Philosophers of religion have written a great deal about the problem of evil. Their reflections, however, have not concentrated, at least not extensively or sufficiently, on the particularities of evil that manifest themselves in genocide. Concentrating on some of those particularities, this essay reflects on genocide, which has sometimes been called the crime of crimes, to raise questions such as: how should genocide affect the philosophy of religion and what might philosophers of religion contribute to help check that crime against (...) humanity? (shrink)

John Rawls is one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Contemporary political philosophy has been reshaped by his seminal ideas and most current work in the discipline is a response to them. This book introduces his central ideas and examines their contribution to contemporary political thought. In the first part of the book Catherine Audard focuses on Rawls' conception of political and social justice and its justification as presented in his groundbreaking A Theory of Justice. This (...) includes sustained examination of Rawls' moral philosophy and its core thesis, the primacy of justice, the complex relation between Rawls' views and utilitarianism, and his most famous concept, the Original Position Device. In the second half of the book, Audard explores Rawls' more practical concerns for stability and political consensus, citizenship and international justice, and shows the continuity between these concerns and his earlier work. Throughout, Audard contextualizes Rawls' ideas by giving a sense of their historical development, which underlines the intellectual cohesion of his thought. The move between ethics and politics so characteristic of Rawls' work, and which makes for the richness of his philosophy, is shown to also create for it significant problems. John Rawls combines clear exposition with insightful analysis and provides an interpretative and critical framework that will help shape ongoing debates surrounding Rawls' work. (shrink)

During public health crises including the COVID-19 pandemic, resource scarcity and contagion risks may require health systems to shift—to some degree—from a usual clinical ethic, focused on the well-being of individual patients, to a public health ethic, focused on population health. Many triage policies exist that fall under the legal protections afforded by “crisis standards of care,” but they have key differences. We critically appraise one of the most fundamental differences among policies, namely the use of criteria to categorically exclude (...) certain patients from eligibility for otherwise standard medical services. We examine these categorical exclusion criteria from ethical, legal, disability, and implementation perspectives. Focusing our analysis on the most common type of exclusion criteria, which are disease-specific, we conclude that optimal policies for critical care resource allocation and the use of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) should not use categorical exclusions. We argue that the avoidance of categorical exclusions is often practically feasible, consistent with public health norms, and mitigates discrimination against persons with disabilities. (shrink)

This landmark study examines the role played by the rediscovery of the writings of the ancient atomists, Epicurus and Lucretius, in the articulation of the major philosophical systems of the seventeenth century, and, more broadly, their influence on the evolution of natural science and moral and political philosophy. The target of sustained and trenchant philosophical criticism by Cicero, and of opprobrium by the Christian Fathers of the early Church, for its unflinching commitment to the absence of divine supervision and the (...) finitude of life, the Epicurean philosophy surfaced again in the period of the Scientific Revolution, when it displaced scholastic Aristotelianism. Both modern social contract theory and utilitarianism in ethics were grounded in its tenets. Catherine Wilson shows how the distinctive Epicurean image of the natural and social worlds took hold in philosophy, and how it is an acknowledged, and often unacknowledged presence in the writings of Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, Boyle, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley. With chapters devoted to Epicurean physics and cosmology, the corpuscularian or "mechanical" philosophy, the question of the mortality of the soul, the grounds of political authority, the contested nature of the experimental philosophy, sensuality, curiosity, and the role of pleasure and utility in ethics, the author makes a persuasive case for the significance of materialism in seventeenth-century philosophy without underestimating the depth and significance of the opposition to it, and for its continued importance in the contemporary world. Lucretius's great poem, On the Nature of Things, supplies the frame of reference for this deeply-researched inquiry into the origins of modern philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for an account of metaphorical content as what is said when a speaker utters a metaphor. First, I show that two other possibilities—the Gricean account of metaphor as implicature and the strictly semantic account developed by Josef Stern—face several serious problems. In their place, I propose an account that takes metaphorical content to cross-cut the semantic-pragmatic distinction. This requires re-thinking the notion of metaphorical content, as well as the relation between the metaphorical and the literal.

E. Jayne Whitea, Catherine Matsuob and Fiona WestbrookcaUniversity of Canterbury; bFukuoka University; cAuckland University of Technology (AUT)This collective writing piece takes its points of depa...

