To support faculty who teach sections of a new general education course that focuses on ethical reasoning skills, I offered a three-day Ethics Across the Curriculum (EAC) workshop. I wanted to ground the faculty development experience by framing it in terms of expected student learning. In other words, I structured the workshop so as to put faculty in the position of students for the workshop. This student-based experience was supported by having a student serve as co-facilitator of the workshop. The (...) decision to make the EAC workshop a faculty-student collaboration proved to be the most important one I made in the design of the workshop. This essay will document parts of this faculty-student collaboration and review some of the important faculty learning that took place as a result of student involvement and leadership. (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

Gene Sharp passed away on January 28, 2018, two days before the anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. His influence in the field of nonviolence has been immense, and much of the work in nonviolence that has been done in the last forty years has had to address Sharp’s work. The direction in which Sharp took the field of nonviolence differed from that of Gandhi. Gandhi based his life around a metaphysics and an ethic that, for him, dictated his (...) nonviolent practices. Sharp preferred to emphasize the practical benefits of nonviolent practices in the field of politics, and he believed that tying nonviolent political action to a metaphysical, religious, or ethical view would reduce the numbers of people likely to adopt such methods. (shrink)

Analytic moral philosophy's strong divide between empirical and normative restricts facts to providing information for the application of norms and does not allow them to confront or challenge norms. So any genuine attempt to incorporate experience and empirical research into bioethics – to give the empirical more than the status of mere 'descriptive ethics'– must make a sharp break with the kind of analytic moral philosophy that has dominated contemporary bioethics. Examples from bioethics and science are used to illustrate the (...) problems with the method of application that philosophically prevails in both domains and with the conception of rationality that underlies this method. Cues from how these problems can be handled in science then introduce summaries of richer, more productive naturalist and constructivist accounts of reason and normative knowledge. Liberated by a naturalist approach to ethics and an enlarged conception of rationality, empirical work can be recognized not just as essential to bioethics but also as contributing to normative knowledge. (shrink)

