The warrant for investigating the relationship between Augustine and narrative ethics is prompted, among other things, by a consideration of the appeals to Augustine among a diversity of views within the vast field of narrative ethics. Disparate thinkers from distinctively different backgrounds and with different motives and purposes, while all sharing an interest in the category of "narrative," also share a common interest in employing Augustine's Confessions in their efforts. Thus the question emerges as to what it (...) is about this ancient text which so readily serves such diverse yet unified purposes. ;After a thorough investigation and evaluation of the appeals to Augustine among a sampling of contemporary narrativists I turn to the Confessions directly. I argue that an examination of the anti-Manichaean aspects of its composition yield important insights regarding its usefulness in the efforts of contemporary narrativists. Specifically, I argue that implicit in this work is a theology of creation which supplies essential foundations to the contemporary discussion of narrative ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BENEDICT, THOMAS, OR AUGUSTINE? THE CHARACTER OF MACINTYRE'S NARRATIVE CHRISTOPHER J. THOMPSON University of St. Thomas St. Paul, Minnesota Introduction I N HIS Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry1 Alasdair Macintyre continues (with certain modifications) in a similar trajectory established in two earlier works, After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Against postEnlightenment portraits of moral reasoning, he consistently defends a conception of practical rationality which entails (...) the recognition of tradition, authority, and narrative as constitutive components of any rationally determined moral enquiry. Despite the consistent appeal to tradition, there is a significant development within Macintyre's reflections regarding the pre-eminent resources we are to draw upon. At the end of After Virtue we are asked to await a "doubtless very different" St. Benedict. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? the Thomistic tradition emerges as the superior form of moral enquiry. While Thomism maintains a pre-eminence in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, I suggest that there is an increasingly Augustinian element emerging within his analysis and that this dimension underlies Macintyre's efforts in ways not previously specified. There is a warrant, then, for seeing within Augustine's efforts the paradigmatic "narrative form of moral enquiry." 1Alasdair Macintyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990). Hereafter RV. 379 380 CHRISTOPHER J. THOMPSON That Augustine figures in Macintyre's reception of the Thomistic tradition is not necessarily striking, for part of what fuels Macintyre's increasing enthusiasm for St. Thomas is precisely the latter's capacity to draw upon the best of the Augustinian tradition of enquiry. Beyond what Macintyre himself has overtly recognized as Augustine's contribution to the thought of St. Thomas, however, I suggest that elements of Augustine's thought directly influence much of Macintyre 's own attempts at restoring a kind of tradition-guided enquiry. This Augustinian strain, moreover, not only serves to highlight features of Macintyre's analysis of Thomism, but also brings to light certain theological presuppositions essential to the kind of moral enquiry Macintyre hopes to retrieve. The character of Macintyre's narrative, then, leads us to St. Augustine. In After Virtue it is largely the Aristotelian tradition of enquiry which he defends against rival post-Enlightenment theories of morality. He argues that the analytic, linguistic, and phenomenological tools brought to bear upon the task of formulating a coherent conception of the moral life and moral enquiry have failed miserably, principally for two reasons. The first is that such contemporary efforts have neglected to realize that moral enquiry is embedded in a broader context of social practices, practices which are inevitably historically conditioned; thus a failure to recognize the historically situated character of moral enquiry distorts that account. The second reason is related to the first in that failure to acknowledge the historical character of such enquiry has resulted in a failure to recognize that much of our contemporary terms and tools of moral analysis are remnants from previous contexts of enquiry which are no longer mutually agreed upon nor recognized as relevant.' What has been lost, among other things, is the teleological metaphysics which serves as the context for nearly two millennia in the West. Uproot the stock of ethical norms from this tradition 2 For this notion of "moral remnants" surviving beyond the historical contexts in which they emerge, see Alasdair Macintyre, "Ought," Chapter 15 in Against the Self Images ofthe Age (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 136-156, though in a different context and with very different effect. THE CHARACTER OF MACINTYRE 'S NARRATIVE 381 of enquiry and what remains is simply an amalgam of unrelated moral demands-some divinely sanctioned, some rooted in the passions, some the outburst of emotive whimsy-yet all lacking any coherent exposition.' The only hope is to retrieve something of the Aristotelian tradition of moral enquiry in which the notion of the virtues and the virtuous human person entails a conception of the moral life as bearing a narrative unity, a teleologically ordered whole in which one's actions bear an intrinsic unity and significance to the extent they complement one's telos. The narrative unity ascribed to the living of the good life is... (shrink)

