Was Joseph de Maistre a conservative thinker?; an actor who might at any time switch roles with his alleged British counterpart Edmund Burke in a show called “Reactions to the French Revolution”? Or was de Maistre (as Sir Isaiah Berlin saw him) a milestone on mankind’s rush to the “Age of Unreason” in general, and to the Nazi folly in particular? To answer this controversy, Professor Michael Shafir called on the witness’ stand an unexpected expert in conservatism and the folly (...) of revolutions: Romanian playwright Ion Luca Caragiale. Using as evidence before the court Caragiale’s famous farce “Master Leonida Facing Reaction”, this exercise in literary counterfactualism demonstrates, according to Shafir, the fig of reason and faith is too small to cover the wastelands of unreason and Social-Darwinist-like psychopathology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Inner Life of Catholic Reform: From the Council of Trent to the Enlightenment by Ulrich LehnerCarlos M. N. EireThe Inner Life of Catholic Reform: From the Council of Trent to the Enlightenment. By Ulrich Lehner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. ix + 294. $37.99 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-19-762060-1.This marvelous book encapsulates the seismic shift in perspective that has taken place in the study of early (...) modern Catholicism in the past four decades, and, at the same time, it sharpens the historiographical cutting edge of this new approach. Instead of focusing on the Council of Trent, the papacy, the Inquisition, religious orders, institutional reforms, political issues, theological wrangling, heroic saintly figures, or any of the many other external features of reform that previously dominated scholarship on Catholic reform, Lehner dives deeply into sources that shed light on what many scholars have taken to calling “lived religion,” that is, on the myriad ways in which the lives of the Catholic faithful were transformed. As he puts it, his book focuses on “spiritual resources” and rediscovers “neglected perspectives by shedding light on the forms and methods early modern Catholics used to ‘reform’ themselves and achieve spiritual progress” (ix, 1).This is a detail-oriented book, a brilliant interweaving of cultural, intellectual, and social history reminiscent of the best histoire total produced by the Annales school. It is based on the premise that all assertions must be firmly grounded on evidence, a methodological principle to which Lehner adheres in exemplary fashion. Relying on a vast array of texts, he seeks to prove that the early modern Catholic concept of “church reform” was firmly centered on spiritual values, and that the chief aim behind every proposed or implemented change was “the conversion and sanctification of the sinful self” (2). [End Page 697]By focusing on the inner dimensions of Catholic reform, rather than the outward structural dimensions that have traditionally attracted attention, Lehner does not dismiss the significance of structural reforms. His approach to “lived religion” is reminiscent of Thomas Aquinas’s take on the role played by divine grace in the transformation of human beings: “grace does not destroy nature,” said St. Thomas, “but rather perfects it.” Lehner turns this theological dictum into a historiographical one. As he puts it: “Writing the history of transformative spiritual methods and actions of early modern Catholics does not deny these [other] dimensions and does not seek to replace them, but rather complements and elucidates them” (3).Lehner’s fact-driven examination of the myriad ways in which the inner transformation of individuals effected positive changes in the Church and society focuses on nine specific aspects of daily life. Beginning with an analysis of the general dynamics of reform, he proceeds to dissect reforms in nine key components of Catholic culture: the priesthood, sermons, catechesis, family life, lay associations, the sacraments of the Eucharist and confession, prayer, symbols and images, and devotion to Saints Mary and Joseph.Arguing that the spiritual side of reform, or “inner reform,” as he calls it, “represents core ideas and values of early modern Catholic identity, individually and collectively,” Lehner strives to show the ultimate value of his approach through a wealth of details, perhaps with potential critics in mind who might accuse him for valuing subjectivity over objectivity. But he vanquishes any such critics. Ultimately, his thousands of details support his claim that previous interpretations of early modern Catholic reforms that focused primarily on structural issues are not necessarily more “objective,” but actually perpetuate “a chimerical picture of a religion emptied of everything precious to contemporary believers” (158).Much of what Lehner highlights in this book relates to the emotions in one way or another, that is, to reforming impulses that affected the heart as much as the intellect, but he avoids reductionism, positing that much of the inner reform of Catholicism struck a careful yet tenuous balance between opposing dialectical poles. The Church, he insists, aimed at people’s hearts as much as their minds, and instilled fear of hell and purgatory as much as it stressed mercy and salvation. Sermons, he says, leaned toward preaching fear, but the... (shrink)