We live in an anxious world, riddled with unpredictable threats to our safety and unexpected hatreds directed toward us. It is easy to obsess on the terrors around us, about which we can do little, and lose perspective on the real and sometimes devastating risks that we encounter in our daily lives. These everyday risks need to be regularly revisited — to remind ourselves that they can be reduced with the application of sharp minds, careful scholarship, and political will.Medical errors (...) in the American health-care system are just such a problem. The risk of death or serious injury at the hands of the American health-care system is not trivial, as we have learned over the past few years as the health-care establishment has acknowledged the level of iatrogenic injury in the system. If, as the Institute of Medicine reported in To Err Is Human, as many as 100,000 people every year are dying in hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices as the result of actions or omissions that could have been avoided, then this is a social problem of great magnitude and one that the law must try to correct. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 733 The Giving and Taking of Life: Essays Ethical. By JAMES TUNSTEAD BURTCHAELL. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989. xiv + 304 pp. $29.95. One looks forward to the writings of James Burtchaell not only because his judgments are almost always on the side of the angels hut also because his mastery of the English language often enables him to say in a few (...) words what writers of lesser skill say in volumes. This is a collection of previously-published essays on a wide range of topics including contraception, abortion, the use of biotechnology in human reproduction, the use of fetal tissue in medical therapy, law in a pluralist society, liberation theology, the morality of terrorism and the relationship of religion to politics. In its own way, this hook poses well the moral questions of how we and " nature " are to relate to the newly emerging generation of technology. Because the articles are so diverse, it is not possible to give a detailed account or critique of each of them, and rather than doing that I will focus attention only on the issue of ethics and the newly emerging technology which will have a profound impact on not only our personal lives, hut also our society and politics. And to an even greater extent, newly emerging technological developments will have an enormous impact on the way in which our race regenerates and orients itself in the future. On a case-by-case basis, Burtchaell raises these issues with great force and clarity, even though his understanding of nature and technology is not entirely clear. He suggests that nature is far more subtle and vital than we commonly assume and that it has its own ways of fighting hack against our technological assaults against it. Our attempts to control and manipulate nature through technological means provide nature with an opportunity to protect itself hy striking hack at us in ways previously unimagined. Using technology to bend nature to our will is much like the Australian Aborigine who vainly tried to throw away his boomerang! What is most striking about this hook is the contradictory way in which Burtchaell employs the concept of nature to determine the morality of certain enterprises. This contradiction is seen most clearly hy comparing his assessments of artificial contraception and technological transmission of human life. The contrast is so sharp that the issue of the foundations of his thought can he called into question. When one compares his favorable assessment of artificial contraception to his critical evaluation of technological reproduction of human life, one wonders if there is an underlying principle guiding his moral deliberations or whether it is merely his intuitions, likes and dislikes (strongly 734 BOOK REVIEWS colored and shaped by his cultural setting) that determine his evaluations. In "'Human Life' and Human Love", Burtchaell vigorously criticizes the substance, form and arguments of the encyclical Humanae Vitae. For him, the great flaw in this encyclical was the weight it gave to the distinction between natural and artificial contraception and the absolute condemnation visited upon the latter. Seeing little difference between more natural methods of contraception like natural family planning and the use of the pill, Burtchaell argues that artificial contraception should have been given some kind of moral permissibility by Pope Paul VI (P. 99). But it is not clear why he gives limited support to artificial birth control after one reads his harsh criticisms of it: But the venture of technology overshot its original goals in several unforeseen ways. America now has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in what we like to call the developed world. The incidence of sexual prom· iscuity, venereal disease, abortion, marital collapse, fatherless children, child abuse and abandonment, wanton breeding by the thriftless (and dusky) poor is probably higher than at any time in our national history. The founders [Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes] did concede that their program might not immediately achieve its desired results. But that was because of the lack, in their time, of an ' ideal ' contraceptive. Its development was to be expected from further assiduous scientific research. Seventy years and much assiduous research later, the same message is still... (shrink)

In the past few years in the Netherlands and other multi-ethnic democratic states we hear sharp political and intellectual criticism on the philosophical idea of a ‘multicultural society’. In this article, the author questions the criticism of several liberal and conservative political philosophers, who in their approach give attention to the genealogy of multiculturalism. While a liberal as Brian Barry sees multiculturalism as a regression, the conservative Roger Scruton on the other hand considers this political and intellectual phenomenon as (...) a bridge too far, a symptom of the disintegration of the modern nation. The author argues that these criticisms are forcing us to abandon a form of multiculturalism that considers ‘toleration’ as the highest principle. The ‘toleration-multiculturalist’ gets entangled in inconsistencies and moral paradoxes, as soon as he wants to determine his position towards intolerant and immodest variations of the Volksgeist, the cultural homogeneity and identity. The underlying problem in the discussion among liberals, conservatives and multiculturalists is the ontological vulnerability of cultures. This vulnerability has to do with the fact that cultures, traditions and identities are dependant on the constructive work of autonomous interpreters. Therefore a permanent dialogue with the past is necessary. While nationalists and multiculturalists are inclined to eliminate this vulnerability by fixating and immunizing the cultural and national identity, the liberals are neutralizing the cultural loyalties of people through the privatisation of identities. In contrast to these positions the author pleads for a form of democracy in which the rituals of democracy mediate the permanent dissensus about the meaning of nevertheless being a national community. (shrink)

In Zizek and Politics, Geoff Boucher and Matthew Sharpe go beyond standard introductions to spell out a new approach to reading Zizek, one that can be highly critical as well as deeply appreciative. They show that Zizek has a raft of fundamental positions that enable his theoretical positions to be put to work on practical problems. Explaining these positions with clear examples, they outline why Zizek's confrontation with thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze has so radically changed how (...) we think about society. They then go on to track Zizek's own intellectual development during the last twenty years, as he has grappled with theoretical problems and the political climate of the War on Terror. This book is a major addition to the literature on Zizek and a crucial critical introduction to his thought. (shrink)

