Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex moral decision-making have a deep connection? What are the moral responsibilities of the artist, critic, and reader? What can religious perspectives—from Catholic to Protestant to Mormon—contribute to literary criticism? Thirty well known contributors reflect on these questions, including iterary theorists Marshall Gregory, James (...) Phelan, and Wayne Booth; philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Richard Hart, and Nina Rosenstand; and authors John Updike, Charles Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, and Bernard Malamud. Divided into four sections, with introductory matter and questions for discussion, this accessible anthology represents the most crucial work today exploring the interdisciplinary connections between literature, religion and philosophy. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

A Husserl-based social ethics is within the noetic-noematic field as disclosed through various reductions. The focus is how at the passive and active levels a bsic sense of will is in play as well as the "telos" of subjectivity in terms of both a "godly" intersubjective ideal "we". This is inseparable form the disclosure of the full sense of person through an "absolute ought" and the "truth of will" wherein the common world and common goods are tied to an ideal (...) community as a person of a higher order. (shrink)

Transcendental Phenomenology of language wrestles with the relationship of language to mind’s manifestation of being. Of special interest is the sense in which language is, like one’s embodiment, a medium of manifestation. Not only does it permit sharing the world because words as worldly things embody meanings that can be the same for everyone; not only does speaking manifest to others the common world from the speaker’s perspective; but also speaking, as a meaning to say, may achieve the manifestation of (...) the world also for the speaker herself. This requires finding the right words to form true propositions in a well-formed sentences. The manifest telos of proposition-rendering sentences is adumbrated and founded in the infant’s elemental formation of simple phonemic identity syntheses and syntax. This instinctual dynamism is founded in what Husserl names “the idea of truth” which supports the thesis of a universal language instinct. (shrink)

In his article, Johannes Kneiss, argues convincingly that a generational ban of smoking need not necessarily disadvantage, or treat as moral unequals, future generations. While a ban need not be inegalitarian in these particular ways, we argue that this is insufficient to establish a ban to be appropriately relationally egalitarian. In what follows, we raise a couple of other issues that we would like to see addressed before we can be confident in such a law. First, it remains underexplored, whether (...) current generations would be disadvantaged or treated as moral unequals by a ban. Plausibly, being excluded from the ban could show insufficient concern for current generations. By not acting paternalistically towards them, current generations miss out on the health benefits afforded to the young, which might display a greater valuing of younger lives than older lives. Kneiss briefly considers this objection, but quickly dismisses it: “given that some existing smokers strongly wish to retain the option to smoke, […] a ban across the board cannot be said to advance their interests, as conceived by these smokers themselves”.1 However, in our view, this is too quick. Appealing to the smokers’ own conceptions of their interests to establish their interests presumes that the smokers know what is in their …. (shrink)

Sometimes we must choose between competing claims to aid or assistance, and sometimes those competing claims differ in strength and quantity. In such cases, we must decide whether the claims on each opposing side can be aggregated. Relevance views argue that a set of claims can be aggregated only if they are sufficiently strong (compared to the claims with which they compete) to be morally relevant to the decision. Relevance views come in two flavours: Local Relevance and Global Relevance. This (...) paper presents a trilemma for both. Namely, that neither view can capture our intuition in tie-break cases, without forfeiting our intuitions in other important cases. The paper then presents a way to salvage relevance views and capture all our intuitions using a Hybrid view. By distinguishing between two types of relevance we can combine the strengths of Local and Global Relevance views such that we can hold all our intuitions, consistently and in a non-ad-hoc manner. Building on this, the paper demonstrates how we might amend the strongest formulation of a Relevance view, into a Hybrid account. The main focus of this paper is to develop a relevance view that can capture all the intuitions we have; however deeper justifications will still be needed for a full account of any relevance view. Thus, the end of the paper briefly considers what deeper justification might support the Hybrid view, indicating the direction such literature might go. Lastly, the paper considers the advantages of this view over a rival Hybrid view. (shrink)

Limited aggregationists argue that when deciding between competing claims to aid we are sometimes required and sometimes forbidden from aggregating weaker claims to outweigh stronger claims. Joe Horton presents a ‘fatal dilemma’ for these views. Views that land on the First Horn of his dilemma suggest that a previously losing group strengthened by fewer and weaker claims can be more choice-worthy than the previously winning group strengthened by more and stronger claims. Views that land on the Second Horn suggest that (...) combining two losing groups together and two winning groups together can turn the losing groups into the winning groups and the winning groups into the losing groups. This paper demonstrates that the ‘fatal dilemma’ is neither fatal nor a dilemma. The First Horn is devastating but avoidable and the Second Horn is unavoidable but not devastating. Nevertheless, Horton’s argument does help to narrow down the acceptable range of views. (shrink)

The referent of the transcendental and indexical “I” is present non-ascriptively and contrasts with “the personal I” which necessity is presenced as having properties. Each is unique but in different ways. The former is abstract and incomplete until taken as a personal I. The personal I is ontologically incomplete until it self-determines itself morally. The “absolute Ought” is the exemplary moral self-determination and it finds a special disclosure in “the truth of will.” Simmel's situation ethics is useful for making more (...) precise Husserl's ethical position. (shrink)

