(1997). Individuals confront tradition: Scholars in eleventh‐ and twelfth‐century Europe. The European Legacy: Vol. 2, The Individual in European Culture, pp. 1313-1324.

One of the greatest merits of Dr. Sherover's excellent book is that it enables us to see Heidegger's thought- in one direction, at least- as an organic outgrowth from his reading of Kant. It thus helps to remove on common misapprehension that Heidegger's thought is odd, idiosyncratic, and not rooted- as in fact it is- in the mainstream of philosophy. Dr. Sherover is able to remove this misunderstanding in great part through the admirable clarity of his exposition; he has succeeded (...) in conveying Heidegger's most abstruse points into plain and understandable English, and so has overcome the formidable barrier of terminology that has blocked so many Heideggerian interpreters. This book is in fact the clearest exposition that I have read of Heidegger's thought at one states of its development. But beyond this valuable job of clarification, by bringing the light of Heidegger to bear upon Kant, this book is also a significant contribution to Kantian scholarship. And that means, of course, a contribution to philosophy itself. (shrink)

In this study, Charles M. Sherover argues that there is a single, substantial line of development that can be traced from the work of Leibniz through Kant and Royce to Heidegger. Sherover traces a movement from deep within the roots of German idealism through Royce's insights into American pragmatism to the ethical ramifications of Heidegger's existential phenomenology, and then provides an analysis of the neglected ethical and political implications of Heidegger's Being and Time. The essays lead finally to Sherover's (...) own view of the self as a member of a moral and political community. Charles M. Sherover is Professor Emeritus of philosophy, Hunter College, City University of New York. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Heidegger, Kant and Time and Time, Freedom and the Common Good. Gregory R. Johnson is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Pacific School of Religion. PRAISE FOR THE BOOK: "Sherover combines solid and original scholarship with well-argued conclusions of his own, seeking to lead us in the direction of a higher and fuller mode of authentic being in the world. This collection of essays is an excellent addition to the series, Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, edited by Jude P. Dougherty." -- Eugene Thomas Long, Review of Metaphysics. (shrink)

Almost everyone agrees, under some interpretation, that a world is nomologically accessible if and only if it obeys the laws of the base world. This surface agreement, however, has led many to attach little importance to different interpretations, thereby conflating two distinct concepts of nomological accessibility. According to the Shared Law Account (hereafter SL), a target world is nomologically accessible from the base world if, and only if, all and only the laws of the base world are laws at the (...) target world. The Compossible Events Account (hereafiter CE) holds that a target world is nomologically accessible from the base world if, and only if, all events of the target world are compossible with the laws of the base world. After demonstrating that these accounts are distinct, I shall show that the distinction matters. Not only is the correct modal system for nomic necessity determined by which characterizes accessibility, but some arguments against Humean supenfenience depend upon SL. In the final section I show that CE is the correct interpretation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on Aristotle’s Nicomachean EthicsCharles M. YoungGabriel Richardson Lear. Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp. ix + 238. Cloth, $35.00.Suppose that you and I are friends. I need a ride to the airport; you offer to take me. You might do this for any of a number of reasons: (...) because you want to place me in your debt, because you want to impress bystanders, etc. But you might also do it for none of these reasons. You might do it, instead, because, understanding what resources are and what resources are for, you see taking me to the airport as an appropriate use of your resources (your time and your car), given our relationship and the circumstances in which we find ourselves.That's the Readers' Digest version of one story one might tell, on Aristotle's behalf, by way of connecting up friendship, virtuous action, practical and theoretical wisdom, action for its own sake, and action for the sake of the fine in the Nicomachean Ethics. I myself think it is a good story. It is also a story, I think, that Gabriel Richardson Lear tells, at least some of the time, in Happy Lives and the Highest Good, though she tells it with respect to courage, temperance, and magnanimity, not liberality and friendship.Most of the time, however, Lear tells another story. According to it, your taking me to the airport makes clear your commitment to make use of your resources to promote my good. Since we are friends, however, my good is bound up with yours, so in promoting my good you also promote your own good. But according to Aristotle the good for each of us is a life in which rationality is realized in thought and action. Hence your taking me to the airport counts as fine because it shows your commitment to that sort of life. But, again according to Aristotle, the centerpiece, and source of value, of that sort of life is contemplative activity, so you act for the sake of contemplation, whether you know this or not. And, in view of its expression of practical reason and truthfulness, your liberal activity is structurally similar to and so approximates to contemplative activity, and this allows us to say that you did what you did for the sake of contemplation.This is, so far as I know, an entirely new approach to the problems raised by Aristotle's identification of happiness with contemplation in NE X. Lear's story, and the arguments in its support, deserve and will repay serious attention. I limit myself here to four concerns about some of the details.First, our first story locates what is fine about virtuous action in the fit exhibited among the agent, her action, and her situation. Lear's story locates what is fine about virtuous action in its promotion of a certain kind of life. The first story thus sees what is fine about [End Page 118] virtuous action as something intrinsic to it, while Lear's story sees it as something external to it that it promotes. The first story seems to me to be looking in the right place.Second, the first story has it that virtuous activity is an expression of understanding, Lear's story that it is an expression of a commitment to understanding. Again, the first story seems to me to be looking in the right place.Third, Lear thinks that the liberal person can be said to act for the sake of contemplation when contemplation is the source of value for what she does, even when it is not the conscious aspiration of her action. That may be true, but I do not see that it is enough. What needs explanation is rather that she can be said to choose liberal activity for the sake of contemplation, and it is unclear how this could be unconscious.Finally, Lear's appeal to approximation may prove too much. The crafts, according to Aristotle, involve practical reason and truthfulness. But Aristotle doesn't believe that craft... (shrink)