'Most of us are still groping for answers about what makes life worth living, or what confers meaning on individual lives', writes Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self. 'This is an essentially modern predicament.' Charles Taylor's latest book sets out to define the modern identity by tracing its genesis, analysing the writings of such thinkers as Augustine, Descartes, Montaigne, Luther, and many others. This then serves as a starting point for a renewed understanding of modernity. Taylor argues that modern (...) subjectivity has its roots in ideas of human good, and is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and attain the good. The modern turn inwards is far from being a disastrous rejection of rationality, as its critics contend, but has at its heart what Taylor calls the affirmation of ordinary life. He concludes that the modern identity, and its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, is far richer in moral sources that its detractors allow. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defence of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics. (shrink)

As in science, so in bioethics: if prohibiting conflicts of interest is not feasible, rigorous requirements for disclosure can at least manage them.

The idea of philosophy as a 'way of life' is not a new one. From the first recorded philosophy by Plato, there has been a tradition of thinking about philosophy as pointing us towards the good life, happiness and an ethical existence. But where does this notion that philosophy has anything to offer in terms of guiding us in how to live and live well come from? In this first ever introduction to philosophy as a way of life, Matthew (...) class='Hi'>Sharpe and Michael Ure take us us through the history of the idea from Plato and the Buddha to Foucault, Hadot and Zizek. They examine the kinds of practical exercises each thinker recommended and practiced to transform their philosophy into manners of living and acting. Philosophy as a Way of Life also examines the recent resurgence of thinking about philosophy as a practical, lived reality and why this ancient tradition still has so much relevance and power in the contemporary world. (shrink)

• We define a notion of order of indiscernibility type of a structure by analogy with Mitchell order on measures; we use this to define a hierarchy of strong axioms of infinity defined through normal filters, the α-weakly Erdős hierarchy. The filters in this hierarchy can be seen to be generated by sets of ordinals where these indiscernibility orders on structures dominate the canonical functions.• The limit axiom of this is that of greatly Erdős and we use it to calibrate (...) some strengthenings of the Chang property, one of which, CC+, is equiconsistent with a Ramsey cardinal, and implies that where K is the core model built with non-overlapping extenders — if it is rigid, and others which are a little weaker. As one corollary we have:TheoremIf then there is an inner model with a strong cardinal. • We define an α-Jónsson hierarchy to parallel the α-Ramsey hierarchy, and show that κ being α-Jónsson implies that it is α-Ramsey in the core model. (shrink)

Three arguments are proposed against the idea that ordinary talk about the mind constitutes a folk psychology, a sort of prescientific theory which explains human behaviour and which is ripe for replacement by a neurological or computational theory with better scientific credentials. First, not all talk of the mind is introduced to explain in the way assumed by those who think that mental talk hypothesizes inner processes to explain behaviour. Second, the individuation of the behaviour which is explained by the (...) inner processes itself requires reference to ?mental? states such as intentions or desires. Consequently the project is circular. Finally, scientific theory is a practice with a history which may be matched in the case of ordinary talk of the mind. Certainly ordinary talk of motives, intentions, and thoughts may be infected by the theorizing of economists and sociologists et al., but it is impossible that all talk of the mind should be theoretical in this way. (shrink)