The works of Ludwig Wittgenstein are notoriously difficult to interpret because of the peculiarity of their style and content. They are fragmentary and aphoristic. They are in some respects very personal. They treat philosophical problems as things to be overcome rather than solved. Wittgenstein indicates that their point is ethical. In an age when philosophy has primarily conceived of itself as systematic, scientific and objective these features of Wittgenstein's works appear as oddities. Commentators have frequently ignored the peculiarities of Wittgenstein's (...) works and have read the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations as contributing unproblematically to contemporary philosophical debates. ;If, however, we read Wittgenstein's works alongside of the confessions of Augustine and Tolstoy we can see them as contributions to a mostly forgotten genre of philosophical writing, namely, philosophical confession. In this way we can see more clearly that the aim of Wittgenstein's writing is transformation rather than philosophical doctrine and we can see the various peculiarities of his works as contributing to that conception of philosophy. Philosophical problems, for him, are the illusions of language and are therefore problems which are attached to the first-person point of view and problems of will rather than of intellect. The style of his writing is a response to the demands of this conception. ;The first chapter demonstrates that Wittgenstein read and took very seriously the works of Augustine and Tolstoy. It then brings out features of their confessions which are essential to understanding the form and content of Wittgenstein's works. The second chapter interprets the Tractatus in the light of Tolstoy's A Confession. The third chapter interprets the Investigations in the light of Augustine's Confessions. The fourth chapter suggests how we should understand the ethical dimension of Wittgenstein's works given their confessional character. In the concluding postscript, I briefly suggest how this discussion of Wittgenstein's works as confessional could be seen a contribution to a wider discussion of what sort of writing is legitimately philosophical. (shrink)

The problem of faith and knowledge is one form of this basic problem which has been especially congenial and troublesome to the Western mind since the beginning of the Christian era. For Western civilization is a marriage of two very different outlooks on life, Hebrew fideism and Greek rationalism. Neither has absorbed the other and neither has been able to dispense with the other. Like an unstable chemical bond, our society is a synthesis which is constantly threatened by unpredictable imbalances. (...) Instability is intensified by the fact that both Hebrew and Greek components of Western culture were themselves arenas of conflict between the stable and the dynamic. When Palestine and Greece came together in Philo and Augustine the old problem arose in new forms, the most distinctive intellectual form of which is the problem of faith and knowledge. (shrink)

Augustine of Hippo is notorious for arguing that evil is nothing more than a privation or lack of good. He also thinks that goodness is equivalent to existence and that there are degrees not only of goodness but also of existence. Critics have charged that such abstractions have no purchase in the concrete world of our experience. This article investigates what Augustine means by both goodness and existence in the illuminating context of his view that the world is (...) a dependent or derivative creation. It does so by showing how order (ordo) is a further correlate of both goodness and existence. Augustine points out the existence of two radically different realities: that which changes (creation) and that which is unchangeable (God the creator, identified as truth). For Augustine, the orderliness exhibited by the former constitutes both its dependence on the latter, and its goodness and existence: order is essentially an imitation of unchanging unity. This article therefore provides the framework for a more substantive and intelligible understanding of Augustine’s conception of evil, not only as lack but as disorder. More broadly, it shows that the idea of order is central to the metaphysics in which Augustine’s ethics is grounded. (shrink)

