was the synthesis of these critiques that enabled the considerable development of the concept of ‘spectacle’, opening the way to the unique influence the SI exerted in the re-emergence of a revolutionary movement at the end of the 1960s. (shrink)

Sir Anthony Kenny tells the fascinating story of the development of philosophy from the early 19th to the late 20th century. He guides the reader through the ideas of such great thinkers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Marx, Wittgenstein, and Russell. This volume concludes Kenny's magisterial New History of Western Philosophy.

L’édition de l’ Histoire du marxisme n’aura pas lieu en France. Pourtant le projet que mena à bien Einaudi en Italie au tournant des années 1970-1980 était un projet franco-italien, et même international, impliquant entre autres Eric Hobsbawm et Perry Anderson, qui garderont une rancœur tenace envers leurs homologues français. Cet article retrace, archives et entretiens à l’appui, la généalogie de ce projet avorté, voire, à tout croire, sabordé. La réalité est plus nuancée, et impose de tenir compte des stratégies (...) fluctuantes d’acteurs institutionnels, du monde de l’édition et de l’université, au gré des modes parisiennes, des opportunités culturelles, et des adversités politiques en France et dans l’espace international. Une attention particulière est portée aux dilemmes des acteurs individuels, portant ou bloquant ce projet, d’abord Lucien Goldmann et ses réseaux européens de théoriciens critiques (École de Francfort, gramsciens, humanistes d’Europe de l’Est), puis Pierre Nora, François Furet, Jacques Le Goff avec une équipe d’historiens internationaux, tournée vers les États-Unis, d’Arno Mayer à Moshe Lewin. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western CivilizationPaul A. RaheVictor Davis Hanson. The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization. New York: The Free Press, 1995. xvi 1 541 pp. Cloth, $28 (US), $38 (Can.).On the back flap of the dust jacket of this volume, one finds a photograph of its author. He is not represented in the (...) customary manner—as an urbane sophisticate attired in jacket and tie, leaning against a bookcase or sitting at a desk, his hair carefully combed, his beard immaculately trimmed. Instead, he stands slouched before a weathered, wooden structure. He is adorned with sunglasses and jeans; his hair is unkempt, even wind-blown; he sports a mustache and appears to be unshaved; his sleeves are rolled up; his shirttails hang out and they appear to be soiled. We can infer that the shirt’s owner is himself unwashed. Victor Davis Hanson wants us to see him less as a professor of Greek than as a rube—akin to the “dour husbandmen, ‘their facial expressions like sour vinegar’” (403) celebrated by Aristophanes (Eccl. 289–92).This is as it should be, for among classicists Hanson is sui generis, and his is no ordinary scholarly work. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and teaches Greek at California State University at Fresno. But that is the least of it—for, with his brothers and a cousin, he has long operated a family farm in the southern San Joaquin Valley. He knows more about agriculture of the sort practiced by the ancient Hellenes than anyone now alive, and he has devoted his career as a scholar to making sense of classical Greek civilization in light of that knowledge. Everything that he has previously published—in articles and book chapters, in his splendid dissertation Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece (Pisa 1983), and in his provocative monograph The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (New York 1989)—grew out of an attempt to make a whole of his divided life. The same can now be said for the book under review, which is nothing less than a masterpiece.Hanson makes no mention of Antonio Gramsci or even Karl Marx; and from the down-to-earth, resolutely empirical tone of his book, one can easily infer that he would have little patience with the elaborate theoretical posturings of either. But this notwithstanding, he can perhaps best be characterized as a heterodox Marxist. Put simply, he claims that late in the Dark Ages, Greek husbandmen invented a mode of production theretofore unknown and that in accord with the dictates of that mode of production, they elaborated the way of life and the institutions and practices that we commonly recognize as distinctively “Western.” The mode of production that Hanson has in mind is diversified farming [End Page 459] conducted in accord with the dictates of a primitive but nonetheless well-elaborated agronomy by slaveowning, resident proprietors.In the first part of his book Hanson surveys the archaeological and the literary evidence for early Greek settlement patterns and early Greek life; he examines with care the implications of what is said and of what is left unsaid in the last book of Homer’s Odyssey and in Hesiod’s Works and Days; and he draws together from the remaining literature every snippet of evidence pertinent to understanding what it was like to be a farmer in classical Hellas. At every point he is sensitive to information conveyed in the surviving evidence that city slickers, such as myself, inevitably overlook; and slowly, inexorably, piecing together fragments gleaned from a thousand sources, he builds up a persuasive picture of a transformation in agricultural technique more profound in its implications for human life than the Industrial Revolution.In the second part of his book Hanson traces the logic of ancient Greek constitutionalism and the otherwise inexplicable protocols of hoplite warfare to the special needs and peculiar outlook of agriculturalists eking out a livelihood from diversified farming and standing in need of protection for their property and their way of life against predators domestic and foreign. Finally... (shrink)