This investigation examines several key factors believed to promote human flourishing, specifically: Factor 1: Age, Education, & Healthcare, Factor 2: Labor Force Participation, Factor 3: Crime, Factor 4: Income, Factor 5: Youth Unemployment and Factor 6: Voting Behavior. Data was examined at the county level, and collected from a variety of US government and non-governmental organizations. Our investigation into the conditions necessary to promote human flourishing uses internal migration within the United States as the indicator of “unhappy” communities. The findings (...) reveal that all factors are important in emigration somewhere, but the factors vary for different counties. As a result, attempts to address the ills of society require an appreciation of geography and context. (shrink)

This study provides a comparison of thinking style and ethical decision-making patterns between 386 U.S. students and 506 students from the People’s Republic of China enrolled in undergraduate business education in their respective countries. Contrary to our expectations, the Chinese students demonstrated a significantly greater linear thinking style compared to American students. As hypothesized, both Chinese and U.S. students possessing a balanced linear and nonlinear thinking style profile demonstrated greater ethical intent across a series of ethics vignettes. Chinese students also (...) were more likely to adopt an act utilitarian rationale, an ethical philosophy that in practice may violate government regulations or social rules to benefit one’s family instead of society for explaining their decisions across the vignettes. We conclude with a discussion of important theoretical as well as practical and potential future implications based on this comparative study. (shrink)

In Stig Hjarvard’s characterization, mediatization studies move beyond the positivist origins of the social sciences, as they must in order to avoid the fundamental contradiction between original commitments to classical determinism vis-à-vis human agency as acknowledged within mediatization studies. In order to sustain and enhance Hjarvard’s vision of the coherence between human agency and mediatization studies as a species of social science, I first sharpen these theoretical tensions by developing a robust account of human freedom as informed by Kant and (...) virtue ethics. I then adopt precise understandings of complementarity and epistemological pluralism as initially developed in Quantum Mechanics and subsequently by Karen Barad and Judith Simon as frameworks that can coherently conjoin contemporary social science with strong accounts of human freedom. The resulting coherency—or entanglement—between ethics and science implies new ethical responsibilities for social scientists as ‘virtuous agents’. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Preliminaries Universal vs. Particular Justice The Scope of Particular Justice Justice and the Doctrine of the Mean: The Problem Distributive and Corrective Justice Political Justice Pleonexia Justice and the Doctrine of the Mean: Aristotle's Solution Conclusion Bibliography.