This paper wants to draw out a common argument in three great philosophers and littérateurs in modern French thought: Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, and Albert Camus. The argument makes metaphysical and theological scepticism the first premise for a universalistic political ethics, as per Voltaire's: “it is clearer still that we ought to be tolerant of one another, because we are all weak, inconsistent, liable to fickleness and error.” The argument, it seems to me, presents an interestingly overlooked, deeply important and (...) powerful contribution to the philosophical discourse of modernity. On one hand, theological and post-structuralist critics of “humanism” usually take the latter to depend either on an essentialist philosophical anthropology, or a progressive philosophy of history. The former, it is argued, is philosophically contestable and ethically contentious. The latter, for better or worse, is a continuation of theological eschatology by another name. So both, if not “modernity” per se, should somehow be rejected. But an ethical universalism – like that we find in Montaigne, Bayle, Voltaire, or Camus – which does not claim familiarity with metaphysical or eschatological truths, but humbly confesses our epistemic finitude, seeing in this the basis for ethical solidarity, eludes these charges. On the other hand, philosophical scepticism plays a large role in the post-structuralist criticisms of modern institutions and ideas in ways which have been widely taken to license forms of ethics which problematically identify responsibility, with taking a stand unjustifiable by recourse to universalizable reasons. But, in Montaigne, Voltaire and Camus, our ignorance concerning the highest or final truths does not close off, but rather opens up, a new descriptive sensitivity to the foibles and complexities of human experience: a sensitivity reflected amply, and often hilariously, in their literary productions. As such, a critical agnosticism concerning claims about things “in the heavens and beneath the earth” does not, for such a “sceptical humanism,” necessitate decisionism or nihilism. Instead, it demands a redoubled ethical sensitivity to the complexities and plurality of political life which sees the dignity of “really-existing” others, whatever their metaphysical creeds, as an inalienable first datum of ethical conduct and reflection. After tracking these arguments in Montaigne, Voltaire, and Camus, the essay closes by reflecting on, and contesting, one more powerful theological argument against modern agnosticism's allegedly deleterious effects on ethical culture: that acknowledging ignorance concerning the highest things robs us of the basis for awe or wonder, the wellspring of human beings’ highest ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual achievements. (shrink)

David Bohm is a physicist with a broad range of other interests including religion, philosophy, education, art, and linguistics. This book surveys Bohm's physical theories including the quantum potential theory and the implicate order or holomovement theory.

This article challenges John M. Cooper’s reading of ancient Stoicism as a way of life, one which sets its back against Pierre Hadot’s notion that Stoicism could have philosophically advocated regimens of non-cognitive practices of the kind documented by Hadot. Part 1 examines Arrian’s Discourses, following A. A. Long in seeing in this text Arrian’s portrait of Epictetus as a philosophical persona: one bringing together the different virtues of Socrates, Diogenes, and Zeno. Part 2 then examines Epictetus’s Handbook , seeing (...) in this text—in contrast to Hadot and Sellars—a distinct set of prescriptions for the kinds of existential practices the Roman Stoics advocated, not in place of philosophical argumentation, but as a means to habituate aspirants’ conduct to ways of thinking, desiring and acting harmonious with their philosophical conclusions. (shrink)

In Part 1, we situate Dugin’s interpretation of Heidegger in relation to the better known, broadly left-liberal approaches to interpreting Heidegger’s thought, stressing Dugin’s unusual focus on the German thinker’s “middle” or Nazi-era texts, and showing how this periodizing optic affects Dugin’s culminating reading of Sein und Zeit and its key axiological notion of authenticity (Part 1). Part 2 examines Dugin’s appropriation of Heidegger’s radically pessimistic, trans-epochal critique of Western thought, centring around his striking reading of the esoteric notion of (...) the “fourfold” or Gewiert. In this account, the essence of reality itself, the “crosshairs” of the fourfold, is provocatively depicted by Dugin as war, Polemos, Kampf, or Krieg, following the Heidegger of 1933–1936. In a move which echoes Heidegger’s own post-1938 relativizations of all distinctions between Nazism, liberalism and socialism – as well as the Shoah and mechanized agriculture – the Russian thinker hence ends by obviating any distinctions between liberal or democratic and totalitarian regimes, war and peace, and genocide and consumerism. All must be overcome in the “another beginning” destined for the new Russia, if it has the ears to hear. (shrink)