This paper explores the methodological foundations of Thomas Piketty's recent book Capital in the twenty-first century. The current literature on Piketty's work lacks consensus as to which paradigm of economic thought Capital fits into. In response to that literature, this paper argues that Piketty offers a new methodological direction for economic science in the form of an analytical 'new-historicism'. The central emphasis of this methodology is an analysis of general dynamic laws on three levels: distribution, institutions, and history. A new-historical (...) methodological framework applies new analytical tools to old economic problems raised by Smith, Ricardo, Marx, and others. This distinguishes Piketty's framework from other contending paradigms or schools of economic thought, thereby alleviating confusion in the current literature surrounding Piketty's book. (shrink)

Rousseau -- Karl Marx -- Dostoevsky -- Friedrich Nietzsche -- Henry Adams -- Emmanuel Mounier -- Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Signs and Wonders: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel. By R.A. Anderson. Pp.xvii, 158, Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans; Edinburgh, The Handsel Press, 1983, £4.25. Inheriting the Land: A Commentary on the Book of Joshua. By E. John Hamlin, Pp.xxiii, 207, Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans; Edinburgh, The Handsel Press, 1984, £4.75. Servant Theology: A Commentary on the Book of Isaiah 40–55. By G.A.F. Knight. Pp.ix, 204, Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans; Edinburgh, The Handsel Press, 1984, £4.75. God's Chosen (...) People: A Commentary on the Books of Amos and Lamentations. By R. Martin‐Achard and S. Paul Re'emi. Pp.viii, 133, Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans; Edinburgh, The Handsel Press, 1984, £4.50. The Parable of the Wicked Tenants. By Klyne Snodgrass. Pp.x, 140, Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr, 1983, 72 DM. The Johannine Paraclete in the Church Fathers. By Anthony Casurella. Pp.xiv, 258, J.C.B. Mohr Tübingen, 1983, 78DM. Sacraments and Liturgy: The Outward Signs. By Louis Weil. Pp.vii, 115, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1983, £9.50, £3.95. Le Sacrement de l'Ordination. By Joseph Lécuyer. Pp.281, Paris, Beauchesne, 1983, 150 Fr. Christ's Lordship and Religious Pluralism. Edited by G.H. Anderson and T.F. Stransky. Pp.viii, 209, New York, Orbis Books, 1981, £5.50. Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions. By Alan Race. Pp.xi, 176, London, SCM Press, 1983, £5.95. The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul. By Wayne A. Meeks. Pp.xii, 299, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1983, £15.00, £6.50. Antioch and Rome: New Testament Cradles of Catholic Christianity. By Raymond E. Brown and John P. Meier, Pp.xii, 242, London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1983, £5.95; Ramsey, Paulist Press, 1983, $9.95. The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians. By Rosamund McKitterick. Pp.xiv, 414, London, Longman, 1983, £9.95. The Medieval Reformation. By Brenda Bolton. Pp. 126, London, Edward Arnold, 1983, £4.50. Robert Grosseteste Hexaëmeron. Edited by Richard C. Dales and Servus Gieben. Pp.xxix, 374, London, for The British Academy by the Oxford University Press, 1983, £40.00. William of Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste. By Steven P. Marrone. Pp.xi, 318, Princeton University Press, 1983, £28.00. Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford. CM. Dent. Pp.viii, 262, Oxford University Press, 1983, £17.30. Paolo Sarpi between Renaissance and Enlightenment. By David Wootton. Pp.viii,192, Cambridge University Press, 1983, £20.00. The Jesuits in England from 1580 to the Present Day. By Francis Edwards. Pp.333, Tunbridge Wells, Burns and Oates, 1985, £20.00. Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom. By Alan White. Pp.xii, 201, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1983, £16.50. Sophists, Socratics and Cynics. By H.D. Rankin. Pp.263, London, Croom Helm, Totowa, Barnes and Noble, 1983, £17.95. Early Medieval Philosophy : An Introduction By John Marenbon. Pp.ix, 190, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983, £9.95. Aristotelian Aporetic Ontology in Islamic and Christian Thinkers. By Edward Booth. Pp.xxvi, 314, Cambridge University Press, 1983, £35.00. About Beauty: A Thomistic Interpretation. By Armand A. Maurer. Pp.135, Houston, Center for Thomistic Studies, 1983, $6.00. A History of Ideas and Images in Italian Art. By James Hall. Pp.xi, 415, London, John Murray, 1983, £17.50. Inconsistencies: Studies in the New Testament, the Inferno, Othello and Beowulf. By William Whallon. Pp.107, Woodbridge, D.S. Brewer, 1983, £15.00. The Language of Grace: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy and Iris Murdoch. By Peter S. Hawkins. Pp.xiv, 137, Cambridge, Cowley Publications, 1983, $6.95. Iulia de Beausobre. By Constance Babington Smith. Pp.xi, 195, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1983, £9.95. A History of Psychoanalysis. By Reuben Fine. Pp.xii, 686, New York, Colombia University Press, 1979, $31.20. Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan. Edited and translated by Stuart Schneiderman. Pp.viii, 265, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980, £12.60. Work: The Shadow and the Substance. By David Bleakley. Pp. 121, London, SCM Press, 1983, £4.95. M.R. James: An Informal Portrait. By Michael Cox. Pp.xviii, 268, Oxford University Press, 1983, £14.50. (shrink)

