This paper maintains that, for all his ethical interests, his philosophical and theological essays, political treatises and linguistic studies, Dante was primarily a poet; a poet who, moreover, believed that poetry could change the world, and that the Comedy must be read, first, as a poem. This is not a trivial point, because the Comedy remains a text that is endlessly fascinating to philosophers and theologians as well as moralists who read it for its philosophy, theology and ethics and who (...) sometimes fail to see that a poet's imagination, even one as egregiously rational as Dante's, is synthetic rather than analytic. This paper offers an examination of the moral universe of the Comedy, paying particular attention to his presentation of the virtues. It endeavours to show how Dante's entry into the moral universe is by way of beauty through the operation of love, and considers how, for Dante, the inevitability of beauty, when properly understood, opens out on to truth and goodness, which, in turn, fold back upon beauty as the Beatific Vision is reached. (shrink)

An argument against the rationality of desiring to go to heaven might be put in the form of a trilemma: (1) any state of being that both lasts eternally and preserves me as the person I am would be hellish and therefore would not be a state of being that I could have any reason to desire; (2) any state of being that lasts eternally and yet fails to preserve my personhood by turning me into a non-person would not be (...) a state of being that I (qua person that I am) could have any reason to desire; and (3) any state of being that lasts eternally and yet fails to preserve my personhood by turning me into some other person would not be a state of being that I (qua person that I am) could have any reason to desire. This paper offers defenses of each of the three horns of this trilemma and concludes that there is no rationally compelling reason for any human being to desire to go to heaven. (shrink)

There is a modal relative of Euthyphro’s dilemma that goes like this: are necessary truths true because God affirms them, or does God affirm them because they’re true? If you accept the first horn, necessary truths are as contingent as God’s free will. If you accept the second, God is less ultimate than the modal ontology that establishes certain truths as necessary. If you try to split the horns by affirming that necessary truths are somehow grounded in God’s nature, (...) class='Hi'>Brian Leftow meets you with an argument. I will argue that Leftow’s argument fails and that, contrary to his argument, there is a good reason to believe that necessary truths are grounded in God’s nature. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper I embrace what Brian Keeley calls in “Of Conspiracy Theories” the absurdist horn of the dilemma for philosophers who criticize such theories. I thus defend the view that there is indeed something deeply epistemically wrong with conspiracy theorizing. My complaint is that conspiracy theories apply intentional explanations to situations that give rise to special problems concerning the elimination of competing intentional explanations.

In the modern age, the political secret has acquired a bad reputation. With modern democracy’s ideal of transparency, political secrecy is identified with political crime or corruption. The article argues that this repression of secrecy in modern democracies falls short of a substantial understanding of the structure and workings of political secrecy. By outlining a genealogy of political secrecy, it elucidates the logic as well as the blind spots of a current culture of secrecy. It focuses on two fundamental logics (...) of secrecy, deduced from the Latin terms ‘ arcanum’ and ‘ secretum’. Whereas the logic of arcanum regards secrecy as a legitimate dimension of government, a modern logic of secretum is marked by an inextricable dialectics between the withdrawal and communication of knowledge, between secrecy and publicity. Here, the secret is not so much a piece of withheld knowledge as a ‘secrecy effect’ that binds the realm of secrecy to the public sphere by a dialectics of permanent suspicion and scandal. Instead of falling into the trap of this ‘secrecy effect’ it is worth taking a closer look at the tradition of thought on the arcana imperii, from Tacitus to early modern doctrines of raison d’état to Carl Schmitt. What this tradition deals with is the functionality of secrecy and its complicated relation to the law. The arcana tradition elaborates the crucial point of secrecy: its potential, but also its profound ambivalence. Secrecy opens up a discretionary space of action exempt from the rule of law, and, according to Carl Schmitt, ignores the law so as to allow it to become effective. Secrecy serves to protect and stabilize the state, but at the same time it opens a space of exception from the rule of law that breeds violence, corruption and oppression. Instead of seeing secrecy as the opposite of a political culture of transparency, it is more productive to regard secrecy as transparency's complement – a counterpart, however, that is marked by the profound paradox of being both a consolidation of and a threat to democracy. (shrink)

This book offers a unique synthesis of past and current work on the structure, meaning, and use of negation and negative expressions, a topic that has engaged thinkers from Aristotle and the Buddha to Freud and Chomsky. Horn's masterful study melds a review of scholarship in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics with original research, providing a full picture of negation in natural language and thought; this new edition adds a comprehensive preface and bibliography, surveying research since the book's original publication.