The present essay contends that progressive readings of Smith ignore the influence of theological concepts and religious ideas on his work, notably three distinct strands: first, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural theology; second, Jansenist Augustinianism; third, Stoic arguments of theodicy. Taken together, these theological elements help explain why Smith’s moral philosophy and political economy intensifies the secular early modern and Enlightenment idea that the Fall brought about ‘radical evil’ and a ‘fatherless world’ in need of permanent divine intervention. As such, (...) Smith views the market as divine regulation of human sinfulness and an instrument to serve God’s providential plan. Indeed, the ‘invisible hand of the market’ represents a nominalist realm where human cooperation intersects with divine providence, blending private self-interest with the public commonweal. I will also argue that Smith’s conception of a morally neutral market is ultimately incompatible with creedal Christianity, in particular orthodox catholic Christian ideas of the common good in which all can share and the practice of charity for those most in need who have been abandoned by state bureaucracy and the marketplace. The main reason is that Smith, not unlike Calvin, tends to divorce human contract from divine gift by dividing the theo-logic of gratuitous reciprocal giving from the economic logic of contract – a dualism that bears an uncanny resemblance with Suárez’s Baroque scholasticism of which Smith’s friend David Hume was rightly critical. In particular, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation theology of Calvin, Luther and Suárez sunders ‘pure nature’ from the supernatural and develops a ‘two ends’ account of human nature, according to which human beings have a natural end separate from their supernatural finality. So instead of participating in the divine oikonomia of asymmetrical gift-exchange, human society and the economy operate autonomously and are ordered towards a purely natural end. Smith conceptualises the market mechanism as both a fundamental precondition for interpersonal relationality and at the same time separate from the sociality it engenders. Smith’s anthropology hovers half-way between Machiavelli and Mandeville’s homo œconomicus in search for maximal profit, on the one hand, and the diametrically opposed conception of man as a gift-exchanging animal striving for mutual social recognition, on the other hand. By viewing market exchange as separate from the private virtues of benevolence, justice and prudence, he introduces a split between the exercise of moral virtues and the operation of commercial society. Such a divide is wholly foreign to the project of an overarching civil compact in the writings of Smith’s contemporary Antonio Genovesi and other members of the Italian schools of civic humanism and civil economy. In consequence, Smith’s œuvre marks a decisive shift from civil to political economy. (shrink)

Although much has been written about the vigorous debates over science and religion in the Victorian era, little attention has been paid to their continuing importance in early twentieth-century Britain. Reconciling Science and Religion provides a comprehensive survey of the interplay between British science and religion from the late nineteenth century to World War II. Peter J. Bowler argues that unlike the United States, where a strong fundamentalist opposition to evolutionism developed in the 1920s (most famously expressed in the (...) Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925), in Britain there was a concerted effort to reconcile science and religion. Intellectually conservative scientists championed the reconciliation and were supported by liberal theologians in the Free Churches and the Church of England, especially the Anglican "Modernists." Popular writers such as Julian Huxley and George Bernard Shaw sought to create a non-Christian religion similar in some respects to the Modernist position. Younger scientists and secularists—including Rationalists such as H. G. Wells and the Marxists—tended to oppose these efforts, as did conservative Christians, who saw the liberal position as a betrayal of the true spirit of their religion. With the increased social tensions of the 1930s, as the churches moved toward a neo-orthodoxy unfriendly to natural theology and biologists adopted the "Modern Synthesis" of genetics and evolutionary theory, the proposed reconciliation fell apart. Because the tensions between science and religion—and efforts