This paper examines the concepts of desert and luck, familiar in political theory but neglected by sociologists. I argue that the idea of desert is composed of both personal performance and the degree of responsibility a person has over that performance. Distribution ought to be in accordance with the indebtedness created by the person's performance. This can be compromised by luck; that is, personal desert is undermined where lack of performance scuttles the applicability of the contributory model. This paper examines (...) recent work, focusing on establishing desert criteria for each person's ends and life‐plans, and a formula for distribution according to personal welfare. (shrink)

The Sustainable Development Goals are an opportunity to address major social and environmental challenges. As a widely agreed framework they offer a potential way to mobilise stakeholders on a global scale. The manner in which the goals, with time-based targets and specific metrics, are set out within a voluntary reporting process adopted by both governments and business, provides a fascinating and important case for organisational studies. It is both about advancing performance measurement and evidence-based policy-making for sustainable development, and also (...) participation and consultation at a wider, more global scale, than has ever been possible before. This paper contributes to the notion of SDGs as a wicked problem, answering calls for deeper theorisation, via synthesis with core ideas in the management field of decision theory. A case study on the wicked problem of deforestation and its links to supply chains, multi-stakeholder initiatives and SDG reporting, provides an illustration of the relevance of the application of decision theory to wicked problems, presented using a novel conceptual framework. This helps to illustrate new avenues for research and practical application regarding the balance of technocratic and participative approaches for sustainable development. (shrink)

Note posted 9 Jun 08 : Modifications made today include a new section on predictive validity, and addition of recently published article and in in-press article, both by Nosek & Hansen, under the "CULTURE VS. PERSON" heading, which replaces a previously listed unpublished ms. of theirs. I continue to encourage all interested to send material that they are willing to be included on this page. Please also to let me know about errors, including faulty links.

An introduction to Reformed Epistemology.