The objective of this paper is to understand from a sociological perspective how the moral question of euthanasia, framed as the “right to die”, emerges and is dealt with in society. It takes France and Germany as case studies, two countries in which euthanasia is prohibited and which have similar legislation on the issue. I presuppose that, and explore how, each society has its own specificities in terms of practical, social and political norms that affect the ways in which they (...) deal with these issues. The paper thus seeks to understand how requests for the “right to die” emerge in each society, through both the debate (analysis of daily newspapers, medical and philosophical literature, legal texts) and the practices (ethnographic work in three French and two German hospitals) that elucidate the phenomenon. It does so, however, without attempting to solve the moral question of euthanasia. In spite of the differences observed between these two countries, the central issue at stake in their respective debates is the question of the individual’s autonomy to choose the conditions in which he or she wishes to die; these conditions depend, amongst others, on the doctor-patient relationship, the organisation of end-of-life care in hospital settings, and more generally, on the way autonomy is defined and handled in the public debate. (shrink)

Background: The Parkinsonian [i.e., Parkinson's disease ] gait disorder represents a therapeutical challenge with residual symptoms despite the use of deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus and medical and rehabilitative strategies. The aim of this study was to assess the effect of different DBS modes as combined stimulation of the STN and substantia nigra and environmental rehabilitative factors as footwear on gait kinematics.Methods: This single-center, randomized, double-blind, crossover clinical trial assessed shod and unshod gait in patients with PD with (...) medication in different DBS conditions during different gait tasks and compared gait characteristics to healthy controls. Notably, 15 patients participated in the study, and 11 patients were analyzed after a dropout of four patients due to DBS-induced side effects.Results: Gait was modulated by both factors, namely, footwear and DBS mode, in patients with PD. Footwear impacted gait characteristics in patients with PD similarly to controls with longer step length, lower cadence, and shorter single-support time. Interestingly, DBS exerted specific effects depending on gait tasks with increased cognitive load. STN+SN DBS was the most efficient DBS mode compared to STIM OFF and STN DBS with intense effects as step length increment during dual task.Conclusion: The PD gait disorder is a multifactorial symptom, impacted by environmental factors as footwear and modulated by DBS. DBS effects on gait were specific depending on the gait task, with the most obvious effects with STN+SN DBS during gait with increased cognitive load. (shrink)

What kind of evidence will lead people to revise their moral beliefs? Moral beliefs are often strongly held convictions, and existing research has shown that morality is rooted in emotion and socialization rather than deliberative reasoning. In addition, more general issues—such as confirmation bias—further impede coherent belief revision. Here, we explored a unique means for inducing belief revision. In two experiments, participants considered a moral dilemma in which an overwhelming majority of people judged that it was inappropriate to take action (...) to maximize utility. Their judgments contradicted a utilitarian principle they otherwise strongly endorsed. Exposure to this scenario led participants to revise their belief in the utilitarian principle, and this revision persisted over several hours. This method provides a new avenue for inducing belief revision. (shrink)

In this short response, I agree with Cavaliere’s recent invitation to consider ectogenesis, the process of gestation occurring outside the body, as a political perspective and provocation to building a world in which reproductive and care labour are more justly distributed. But I argue that much of the literature Cavaliere addresses in which scholars argue that artificial wombs may produce greater gender equality has the limitation of taking a fixed, binary and biological approach to sex and gender. I argue that (...) in taking steps toward the possibility of more just practices of caregiving and family making, we must look first not to artificial womb technologies but to addressing the ways that contemporary legal and social practices that enforce essentialising, binary ways of thinking about reproductive bodies inhibit this goal. (shrink)