All the major sixteenth-century Reformers knew something about the early church and used the early Fathers. As an Augustinian monk and professor of theology, however, Luther’s knowledge and use of the great Father was both deeper and more nuanced. While indebted to Augustine, Luther went further in defining what it meant for theology to be ‘scriptural’. He saw history as the interaction of God’s two regimes, and the church of every age as weak and flawed but conquering through the (...) cross of Christ. This led him to a free use of the Fathers without being constrained to always agree with or imitate them. The comfort he received from the Apostles’ Creed in particular led him to appreciate the early creedal statements, and so it was natural for him to use them as models when formulating the new confessions required in his own day. The sixteenth-century heritage of written confessions of faith is a heritage under-appreciated but still vital for church bodies today.1. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 703 thing," and "doing, acting [having.] priority over intellectual understanding and reasoning " (92). But are such "analogies" really the crux of the "religious point of view" in terms of which Wittgenstein said that he could "not help seeing every problem"? When we recall that Wittgenstein's later philosophy was a proibund attack upon what he regarded as the idolatry of science, logic, and mathematics (an idolatry of (...) which he himself, in the Tractatt~,, was partly guilty), and that he was also bent on undermining the accompanying subjectivized and privatized view of the human mind, as well as the scientistic reading of religious beliefs and primitive religions, we may be inclined to see his philosophy as clearing the way for the simple noninstitutionalized Tolstoian faith which he himself accepted. Philosophy and religion were on the same track in his mind (and not merely related by "analogies") when he wrote: "All that philosophy can do is to destroy idols. And that means not creating a new one--for instance, as in the 'absence of an idol' " (MS 213, 89). Peter Winch's Responseor Discussion(both words are used as titles) suggests that the pervasiveness of Wittgenstein's "religious point of view" can be seen in his question to Russell: "How can I be a logician before I am a human being?" (which certainly also extends to "How can I be a philosopher before I am a human being?"). With this goes the realization, expressed in the Preface to the PhilosophicalRemarks, that he will not be able to make his book more free of the "impurities" of vanity than he himself is free of them. We sense the religious point of view of Wittgenstein in his utter seriousness (so often compared to Augustine, Pascal, and Kierkegaard) as well as in his conviction that there is a good lying beyond the world which puts every human being, and above all himself, under an obligation to place it ahead of self. When he said that he could not help seeing every problem this way, he meant that he could not help seeing it as having an importance that went beyond facts and theories and circumstances and even beyond the world itself. And the demonstration that this was indeed his point of view he knew would inevitably be, as indeed it was, in every line he wrote. H. L. FINCH Hunter College,CUNY Johnny Washington. A Journey into the Philosophyof Alain Locke. Contributions in AfroAmerican and African Studies. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Pp. viii + ~2o. Cloth, $59.95. Alain Locke (1886-1954), a secondary figure in American pragmatism, wrote on problems of value in cultural analysis; he is noted for his vigorous relativism. As this century's most distinguished African American philosopher--a Rhodes Scholar educated at Harvard and Oxford--Locke played twin roles, mentoring artists of the Harlem Renaissance and chairing the philosophy department at Howard University. Josiah Royce's influence on his thought is evident, as is that of social scientists W. E. B. Du Bois and Franz Boas. In Locke's most recognized works, such as "Values 704 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER 1995 and Imperatives" (1935) and "The New Negro" (19~5), as well as his lesser-read "Pluralism and Intellectual Democracy" (1942), he warrants note for two key contributors to the history of ideas. First, he analyzes "race" and "culture" relativistically, showing how nineteenth-century discussions (say, on "racial uplift") may continue without problematic ontological baggage. Second, by appealing to functionalism, he defends the relative equivalence of elements which characterize cultures. He thus undergirds arguments in social philosophy about the sufficiency of values and norms in social practices. Four decades after his death there exist only two book-length studies of Locke's philosophy, both authored byJohnny Washington. Washington deserves a great deal of credit for his part in initiating a fast-growing critical--and distinctively philosophical-literature on Locke. Indeed, no serious student of Locke's philosophy can proceed without contending with Washington's work. While this study merits praise for its thoroughness and care in treating unpublished essays by Locke, it suffers somewhat from its style of exposition. Washington's "narrate-and... (shrink)

Odo of Tournai, the Phoenix, and the Problem of Universals IRVEN M. RESNICK OVER THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS a good deal of attention has been focused on the philosophical literature of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries in an attempt to locate the origins of nominalism? As part of this effort, several scholars have attempted to come to a new and better appreciation of one of the most vilified figures of the late eleventh century, namely Roscelin of Com- pi~gne, (...) whose logical doctrine, sometimes described as "proto-nominalism" or "vocalism, ''2 represents an early stage in the development of twelfth-century logical thought. Some have attempted simply to reconstruct, on the basis of the little material available to us that describes Roscelin's views, a less polemical and more coherent account of his theory of universals.3 Others have attempted to identify additional writings -- both published and unpublished -- that may prop- erly shed light on Roscelin's philosophy.4 All, however, would agree on Roscelin's significance for the history of philosophy at the beginning of the twelfth-century renaissance. Roscelin's importance does not necessarily presuppose his originality. Evi- ' This effort has resulted in the dedication of an entire number of Vivarium to the origin and meaning of twelfth-century nominalism. Cf. Vivarium 3o/1 . For a discussion of various doctrines on universals that emerged before Abelard, see Augustine Thompson, "The Debate.. (shrink)

A classic, though basically neglected question about motivation arises when we attempt to account for blame’s nature—namely, does the recognition central to blame need help from an independent desire in order to motivate the blame-characteristic dispositions that arise in the blamer? Those who have attended to the question think the answer is yes. Hence, they adopt what I call a Humean Construal of blame on which blame is (a) a judgment that an individual S is blameworthy and (b) an independent (...) desire about S not doing as they did or being as they are. This paper rejects arguments for the Humean Construal, illustrates deep failings of that view, and uses these considerations to support anti-Humean accounts of blame in particular and moral motivation more broadly. (shrink)

The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan ...