La question de la cohérence de la théorie rawlsienne de la justice et de son tournant politique a été depuis longtemps une source de débats et de malentendus. Pour certains interprètes, l’abandon par le second Rawls d’un fondement kantien des principes de justice au profit d’un libéralisme purement politique serait un prix trop élevé à payer pour obtenir un large consensus sur des principes de justice dans des sociétés démocratiques traversées par des conflits de valeurs insurmontables. « La vérité dérangeante (...) ( inconvenient truth ) que Rawls découvre est qu’il est impossible, écrit Robert Taylor (2011), de parvenir à un consensus par recoupement sur une conception kantienne de la personne ou plus largement sur la justice comme équité », mais qu’en même temps, sans un tel fondement, la force morale de la théorie de la justice serait diluée. Dans cet article, je voudrais répondre à ces critiques et montrer que, bien loin de conduire au relativisme, l’exigence d’autonomie doctrinale et d’indépendance des principes de justice à l’égard de toute conception substantielle du Bien exprimée par Rawls ( Libéralisme politique, p. 133) exprime le sens qu’a pour lui l’idéal démocratique : le respect pour l’autonomie morale des personnes et le rejet de « la pratique séculaire de l’intolérance comme condition nécessaire à l’ordre et à la stabilité de la société » ( Libéralisme politique, p. 14). Mais un tel idéal n’est-il pas irréaliste? Faire ainsi confiance à l’autonomie des citoyens, à leur capacité à distinguer entre leurs doctrines morales personnelles et des principes publics de justice ( Libéralisme politique, p. 7) ne risque-t‑il pas d’affaiblir les démocraties au lieu de garantir leur stabilité, comme l’espère Rawls ( Libéralisme politique, p. 4)? Cette ambition d’autonomie doctrinale est-elle une force ou une faiblesse de la théorie rawlsienne? (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

O'Keefe's contention that Epicurus devised the atomic swerve to counter a threat to the efficacy of reason posed by the thesis that the future is fixed regardless of what we do, is not supported by the evidence he adduces. Epicurus' own words in On nature XXV, and testimony from Lucretius and Cicero, tell far more strongly in favour of the traditional view, that Epicurus' concerns were causal determinism and its threat to moral responsiblity for our actions and characters.

Qu'est-ce que l'utilitarisme? Philosophie du bourgeois, philosophie de l'homo oeconomicus, dénoncée, entre autres, par Marx, Nietzsche et Foucault? Ou la seule philosophie morale de taille à concurrencer le kantisme et l'une des bases de l'éthique appliquée contemporaine? L'utilitarisme a cherché à constituer une morale purement rationnelle, critique des croyances religieuses et des conventions sociales. L'exemple le plus illustre est celui de la justice pénale. Bentham, dans des textes révolutionnaires, soutient, à la suite de Beccaria, que la peine doit être proportionnée (...) au tort commis par le coupable, non au besoin de vengeance de la victime et de la société. Dans le premier volume de cette Anthologie, Bentham et ses précurseurs, la filiation entre Bentham et les philosophes des Lumières est établie. De Shaftesbury et Hume à Beccaria et William Paley, on pourra prendre la mesure des continuités, mais aussi du génie du fondateur de ce radicalisme philosophique. Surtout, le lecteur aura accès aux textes majeurs de Bentham qui n'avaient jamais été traduits, en dehors du Panoptique et des Sophismes anarchiques écrits directement en français. On pourra ainsi apprécier combien l'utilitarisme a été et demeure un outil d'analyse et de critique de la morale ordinaire. (shrink)

The reception of Rawls in France has been an extremely complex story where forces of innovation have been, in the end, overwhelmed by the resistance of `philosophical nationalism'. This is surprising as, in many ways, France was going through tremendous changes and modernization at the time of the translation of A Theory of Justice in 1987. In that context, Rawls's project seemed to have something useful and suggestive to offer: bridging the gap between freedom and equality in a new version (...) of social democracy, combining social justice and market efficiency, respecting the plurality of values within civil society and creating a consensus on democratic legitimacy. But the intellectual obstacles, represented mostly by the French idiosyncratic brand of republicanism, were to prove too strong to allow for a true `liberalization' of French intellectual and political life. Whereas a number of lawyers, economists and political scientists as well as proportion of the French civil service saw all the benefits of a rigorous engagement with Rawls, philosophers and the intelligentsia on the whole, with the exception of Paul Ricoeur, reacted negatively to Rawls. (shrink)