Carol Gilligan has identified two orientations to moral understanding; the dominant justice orientation and the under-valued care orientation. Based on her discernment of a voice of care, Gilligan challenges the adequacy of a deontological liberal framework for moral development and moral theory. This paper examines how the orientations of justice and care are played out in medical ethical theory. Specifically, I question whether the medical moral domain is adequately described by the norms of impartiality, universality, and equality that characterize the (...) liberal ideal. My analysis of justice -oriented medical ethics, focuses on the libertarian theory of H.T. Engelhardt and the contractarian theory of R.M. Veatch. I suggest that in the work of E.D. Pellegrino and D.C. Thomasma we find not only a more authentic representation of medical morality but also a project that is compatible with the care orientation's emphasis on human need and responsiveness to particular others. (shrink)

David Bohm's thinking has become widely publicized since the 1982 performance of a form of the Einstein‐Podolsky‐ Rosen (EPR) experiment. Bohm's holomovement theory, in particular, tries to explain the nonlocality that the experiment supports. Moreover, his theories are close to his metaphysical and religious thinking. Fritjof Capra's writings try something similar: supporting a theory (the bootstrap theory) because it is close to his religious beliefs. Both Bohm and Capra appear to use their religious ideas in their physics. Religion, their source (...) for physical hypotheses, provides the motivation to develop and uphold them. (shrink)

Research Ethics Boards (REBs) at universities are chaired and staffed by researchers who serve to enforce codes of ethics by scrutinizing research proposals. Yet there is widespread dissatisfaction with the REB approval process. This article examines the sources of that dissatisfaction, the place for codes of ethics in the conducting of research, the evidence for risk to research participants as the basis for those codes, and the effectiveness of REBs in protecting research participants. We offer suggestions for how REB chairs, (...) members, and researchers can improve the REB approval process so that it is fair and responsive. (shrink)

This paper examines the seemingly unlikely rapport between the ‘Christian existentialist’, radically Protestant thinker, Søren Kierkegaard and French classicist and historian of philosophy, Pierre Hadot, famous for advocating a return to the ancient pagan sense of philosophy as a way of life. Despite decisive differences we stress in our concluding remarks, we argue that the conception of philosophy in Hadot as a way of life shares decisive features with Kierkegaard’s understanding of the true ‘religious’ life: as something demanding existential engagement (...) from its proponent, as well as the learning or recitation of accepted doctrines. The mediating figure between the two authors, the paper agrees with Irina, is Socrates and his famous irony. In order to appreciate Kierkegaard’s rapport with Hadot, then we first of all consider Hadot’s treatment of the enigmatic ‘old wise man’ who remains central to Kierkegaard’s entire authorship. However, to highlight Hadot’s Socratic proximity to Kierkegaard, we set up Hadot’s Socrates against the contrasting portrait readers can find in John M. Cooper’s recent work on Socrates and philosophy as a way of life. Part II of the essay turns back from Hadot’s and Kierkegaard’s Socrates towards Hadot’s own work, and argues—again moving beyond both Gregor and Irina’s works on Hadot and Kierkegaard—that the shape of Hadot’s ‘authorship’, including his remarkably classical style, can be understood by way of Kierkegaard’s notion of indirect communication. In our concluding remarks, in the spirit of Kierkegaard, we pinpoint the fundamental difference between the two thinkers, arguing that for Hadot in contrast to Kierkegaard, a stress on existential commitment in no way speaks against the philosophical defence of a form of rational universalism. Reading Hadot via Kierkegaard allows us to appreciate Hadot’s novelty as attempting to ‘squaring the circle’ between an emphasis on subjectivity and, as it were, the subjective dimensions of philosophers’ pursuit of rational universality. (shrink)

R. A. Sharpe; VIII*—Art and Expertise, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 85, Issue 1, 1 June 1985, Pages 133–148, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristote.