The enactive approach offers a distinctive view of how mental life relates to bodily activity at three levels: bodily self-regulation, sensorimotor coupling, and intersubjective interaction. This paper concentrates on the second level of sensorimotor coupling. An account is given of how the subjectively lived body and the living body of the organism are related via dynamic sensorimotor activity, and it is shown how this account helps to bridge the explanatory gap between consciousness and the brain. Arguments by O'Regan, Noë, and (...) Myin that seek to account for the phenomenal character of perceptual consciousness in terms of ‘bodiliness’ and ‘grabbiness’ are considered. It is suggested that their account does not pay sufficient attention to two other key aspects of perceptual phenomenality: the autonomous nature of the experiencing self or agent, and the pre-reflective nature of bodily self-consciousness. (shrink)

Has philosophy anything of value to offer Africa? Has Africa anything of value to offer contemporary philosophy? This text answers yes to both of these questions and deals with the question of human freedom and the problem of liberation in the context of postcolonial contemporary Africa.

b>. Computational models of colour vision assume that the biological function of colour vision is to detect surface reflectance. Some philosophers invoke these models as a basis for 'externalism' about perceptual content (content is distal) and 'objectivism' about colour (colour is surface reflectance). In an earlier article (Thompson et al. 1992), I criticized the 'computational objectivist' position on the basis of comparative colour vision: There are fundmental differences among the colour vision of animals and these differences do not converge (...) on the detection of any single type of environmental property. David R. Hilbert (1992) has recently defended computational objectivism against my 'comparative argument;' his arguments are based on the externalist approach to perceptual content originally developed by Mohan Matthen (1988) and on the computationally inspired theory of the evolutionary basis for trichromacy developed by Roger N. Shepard (1990). The present article provides a reply to Hilbert with extensive criticism of both Matthen's and Shepard's theories. I argue that the biological function of colour vision is not to detect surface reflectance, but to provide a set of perceptual categories that can apply to objects in a stable way in a variety of conditions. Comparative research indicates that both the perceptual categories and the distal stimuli will differ according to the animal and its visual ecology; therefore externalism and objectivism must be rejected. (shrink)

A standard view of trust sees trust as intimately related to reliance; on this standard view, trust is reliance plus some other factor. A significant literature has now developed that seeks to explain what factor, in addition to reliance, serves to distinguish cases of trust from cases of mere reliance. I argue that this approach to the analysis of trust is misguided. Although reliance, properly understood, frequently accompanies trust, reliance is not a necessary condition of trust.

The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the (...) time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference , which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION1 ARELY HAS A GREAT AND INFLUENTIAL THINKER taken pains to let others look at his previous literary career through his very own eyes....

In this article, we articulate and defend a contextual approach to political theory. According to what we shall call ‘iterative contextualism’, context has two important roles to play in determining what is required by justice. First, it is through the exploration and evaluation of multiple contexts that general principles are devised, revised and refined. Second, significant weight should be given to the norms to be found in specific contexts because the people affected by those norms strongly identify with them. Having (...) said this, the application of general principles to particular contexts may still result in recommendations which deviate to some degree from the prevailing norms. In this case, we shall argue that although justice requires something other than what local norms say, what is required is likely to be intimated by the relevant context. Thus, whilst considerations of identification act as significant constraints on iterative contextualists’ thinking, the idea of intimations provides them with an important resource. (shrink)

This special issue is devoted to highlighting thinkers who have been overlooked within business ethics and who have important contributions to make to our field. We make the case that, as scholars of a hybrid discipline that also aims to address important issues of business practice, we need to look continually for new sources of insight and wisdom that can both enrich our discourse and improve our ability to generate ideas that have a positive impact on business practice. In this (...) introductory essay, we discuss our rationale for creating this special issue, summarize the articles contained within, and close with thoughts on its significance for the field going forward. (shrink)

The analysis of dispositions is used to consider cases where the effect of one disposition operating is the existence of another disposition. This may arise from rearrangements within aggregated structures of dispositional parts, or, it is argued, also as stages of derivative dispositions within a set of multiple generative levels. Inspection of examples in both classical and quantum physics suggests a general principle of `Conditional Forward Causation': that dispositions act 'forwards' in a way conditional on certain circumstances or occasions already (...) existing at the `later' levels. (shrink)

This volume examines the Kierkegaard-Martensen relationship, establishing ways in which the speculative theologian Martensen was a source for Kierkegaards thought. Kierkegaard's relationship with Martensen was multidimensional and volatile.

In cognitive psychology there appears to be a creative tension between models that use connections of a network, and models that use rules for symbol manipulation. The idea of a connectionist network goes back to McCulloch & Pitts [1943] and Hebb [1949], and finds recent revival in the `parallel distributed processing' (PDP) models that have been extensively examined in the last few years (see e.g. Rumelhart et al. [1986]). In the intervening years, however, the predominant explanations of psychology have been (...) in terms of rules for the manipulation of symbolic structures (e.g. since Newell & Simon [1963]). Because of the tension between these different approaches (see e.g. Fodor & Pylyshyn [1988]), there is great interest in the formulation of `hybrid systems' which combine connectionist components with traditional symbolic processing. I attempt below to outline the general architecture of such a hybrid system. (shrink)