A leading philosopher shows that if the pursuit of happiness is the question, Epicureanism is the answer Epicureanism has a reputation problem, bringing to mind gluttons with gout or an admonition to eat, drink, and be merry. In How to Be an Epicurean, philosopher Catherine Wilson shows that Epicureanism isn't an excuse for having a good time: it's a means to live a good life. Although modern conveniences and scientific progress have significantly improved our quality of life, many of (...) the problems faced by ancient Greeks -- love, money, family, politics -- remain with us in new forms. To overcome these obstacles, the Epicureans adopted a philosophy that promoted reason, respect for the natural world, and reverence for our fellow humans. By applying this ancient wisdom to a range of modern problems, from self-care routines and romantic entanglements to issues of public policy and social justice, Wilson shows us how we can all fill our lives with purpose and pleasure. (shrink)

Metaethics from a First Person Standpoint addresses in a novel format the major topics and themes of contemporary metaethics, the study of the analysis of moral thought and judgement. Metathetics is less concerned with what practices are right or wrong than with what we mean by 'right' and 'wrong.' Looking at a wide spectrum of topics including moral language, realism and anti-realism, reasons and motives, relativism, and moral progress, this book engages students and general readers in order to enhance their (...) understanding of morality and moral discourse as cultural practices. Catherine Wilson innovatively employs a first-person narrator to report step-by-step an individual's reflections, beginning from a position of radical scepticism, on the possibility of objective moral knowledge. The reader is invited to follow along with this reasoning, and to challenge or agree with each major point. Incrementally, the narrator is led to certain definite conclusions about 'oughts' and norms in connection with self-interest, prudence, social norms, and finally morality. Scepticism is overcome, and the narrator arrives at a good understanding of how moral knowledge and moral progress are possible, though frequently long in coming. Accessibly written, Metaethics from a First Person Standpoint presupposes no prior training in philosophy and is a must-read for philosophers, students and general readers interested in gaining a better understanding of morality as a personal philosophical quest."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

This dissertation examines how the distinction between what is said and what is implicated should be applied to metaphorical language. I claim that metaphor has been incorrectly held to belong to the domain of pragmatics---what is implicated by an utterance---and I argue that metaphorical interpretations can and should be regarded as constituting what is said. ;The first two chapters develop the case against two implicature accounts of metaphor: Grice's account of metaphor as conversational implicature, and the relevance-theoretic account of metaphor (...) as 'loose talk' developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. Two reasons to dispute these characterizations of metaphor as implicature are developed by examining dissimilarities between alleged metaphorical implicatures and more typical cases of implicature. The third chapter focuses on the notion of what is said in cases of literal language, and explores where and how the line between what is said and what is implicated should be drawn for several controversial cases. I argue for a view of such cases according to which considerable contextual variation is taken to fall within the realm of what is said. With this view of what is said in place, the final two chapters of the dissertation explore how a semantic account of metaphor might go. Two existing semantic accounts are examined, and difficulties with each are discussed. Finally, a characterization of metaphorical content is proposed, and an alternative semantic account is developed. (shrink)

Can you draw a clear line through American history from the Puritans to the "Nones" of today? On the surface, there is not much connective tissue between the former, who often serve as shorthand for a persistent religious fanaticism in the United States, and the almost one quarter of the population who now regularly check the "None" or "None of the above" box when responding to surveys of religious preference. But instead of seeing a disconnect between these two groups separated (...) by time, historian Catherine Albanese insists there is a deep connection that spans the centuries. With a targeted romp through American history from the seventeenth century to the present, Albanese ties together these seemingly disparate groups through a shared and distinctively American preoccupation with delight and desire. Albanese begins our journey with the role of delight and desire in the brand of Calvinism championed by renowned Puritan minister Cotton Mather and later Jonathan Edwards. She then traces the development of these themes up through the present, treating the reader to revelatory readings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Bushnell, Andrew Jackson Davis, William James, Emma Curtis Hopkins, Elizabeth Towne, and others, revealing the contours of an evolving theology of desire. The result is an original and entertaining take on an underexamined through line in American history. (shrink)