As a child brought up among animals, Lynne Sharpe never doubted they were essentially ‘creatures like us’. It came as a shock to learn that others did not agree. Here she exposes the bizarre way in which many philosophers — including even some great and humane ones — have repeatedly talked and written about animals. They have discussed the topic in terms of non-existent abstract ‘animals’, conceived as defective humans, entirely neglecting the experience of people who have wide practical (...) knowledge of companion animals — such as horses and dogs — through working with them. She testifies to the interesting nature of these creatures’ lives, noting that the usual narrow approach to animals carries with it also a distorted notion of human life as essentially cerebral and language-centred. (shrink)

Compatibilists respond to the problem of causal exclusion for nonreductive physicalism by rejecting the exclusionist’s ban on overdetermination. By the compatibilist’s lights there are two forms of overdetermination, one that’s problematic and another that is entirely benign. Furthermore, multiple causation by “tightly related” causes requires only the benign form of overdetermination. Call this the tight relation strategy for avoiding problematic forms of overdetermination. To justify the tight relation strategy, modal compatibilists appeal to a widely accepted counterfactual test. The argument of (...) this paper is that the counterfactual test fails to legitimize the tight relation strategy as it fails to adequately distinguish between problematic and benign overdetermination. Contrary to modal compatibilists, modal dependence does not suffice for benignity. I conclude by arguing that adequately addressing overdetermination worries requires a much heavier metaphysical burden than modal compatibilists have typically recognized. (shrink)

This article will provide a critique of tworecent English marriage law decisions, thefirst concerning a (female to male) transgenderman and the second a (male to female)intersexed woman. It will do so throughconsideration of the dialogue between each andthe landmark transgender case of Corbett v. Corbett. It will highlight howboth decisions, in seeking to minimise the factof `departure' from Corbett, serve toreproduce key elements of that decision whichserve to undermine the future prospects fortransgender law reform in the English context.In particular, both (...) decisions, in differentways, or with different emphases, ensure that`legal sex' continues to be determined by(bio)logical and temporal factors. Crucially,however, as in Corbett, it is legalanxiety over the boundaries of the `natural',and the homophobia of law, that underscoresthis anxiety, that account for these particularconstructions of `legal sex'. (shrink)

This paper starts from the contention that Pierre Hadot’s unusually divided reception reflects the different dimensions of Hadot’s own scholarly profile. Hadot’s largely favourable reception amongst historians of ideas responds to the philological dimension of his work, but misses the implicit normativity involved in his recovery of the sense of ancient philosophy as a way of life. Analytic critics have registered but contested this normativity in ways that arguably also misrepresent his work. This paper contends that both receptions of Hadot (...) have missed what can be called Hadot’s unique philosophical problematic: uncovering through the ancient sources a kind of phenomenology of how a person would perceive and evaluate the world who had, counter-factually, attained a wholly enlightened, wholly “sage” mode of living. This phenomenology of sagesse, which is predicated on a metaphysical agnosticism, proves closer to the last Foucault than Hadot sometimes suggested: albeit embodying an aesthetics of “the whole,” over against Foucault’s aesthetics of existence. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper looks at the state of the literature surrounding Heidegger and Nazism today. Part 1 focusses on Hassan Givsan’s remarkable work, Une histoire consternante: pourquoi les philosophes se laissent corrompre par le “cas Heidegger”, which looks at the different, mutually inconsistent forms of “apologetics” denying that Heidegger had been a Nazi, or that this commitment could have been shaped by his philosophy. Part 2 looks at five themes that emerge from the 2014 French-language collection Heidegger, le sol, la communauté, (...) la race, edited by Emmanuel Faye: Heidegger’s anti-semitism, before and in the Black Notebooks; Sein und Zeit and “the political”; Heidegger and his estate’s post-war “rewriting” of his Nazi-era texts; Heidegger’s esotericism; and his intellectual proximities to other Nazi thinkers. Closing reflections touch on the state of the debate, calling for increased scholarly awareness of the evidence, and debate of its significance. (shrink)