The question of the extent to which one can rationally reconstruct the process of medical diagnosis and reduce it to an algorithm is explored. The act of diagnostic insight is such that a computational program cannot ‘catch on’ in the way that a competent diagnostician can. Clinical diagnostic reasoning in a particular case requires as a necessary condition an extraordinarily complex and rich structure of background knowledge as well as an intuitive element, such as is manifest when one ‘catches on’ (...) to a joke. Computers cannot ‘catch on’ due to their limitations in the computational mode. As a consequence, there can be no computer simulation of an essential element in diagnostic procedures. Keywords: clinical judgment, computer diagnosis, intuition, medical decision-making CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

There is an intimate relation between these two aspects of the judgment: the predictive judgment is certainly not a priori. It presupposes some antecedent judgment that the sugar in the spoon does taste sweet or that it did taste sweet. This does not necessarily presuppose the antecedent direct experience of tasting the sugar, for its antecedent could be an inferred judgment, or a communicated and believed judgment. But, on the other hand, neither is the produced judgment of an experienced sweetness (...) clearly a posteriori; for to determine that what was tasted is sweet involves a subtle interplay of expectation and antecedent definition of sweetness which is of the nature of the judgment event, and which is, broadly speaking, predictive. It would be terribly neat if predictions were clearly a priori and postdictions clearly a posteriori and both logical atomism and its correlate functional form, mechanism, would be able to build unassailable causal systems on such hard "givens.". (shrink)

Perhaps I should define what I mean by "ontological status" here, since much of the ensuing argument is concerned with it. I do not mean verifiability or confirmability in any reductive sense, physicalistically or phenomenologically, although it is perfectly clear that the description of how things exist requires such criteria. But to translate such criteria into ontological proofs, of the sort "what has effects, is real" is to fall prey to circularity. The alternative to such an apparently "inferred" ontology is (...) not necessarily pure, non-ontological descriptionism. Hume's suggestion was that "whatever we conceive, we conceive to be existent." In the context of Hume's conditional view of conception, such an attribution of existence to what we conceive is always probative, hypothetical. In this sense, the criteria for verifiability or confirmability also presuppose existence, even if only as the matrix in which hypothetical objects or events either do or do not have a place. If Hume's formulation is understood reflexively, then not only is what we conceive conceived to be existent, but the conception itself is conceived to be existent, since we can conceive of the fact of conceiving. This involves, of course, a distinction of levels, and the whole range of problems of metalanguages and types. For my purposes here, I shall only point out that, over the range of levels, what we conceive is neither more nor less existent than the conception itself; the empirical concept is neither more nor less existent than its extension. Existence is not a matter of degree, whatever the distinction of levels or types. Yet, there is a certain sense to the common sense appreciation that some things seem to be "more real" than others. What does break the circle of a uniform, non-modal existentiality, and makes sense out of the vaguely intuited "more real," is the hypothesis of derivative relationships between existences, i.e., the hypothesis of genetic sequence and the emergence of qualities in this sequence. In this sense, to establish the ontological status of judgment is to establish the derivative sequence of which judgment is the final term. Yet, to establish ontological status in this way, to say things are the way they have become, is to assume that genetic sequence ends, or is abolished in some instantaneous now, outside of which it is meaningless to speak of ontological status. To press this further, every genetic sequence can be differentiated into a series of "nows" each one of which paradoxically constitutes a final term in the series. As derivation has to do with coming-to-be, and apparently ends with being, in the partial sense of being constituted, so ontological status requires the additional parameter of function, as well as derivation; it requires us to speak of effects, which lie beyond the end term in any genetic sequence; to define what is also in terms of what "it" does, or what "it" becomes, or what "it" causes, or with operationism, in terms of "goings-on," without the antecedent subject-term. (shrink)

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I examine Jacques Maritain's views on the relationship between art and ethics or what is today called the ‘ethical criticism of art’, and examine what Maritain's thought can contribute to debates in contemporary aesthetics and wider society. In part I of the article, I approach Maritain's attempted reconciliation of artistic freedom and the demands of morality in three steps, first recalling Maritain's definition of art, second looking at Maritain's analysis of the extra-artistic concerns of the artist, and third offering a (...) critique of Maritain's views on why art is valued by the community and what justifiable moral claims of the community upon the artist might be—particularly regarding the method of production of artworks. Comparing Maritain's theories to those of contemporary writers in part II, I argue that Maritain's ethics of art can be used to complement Jacques Rancière's notions of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ and ‘artistic regimes’, and that, in the terminology of the ethical criticism of art, Maritain affirms a position which is a composite of ‘moderate moralism’ and ‘ethicism’—a position which is both explanatorily powerful in ascertaining how and why we recognise and value art, and flexible in accommodating changing artistic forms and practices. (shrink)