This essay explores seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century programs of natural inquiry where conjecture—an uncertain category of knowledge—played a vital role in the advancement of the sciences. It shows how early modern investigators used conjectures as a bridge between knowledge and ignorance and the process of conjecturing as a way to expand the mental state of inquiry. In publishing their conjectures, they were heeding Francis Bacon’s call to inspire hope and urge fellow experimenters to continue researching complex natural phenomena. Fellow investigators (...) could help to test, verify, revise, invalidate, or propose new inferences in a dialectical, collaborative process. The author argues that, by the eighteenth century, public conjecturing marked a particular kind of broad-minded experimental philosopher. This essay situates conjectures within agnotology—the study of culturally produced ignorance—and Baconian communication of knowledge and ignorance. It explores the philosophical and moral tensions investigators navigated when specifying nature’s unknowns. (shrink)

Cet article fournit les principaux résultats de la mission effectuée en mai 2011 dans le cadre du projet concernant la sculpture architecturale byzantine de la côte occidentale de la mer Noire. La première partie présente et décrit les ensembles architecturaux d’où proviennent les sculptures sur lesquelles ont été prélevés des échantillons de marbre. La seconde partie a trait aux caractéristiques spécifiques des marbres analysés : vingt échantillons de marbre prélevés sur des sculptures provenant surtout de Sozopol, mais aussi d’Obzor et (...) de Pomorie, ont été analysés afin de connaître leur provenance. Les différentes méthodes d’analyses ont montré que la majorité des échantillons étaient issus de l’île de Proconnèse. Néanmoins, quatre des vingt échantillons présentent une composition minéralogique et chimique différente de celle des marbres de Proconnèse : deux sont en marbre pentélique, un autre en marbre de Thasos et le dernier est très probablement en marbre local. (shrink)

A study of fifteen Middle Byzantine reliefs — ten of them unpublished — from the ruined church of Saint-Donat at Glyki makes it easier to understand material at present in the Byzantine Museum at Ioannina. It tells us first of all about the working conditions of the sculptors in a peripheral region of the Byantine Empire. Faced with the lack of marble quarries, these sculptors were obliged to find a solution to the problem. An examination of this material led us (...) to distinguish two groups of reliefs. The first is characterised by a decoration subject to two sorts of influence: on the one hand they show a decoration very similar to that used in the reliefs in Macedonia, and on the other, reminders of Early Christian formal and decorative art. We can thus identify the different sources of inspiration of the sculptors and better understand their manner of organisation. (shrink)

Dans l'introduction, M. Fabre-Magnan explique que le souci majeur de C. Labrusse-Riou a toujours été que l'humanité de l'homme soit préservée, que l'homme est la fin du droit et ee l'éthique et que le juriste a un rôle spécifique à jouer pour protéger cette humanité et pour rendre possible la vie dans un corps social organisé à partir des principes fondateurs du droit et des données du droit positif. Ces écrits sont regroupés en trois parties : " La naissance d'une (...) discipline " dont certains sont devenus des textes de référence, " Les grandes questions de la bioéthique ", en particulier des réflexions sur la légitimité et la responsabilité, " L'horizon de la bioéthique ", sa nécessaire finalité qui est de sauvegarder la vie de l'homme, de défendre son humanité menacée par autrui comme par lui-même. (shrink)

L'exercice de la violence est largement, massivement, le fait des humains mâles. Les femmes, ou humains femelles, en sont souvent les principales victimes. Mais tel n'est pas l'objet de cet ouvrage. Lorsque, exceptionnellement, des femmes ont recours à des actes de violence, sont elles-mêmes auteurs de tels actes, elles transgressent les normes, les frontières imposées à leur seule catégorie de sexe. Ce sont ces cas de dissidence, de subversion, de transgression qui intéressent Hacker...