What follows is a work of critical reconstruction of Camus' thought. It aims to answer to the wish Camus expressed in his later notebooks, that he at least be read closely. Specifically, I hope to do three things. In Part I, we will show how Camus' famous philosophy of the absurd represents a systematic scepticism whose closest philosophical predecessor is Descartes' method of doubt, and whose consequence, as in Descartes, is the discovery of a single, orienting certainty, on the basis (...) of which Camus would proceed to pass beyond the 'nihilism' that conservative critics continued to level against him (MS 34). Part II will unfold the central tenets of Camus' mature thought of rebellion, and show how Camus' central political claims follow from his para-Cartesian claim to have found an irreducible or 'invincible' basis for a post-metaphysical ethics, consistent with the most thoroughgoing epistemic scepticism. Part III then undertakes to show that the neoclassical rhetoric and positioning Camus claimed for his postwar thought—as a thought of moderation or mesure, and a renewed Greek or Mediterranean naturalism—is more than a stylistic pretension. It represents, so I argue, a singular amalgam of modern and philosophical classical motifs which makes Camus' voice nearly unique in twentieth century ideas, and all the more worth reconsidering today. So let us proceed. (shrink)

"Making the Human Mind" is an attack on the widespread assumption that the mind has parts and that it is the interaction between these parts which accounts for some of the most characteristic human behaviour, the sorts of irrational behaviour displayed in self-deception and weakness of will. The implications of this attack are considerable: Professor Sharpe contests a realism about the mind, the belief that there is an inventory which an all-seeing deity could compile and which could contain answers (...) to all the questions we could ask about people. With this goes a hermeneutic approach to the understanding of human behaviour: these forms of understanding are markedly different from that suggested by the scientific model and favoured by those who partition the mind. Finally, the author undermines eliminative materialism and the idea that the way we talk about the mind constitutes a "folk psychology", arguing that what is distinctively human about the human mind has been created by self-consciousness and is self-created. (shrink)

Slavoj Zizek has emerged as the pre-eminent European cultural theorist of the last decade and has been described as the ultimate Marxist/Lacanian cultural studies scholar. His large and growing body of work has generated considerable controversy, yet his texts are not structured as standard academic tomes. In Slavoj Zizek: A Little Piece of the Real, Matthew Sharpe undertakes the difficult task of drawing out an evolving argument from all of Zizek's texts from 1989 to 2001, and reads them as (...) the bearers of a single theoretical project, providing an authoritative, reliable, clearly written and well-structured account of Zizek's demanding body of work. From an exposition of Zizek's social and philosophical critical theory the book moves to a critical analysis of Zizek's theoretical project and its political implications. Sharpe concludes by suggesting that Zizek's work, however, raises as many questions as it answers; questions both about Zizek's theoretical system and to the wider new Left in today's world. (shrink)

This short book is intended to be read in an evening or even a sitting, though it provokes reflections that will go on for far longer. Professor Sharpe is a philosopher and writes as a post-Christian. He does not believe in God for moral reasons and argues that in some ways morality is corrupted by religion.

Richard Shusterman, Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 436 pages./ Like other contributors, I would like to begin by expressing my respect and admiration for the scale and scope of Richard Shusterman’s achievement in Ars Erotica. The Preface acknowledges “the vast amount of material” involved in this project of charting “the history of erotic theory in the world’s most influential premodern cultures,” with each chapter on a different cultural tradition potentially (...) meriting its own monograph (AE, x, xi). As a scholar who has worked in depth on the work of Pierre Hadot, as well as Michel Foucault’s works on the practices of philosophy conceived as an art or craft (technê) of living in the Western tradition, my response will necessarily be more limited. It will address in detail just the first major chapter of the book – especially as I note with appreciation the piece in this symposium by Marta Faustino on the relations between the ars vivendi and ars erotica. I take some comfort in accepting these limitations from the statement of a particular debt that Shusterman proffers in his Preface to Foucault’s works in the finally-not-completed History of Sexuality series. The author notes both what he owes to Foucault on sexuality, particularly in his studies on the ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as his differences from Foucault’s work. (shrink)