This paper seeks to establish the ethical foundation of MNCs' responsibility for providing host country workforce (HCW) preparation and training attendant to the new expatriate management assignment. It argues that such moral responsibility arises from a set of correlative duties which MNCs acquire as business institutions. They include duties involving the expatriate manager, the HCW, and the host nation to (1) assist all employees, including the expatriate manager, in the successful execution of their assignments; (2) avoid the semblance of discriminatory (...) treatment; (3) encourage full status integration into a global economy; (4) foster personal enlightenment and self-enrichment; (5) help individuals develop useful, marketable skills; (6) contribute to the development of a greater and more functional national labor skill base; and (7) encourage a long-term focus on creating enduring value for a maximum number of stakeholders, rather than upon short-term and shortsighted profit for only a few. Some important cautions and considerations related to HCW training implementation are then discussed. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Preliminaries Apology 21b9–23c1: The Origins of the Socratic Elenchus Inconsistency Does Socrates Cheat? Some Stabs at Explanations Concluding Remarks Note.

Plato's striking figure of the ‘child in us’ at Phaedo 77e5 takes on an added lustre when viewed in the light of the theory of explanation Socrates develops between lOObl and 105c7.Socrates' theory aims to explain why certain objects have certain properties: why something is beautiful or tall, or when a body will be sick or alive. Explanation is called for, Socrates thinks, when an object has a property its title to which is insecure, in the sense that the object's (...) having the property is not guaranteed by its being what it is. Thus Socrates wants an explanation, for example, of a person's being tall or – the case of especial interest in the Phaedo – of a body's being alive. (shrink)

Humean interpretations claim that laws of nature merely summarize events. Non-Humean interpretations claim that laws force events to occur in certain patterns. First, I show that the Lewis/Ramsey account of lawhood, which claims that laws are axioms or theorems of the simplest strongest summary of events, provides the best Humean interpretation of laws. The strongest non-Humean account, the scientific essentialist position, grounds laws of nature in essential non-reducible dispositional properties held by natural kinds. The scientific essentialist account entails that laws (...) are a posteriori necessary truths. After showing that these are the best Humean and non-Humean accounts, I demonstrate that the Lewis/Ramsey account is better equipped for interpreting dispositions and counterfactuals. One distinction between the two accounts is whether counterfactuals, whose antecedents are physically possible, sometimes require closest worlds with different laws than the laws of the base world. On the Lewis/Ramsey account non-legal worlds will be necessary. If laws are merely summaries of events that occur then a world where the events are drastically different will often have different laws. The scientific essentialist, however, must demand that laws are the same in counterfactual reasoning because she grounds counterfactual reasoning in the essential dispositional properties of natural kinds. Recently, problems have developed for counterfactual analysis of dispositions due to finkish dispositions, mimicked dispositions, and masked dispositions. These difficulties have led some to abandon reductive accounts of dispositions. Doing so makes positions like scientific essentialism tenable. Yet, while scientific essentialism demands that dispositional properties cannot be reduced to categorical properties, the Humean has the opposite commitment. If dispositional properties are primitives in our ontology, then there is a stronger tie between events than Humeans admit. So, another major disagreement between these accounts is whether dispositions can be reduced. After examining why many attempts at reducing dispositions have failed, I offer one suggestion of how to reduce dispositions and demonstrate that keeping dispositional properties as primitives in our ontology is worse than the solution I offer. (shrink)

When phenomenological descriptions of perceptual experience are given it often seems that the distinction between mode and content of perceptual experience is not given the attention it deserves and that consequently certain philosophical difficulties develop which might have been avoided. While it will no doubt be admitted that the distinction between the “how” and the “what” of appearing is of importance in the phenomenology of perception, at first sight the making of such a distinction may seem so simple as to (...) be hardly worth discussing. It may seem to involve a mere matter of distinguishing modifiers of the verb “to perceive” from this verb's direct objects and their modifiers, but further consideration shows the situation is not that simple. In some cases there are alternative ways of phenomenological description such that what one description seems to indicate to be content is what the other description seems to indicate to be mode, and yet the two descriptions are seen to be equivalent in intent. If we analyze one expression in accordance with its grammar then the alternative expression must be considered idiomatic, that is, not analyzable in accordance with its grammar, for otherwise the two expressions could not be considered compatible. (shrink)