This paper proposes a new approach for analysing daily activities in a laboratory. The case study presented is an analysis of shop-talk around a microscope. In addition to the classical approaches, such as ethnomethodology and anthropology of science, I argue that a microsemiotic approach could be useful to better understand what is at stake. The semiotic approach I shall use here was proposed by a group of Belgian semioticians: Groupe μ. This semiotic approach leads to a constructivist point of view: (...) the meaning of a visual representation is progressively constructed and is very context-dependent. This semiotic approach is fruitful because it allows a very precise analysis of shop-talk recorded data, and gives a better account of the materiality of visual representations. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage prend pour objet les effets de la féminisation massive des activités équestres depuis l’après-guerre, tant au niveau statistique que du point de vue du contenu des pratiques. Le sous-titre choisi établit une certaine ambigüité sur la démarche adoptée : il pose la question d’une « avancée », c’est à dire d’un progrès que constituerait ou non la présence des femmes dans le domaine équestre. « Avancée » (mise ici en doute) pour qui? Pour les femmes? Pour les chevaux? (...) Pour l’activi... (shrink)

Emile Durkheim est essentiellement connu comme l'un des pères fondateurs de la sociologie moderne. Fondée sur l'analyse structuro-fonctionnaliste des systèmes sociaux, son œuvre pédagogique reste importante et toujours valable. L'éducation, " socialisation méthodique de la jeune génération ", implique une pédagogie désormais attentive aux valeurs intellectuelles et morales que le maître a mission de promouvoir. L'analyse sociologique et psychologique de la fonction du maître que propose Durkheim est située ainsi dans le cadre d'une conception des systèmes éducatifs possédant une " (...) autonomie relative " susceptible de faire des éducateurs des agents de changement. Les pages ici présentées sont significatives de la pensée d'un pédagogue posant, à partir d'un travail de sociologue, que rapport au savoir et rapport aux valeurs doivent être liés au sein d'une éducation fondamentalement humaniste. (shrink)

Catherine Zuckert examines the work of five key philosophical figures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the lens of their own decidedly postmodern readings of Plato. She argues that Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, and Derrida, convinced that modern rationalism had exhausted its possibilities, all turned to Plato in order to rediscover the original character of philosophy and to reconceive the Western tradition as a whole. Zuckert's artful juxtaposition of these seemingly disparate bodies of thought furnishes a synoptic view, (...) not merely of these individual thinkers, but of the broad postmodern landscape as well. The result is a brilliantly conceived work that offers an innovative perspective on the relation between the Western philosophical tradition and the evolving postmodern enterprise. (shrink)

Faced with the difficult task of discerning Plato’s true ideas from the contradictory voices he used to express them, scholars have never fully made sense of the many incompatibilities within and between the dialogues. In the magisterial _Plato’s Philosophers_, Catherine Zuckert explains for the first time how these prose dramas cohere to reveal a comprehensive Platonic understanding of philosophy. To expose this coherence, Zuckert examines the dialogues not in their supposed order of composition but according to the dramatic order (...) in which Plato indicates they took place. This unconventional arrangement lays bare a narrative of the rise, development, and limitations of Socratic philosophy. In the drama’s earliest dialogues, for example, non-Socratic philosophers introduce the political and philosophical problems to which Socrates tries to respond. A second dramatic group shows how Socrates develops his distinctive philosophical style. And, finally, the later dialogues feature interlocutors who reveal his philosophy’s limitations. Despite these limitations, Zuckert concludes, Plato made Socrates the dialogues’ central figure because Socrates raises the fundamental human question: what is the best way to live? Plato’s dramatization of Socratic imperfections suggests, moreover, that he recognized the apparently unbridgeable gap between our understandings of human life and the nonhuman world. At a time when this gap continues to raise questions—about the division between sciences and the humanities and the potentially dehumanizing effects of scientific progress—Zuckert’s brilliant interpretation of the entire Platonic corpus offers genuinely new insights into worlds past and present. (shrink)

In this unconventional article, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg conduct a three-way ‘conversation’ in which they all take turns outlining how they understand the relationship among postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism. It begins with a short introduction, and then Ros, Sarah and Catherine each define the term they have become associated with. This is followed by another round in which they discuss the overlaps, similarities and disjunctures among the terms, and the article ends with how (...) each one understands the current mediated feminist landscape. (shrink)