Do the various ascriptions of “violence,” e.g., to rape, logical reasoning, racist legislation, unqualified statements, institutions of class and/or gender inequity, etc., mean something identically the same, something analogous, or equivocal and context-bound? This paper argues for both an analogous sense as well as an exemplary essence and finds support in Aristotle’s theory of anger as, as Sokolowski has put it, a form of moral annihilation, culminating in a level of rage that crosses a threshold. Here we adopt Sartre’s analysis (...) of the “threshold of violence” as indicating a basic “existential” possibility wherein persons may and do adopt a posture of anti-god. This has considerable symmetry with the mythic and theological figure in the Abrahamic religions who is called “Lucifer.” This personage, at a unique timeless moment, found himself empowered to assume the right to exercise an infinite will-act which tolerated no superior normative perspective. I argue that this mythic stance is a live option for persons. Further, modern day nation-state military preparedness, where nuclear weaponry is a major tool of foreign policy, is a way of putting on ice and holding in reserve, but button ready, the onto-logical madness of the Luciferian moment. (shrink)

Recent literature has drawn attention to the complex relationship between health care and the environmental crisis. Healthcare systems are significant contributors to climate change and environmental degradation, and the environmental crisis is making our health worse and thus putting more pressure on healthcare systems; our health and the environment are intricately linked. In light of this relationship, we might think that there are no trade‐offs between health and the environment; that healthcare decision‐makers have special responsibilities to the environment; and that (...) environmental values should be included in healthcare resource‐allocation decisions. However, we argue that these claims are mistaken. The environmental crisis involves a wider range of considerations than just health. There is a plurality of reasons to act on the environment; we might do so to protect the natural world, to prevent catastrophes in other parts of the world, or to avert climate war and displacement. Trading‐off between health care and environmental sustainability is thus unavoidable and requires sensitivity to all these reasons. Healthcare decision‐makers are not well placed to be sensitive to these reasons, nor do they have the democratic authority to make such value judgements. Therefore, decisions about environmental sustainability interventions should be made at a ‘higher level’ of resource allocation. Importantly, hospitals have environmental duties but not environmental responsibilities; their job is to provide the best healthcare possible within the constraints given to them, not to choose between health care and other goods. (shrink)

Book 1 focused on transcendental-phenomenological ontology and distinguished the non-sortal from the propertied personal sense of ourselves. I can be aware of myself and refer to myself without it being necessary to think of any third-personal characteristic. Book 2 addresses the other richer sense of ourself when we respond to "Who are you?" where the answer might be in terms of an anguished question of identity or the ethical what sort of person am I? It might also be the normative (...) question of whom one ought to be. (shrink)

This book is a rounded well-informed study of violence, especially from a hermeneutical and social-studies perspective. It is relevant to peace studies. It raises key issues about the phenomenology of the person, of violence, of the foundations of ethics. Although it tends to skirt normative phenomenological, eidetic as well as moral issues they are always insistently on the edge of the rich discussions philosophical-hermeneutical issues and contemporary writings on these matters.

The works of Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank argue that consciousness is fundamentally a self-awareness antecedent to reflection. This essay picks up the suggestion that consciousness itself is a field or medium of manifestation. As such it is a “metafact,” the anonymity of which transcendental philosophy seeks to overcome. This is required because the “facts” of the light of the mind and the intelligibility of what the mind discloses elude philosophical investigation as long as the anonymity reigns. Clarifying self-consciousness illuminates (...) what essentially must elude normal categorial and predicative investigation which presuppose the light of the mind and intelligibility. The seemingly esoteric issue of the discovery of the primacy of the pre- or non-reflective self-presence at the foundation of first-person reference may be said to found metaphysics in so far as this requires evidence for the inseparability of being from manifestation. (shrink)

The editors, Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp, of Husserl's Aufsdtze und Vortri~ge (1922-1937) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989) have given us a fascinating present with quite a few surprises. I would like to take this occasion to thank them publicly for their able and selfless labors. Here we have Husserl attempting to address himself to a large philosophically untrained audience for funds of which he had dire need: he had two children getting married and the real value of his inflated German (...) annual income was worth $160.00. But, as he told a friend, what he was doing was as genuine philosophical work as what he would do for his Jahrbuch ffir Philosophie und phginomenologische Forschung. In many ways it is regrettable the work did not come to full fruition for the publication in the Jahrbuch because then the tensions and ambiguities we find here would have been perhaps less severe. (shrink)

The dialogue between Blondel and Husserl carried on by Maréchal and Duméry and other thinkers has been silent for almost fifty years. Yet Husserl's Nachlass provides reasons for deepening the dialogue, especially in the area of the basic Blondelian themes: the willing-will and the teleological and religious nature of consciousness. Nevertheless there are intriguing differences in their respective philosophical theologies.