Preview: 2020, the year the coronavirus pandemic spread globally, marked the twenty-fifth year since the publication of Pierre Hadot’s work Philosophy as a Way of Life. In that time, what began as the research specialization of just a few scholars has become a growing area of philosophical and metaphilosophical inquiry, bringing together researchers from around the globe. Hadot’s key ideas of spiritual exercises, and the very idea of PWL, have been applied to a host of individual thinkers from across the (...) history of philosophy: from the Hellenistic and Roman-era philosophers of direct concern to Hadot, through renaissance thinkers like Petrarch, Lipsius, Montaigne, Descartes, or Bacon, into nineteenth-century thinkers led by Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.In more recent years, more global reflections on the “very idea” of PWL have begun to emerge, as well as dedicated journal editions. In these more recent PWL studies, some of the manifold research questions have begun to be explored, which were opened up by the studies of Pierre and Ilsetraut Hadot, as well as its reception in Michel Foucault’s later work. What implications, after all, does understanding the history of PWL, and the predominance of this metaphilosophical conception in the history of Western thought, have for how we understand the practice of philosophy today? Does recovering the alternative understandings of philosophy as a practice in history necessarily lead to a criticism of contemporary, solely academic or theoretical modes of philosophizing, or is the idea of PWL one which has only historiographical force? (shrink)

This essay is a critique of Derrida's ethical works, using Camus's last novella The Fall as a critical sounding board. It argues that a danger pertains to any such highly self-reflexive position as Derrida's: a danger that Camus identified in The Fall, and staged in his character, Jean-Baptiste Clamence. Clamence is a successful Parisian lawyer, on top of his personal and professional life, whose equanimity is troubled after he is the unwitting passer-by as a young woman suicides one night on (...) the Seine. After this time, he comes to consider all his former virtues as concealed vices. He also becomes acutely aware of what he terms the 'duplicity' of human beings as such. In Part I, I consider how Clamence's fall from innocence can be read 'with' Derrida's deconstructive registration of a 'double bind' pertaining to our standing vis-á-vis what he terms 'logocentrism'. I argue that Derrida's is a post-lapsarian philosophy, which challenges all attempts to construct closed conceptual systems that would confer an epistemic and/or moral certitude upon their expositors. In Part II, I then enter into a more detailed exposition of Derrida's 'later' works broaching friendship, the invitation, the gift, and other 'matters moral'. I read these texts in the light of an examination of what is involved, for Camus, in being a 'judge-penitent' (what Clamence in The Fall calls his profession). I suggest that Derrida runs the risk of a certain 'puritanism of difference' in his moral reflections, which defend the aporetic formulation: 'tout autre est tout autre' [every other is every bit other] (The Gift of Death). The problem is that, while Derrida's position allows one (everywhere) to say what one is against, it problematizes any affirmative moral stance. Like Clamence, who assumes the right to judge everyone else because he has subjected himself to a severe penitence, I suggest that we have a right to wonder whether Derrida's deconstructive critique of metaphysics can validate only endless repetitions of itself. Key Words: Camus • Derrida • ethics • The Fall • innocence • 'puritanism of difference. (shrink)

Edmund Pellegrino has argued that the dramatic changes in American health care call for critical reflection on the traditional norms governing the therapeutic relationship. This paper offers such reflection on the obligation to do no harm. Drawing on work by Beauchamp and Childress and Pellegrino and Thomasma, I argue that the libertarian model of medical ethics offered by Engelhardt cannot adequately sustain an obligation to do no harm. Because the obligation to do no harm is not based simply on a (...) negative duty of nonmaleficence but also on a positive duty of beneficence, I argue that it is best understood to derive from the fiduciary nature of the healing relationship. (shrink)