In 2016, a law came into force in France granting terminally ill patients the right to continuous deep sedation until death. This right was proposed as an alternative to euthanasia and presented as the ‘French response’ to problems at the end of life. The law draws a distinction between CDS and euthanasia and other forms of sympton control at the end of life. France is the first country in the world to legislate on CDS. This short report describes the particular (...) context and underlying social values that led to this piece of legislation, and explores its meaning in the wider French context. (shrink)

Many contemporary philosophers consider justice to be the crucial normative concept of ethics and political philosophy. This view goes back to J. S. MillÏs Utilitarianism (ch. 5), and to J. RawlsÏ A Theory of Justice. In this paper, I challenge this view. As I take it, justice is not the core of our normative convictions for many normative convictions do not concern questions of justice. I aim to show that our idea of justice has a very specific content and function.

Angel's declared purpose is to “demystify” mysticism by approaching it as we do ordinary phenomena, and his eventual conclusion is that mystical experiences are very similar to some of our everyday experiences. To demonstrate that, he provides us with three closely-argued chapters on, successively, the typology of mysticism, the reasons for mystical silence, and the relationship of mysticism to other experiences. Ultimately, he claims that mysticism need not be mysterious because all of us have quasi-mystical experiences.

In light of the already-here disasters of the Anthropocene, what might it mean to define “ground” phenomenologically? That is, if one is to get beyond the ‘merely rational’ and enter into the ‘dustier’ matters of ecological philosophizing, how might one phenomenologically consider the ground? This article will dwell on the nature of the earth-ground—or, soil—as a rematerialized grounding principle for phenomenology in this age of climate crisis. Contending with Heidegger, among others, this poietic article limns possibilities for a ‘grounded’ phenomenology.

I consider the problem of how to derive what an agent believes from their credence function and utility function. I argue the best solution of this problem is pragmatic, i.e. it is sensitive to the kinds of choices actually facing the agent. I further argue that this explains why our notion of justified belief appears to be pragmatic, as is argued e.g. by Fantl and McGrath. The notion of epistemic justification is not really a pragmatic notion, but it is being (...) applied to a pragmatically defined concept, i.e. belief. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe concept of ‘vulnerability’ is well established within the realm of research ethics and most ethical guidelines include a section on ‘vulnerable populations’. However, the term ‘vulnerability’, used within a human research context, has received a lot of negative publicity recently and has been described as being simultaneously ‘too broad’ and ‘too narrow’.1 The aim of the paper is to explore the concept of research vulnerability by using a detailed case study – that of mineworkers in post‐apartheid South Africa. In (...) particular, the usefulness of Kipnis’s taxonomy of research vulnerability will be examined.2In recent years the volume of clinical research on human subjects in South Africa has increased significantly. The HIV and TB pandemics have contributed to this increase. These epidemics have impacted negatively on the mining industry; and mining companies have become increasingly interested in research initiatives that address these problems. This case study explores the potential research vulnerability of mineworkers in the context of the South African mining industry and examines measures that can reduce this vulnerability. (shrink)

A professor, dean, and college president for more than twenty years, Francis H. Horn is one of America’s most penetrating educational analysts. And while in this collection of sixteen of his most significant and controversial papers he addresses himself primarily to educational ad­ministrators, the nonspecialist can read what he has to say with pleasure and profit. Extremely well written and jargon free, the essays represent the tenets of Mr. Horn’s main beliefs, many of which go against contemporary conventional views. The (...) papers are divided into four main areas: objectives, problems, administration, and students. Though there is a certain amount of recur­rence of ideas throughout the essays, especially of Mr. Horn’s deeply-held beliefs, the thrust of his thought is objective, patient, provocative, and challenging examination of the realities of the present as well as the hopes of the future. (shrink)

With their biblically grounded understanding of human nature, Christians are well prepared to engage political science. Horne presents a Christian framework, showing how this academic discipline can be studied faithfully.