Defending the ancient thesis, that being and the true, or being and manifestation, are necessarily inseparable, is at the heart of transcendental phenomenology. The transcendental “reduction” disengages the basic “natural” naïve doxastic belief which permits the world to appear as essentially indifferent to the agency of manifestation. The massive work of transcendental phenomenology is showing the agency of manifestation of “absolute consciousness.” Yet the foundations of this agency of manifestation are pervaded by issues which, when addressed, reveal that the question (...) of a “second absolute” is basic and opens Husserlian phenomenology to metaphysical questions. This has to do not merely with the teleology of the agency of manifestation, i.e., the “whither” of the teleology of presencing, but also, in some sense, with the constituting “whence” of the transcendental I. Husserl argues for the teleology of truth pointing to both a divine subject as well as a divine entelechy. (shrink)

Reference to persons with personal pronouns raises the issue of the primary referent and its nature. “I” does not refer to a property or cluster of properties. This contrasts with our identifying grasp of persons. A person is a radical singularity and thus stands in contrast to a kind or sortal term. The individuation of persons is not adequately grasped by “definite descriptions” or “eidetic singularities.” In spite of the seeming possibility of persons being wholly identical in terms of properties, (...) in other words, “doubles,” the core referent of reference to persons is not to what is individuated merely by mere numerical differences or spatial-temporal, and essential-eidetic determinations. Rather we have to do with a “non-sortal unique essence.” What “I” refers to is a self-individuating substance. This raises questions for the proper referent of “love.” What is it that love intends or loves if persons are basically radical singularities. What does one love and why does one love if whom one loves is most essentially non-sortal? The question of the ontological status of persons requires integrating the status of being transcendental I’s, and thus being non-temporal, non-spatial, non-sortal, simple substances and thus not homogenous with the experienced world. (shrink)

Both the sociological as well as biblical-theological concepts of secularism may make use of the phenomenological discussions of implicit horizonal knowledge as informing explicit forms of knowing. If secularism may mean the erosion of faith by way of appropriation of fundamental beliefs about oneself or the world, the deep secularism may mean an appropriation of beliefs which make faith itself appear reprehensible. But perhaps the deepest form of secularism is the existence of scientific, reductionist naturalism; this may take the forms (...) eliminativism or of identity theory. This ‘secularism’ is such that it makes knowing itself impossible. Its basic move is to reduce the transcendental conditions of the manifestation, description, or display of the world to physical causes. Its most startling thesis is that first-person experience itself is an illusion and this illusion is the source of the major lies and beliefs that are most harmful for the culture, e.g. religious faith and belief in immortality. Unfortunately for deep secularism, as scientistic reductionistic materialist naturalism, it self-destructs. (shrink)

Here is a philosophical examination of some themes presented by Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel, as well as in his novels Immortality and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The discussions of the first-personal perspectives of the novel’s author, both as appearing in and as contrasted with that of a character in the novel, as these unfold in implicit subtle comic, social-political contexts, prescind from these contexts and dwell instead on fictional renditions of the senses of personhood and (...) its individuality especially as embodied in the face and as implied in relations of love. Of special interest is Kundera’s thesis that the irreplaceable uniqueness of the individual is one of Europe’s finest illusions. (shrink)

The ancient theme of the metaphysical-theological extremes of being-human is revisited by asking about the condition for the readiness to engage in the form of violence which is nuclear war. Sartre’s analysis of the extreme form of anger which crosses a threshold resulting in a self-legitimating righteous indignation which admits of no superior mollifying standpoint is appropriated to account for the complacency with the institution of nuclear weapons. The god-like anti-God characteristics of extreme rage are put on ice but ready (...) to be thawed quickly in the three-quarter of a century old disposition to destroy the world in which all life that we know is lived. The parallels with the myth of Lucifer invite themselves. This raises the question of what there is in being-human which is the condition for the possibility of such Luciferian impulses. Features of being human explicated by Husserlian transcendental phenomenology serve as lures to the unique form of pride that here is called Luciferian. Here it is argued that these features can also be lures to a sense of pride, analogous to the ancient magnanimitas, as developed by Aquinas. (shrink)

I can be aware of myself and refer to myself without it being necessary to think of any third-personal characteristics; indeed one may be aware of oneself without having to be aware of anything except oneself. This consideration raises issues in phenomenological ontology of identity, individuation, and substance.

Reflection is the basic attitude of transcendental phenomenology. However, as we shall see in this essay, prereflective experiencing may make a unique claim for philosophical foundations - albeit a claim which can only occur when mediated by reflection.

In this paper, we explore the effects of certain forbidden substructure conditions on preordered sets. In particular, we characterize in terms of these conditions those preordered sets which can be represented as the supremum of a well-ordered ascending chain of lowersets whose members are constructed by means of alternating applications of disjoint union and ordinal sums with chains. These decompositions are examples of ordinal decompositions in relatively normal lattices as introduced by Snodgrass, Tsinakis, and Hart. We conclude the paper (...) with an application to information systems. (shrink)