at reconciling the two—are still very much with us today, Bowler's book will be important for everyone interested in these issues. Contents: Illustrations Preface Introduction: A Legacy of Conflict? Confrontation, Cooperation, or Coexistence? Victorian Background Science and Religion in the New Century Part One: The Sciences and Religion 1. The Religion of Scientists Changing Patterns of Belief Scientists and Christianity Scientists and Theism Method and Meaning Science and Values 2. Scientists against Superstition Science and Rationalism Religion without Revelation Marxists and Other Radicals Science, Religion, and the History of Science 3. Physics and Cosmology Ether and Spirit The New Physics The Earth and the Universe 4. Evolution and the New Natural Theology Science and Creation Evolution and Progress The Role of Lamarckism Darwinism Revived 5. Matter, Life, and Mind The Origin of Life Vitalism and Organicism Mind and Body Psychology and Religion Part Two: The Churches and Science 6. The Churches in the New Century The Challenge of the New The Churches’ Response 7. The New Theology in the Free Churches Precursors of the New Theology Campbell and the New Theology Modernism in the Free Churches 8. Anglican Modernism Modernism and the New Natural Theology Charles F. D’Arcy E. W. Barnes W. R. Inge Charles Raven 9. The Reaction against Modernism Evangelicals against Evolution Liberal Catholicism The Menace of the New Psychology Science and Modern Life Theology in the Thirties Roman Catholicism Part Three: The Wider Debate 10. Science and Secularism Against Idealism Popular Rationalism The Social Reformers 11. Religion’s Defenders From Idealism to Spiritualism Creative and Emergent Evolution Evolution and the Human Spirit Progress through Struggle The Christian Response Epilogue Biographical Appendix Bibliography Index. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 223-240 [Access article in PDF] The "Survival of the Fittest" and the Origins of Social Darwinism Gregory Claeys * In late September 1838 a young man, aged 29, a former medical student and amateur naturalist, who had spent several years in the South Pacific studying plant and animal life, but who remained puzzled as to why "favourable variants" of each (...) species survived while "unfavourable variants" were destroyed, sat perusing a book, as he later recalled, "for amusement." 1 The work which provoked Charles Darwin was T. R. Malthus's Essay on Population (1798), which he later claimed first suggested to him the idea that "on the whole the best fitted live." This idea Darwin would popularize through the notion of the "struggle for existence," a phrase which he famously claimed to use as a "metaphor" but which meant simply "the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms." 2 That application resulted in the publication [End Page 223] of the Origin of Species in 1859, an occasion hailed as "the greatest event of Queen Victoria's reign," 3 even "by far the most important... in the history of the modern West." 4 It is well known, too, that Darwin's appreciation of Malthus was not unique even among naturalists. The year before the Origin of Species appeared another young man, Alfred Russel Wallace, aged 25, encountered the very same book. "There suddenly," he later recalled, flashed upon him "the idea of the survival of the fittest." 5 We know Wallace today, thus, as the codiscoverer of theory of natural selection, who presented a paper jointly with Darwin at the Linnean Society on that momentous evening of 1 July 1858 to mark their brilliant achievement. 6This curious coincidence has often been noted, but its ramifications require further assessment. This article examines some crucial nineteenth-century sources of the idea of the "survival of the fittest," which came to underpin many of the social and political doctrines later associated with the theory of natural selection, and also what were regarded as some of the limits of this idea. 7 It contends that there was in fact far more than mere coincidence in the obviously provocative role played by Malthus's Essay for both Darwin and Wallace. 8 It argues, [End Page 224] therefore, against the presumption of tacit causality--logically implicit in the concept of "Social Darwinism" 9 --that much of the social and political theory which nominally invoked Darwin was fundamentally derived from, as opposed to being reinforced by, the principles of natural selection. It challenges the view that the logic of discovery in the natural sciences, in other words, induced parallel or derivative concepts in the social sciences and that the "survival of the fittest" emerged first as a natural, and then mutated into a social concept. Instead it suggests that what was specific about much of Social Darwinism resulted from several shifts in thought in mid-Victorian Britain to which Darwin himself also responded and which therefore also vitally influenced his own development.No doubt, of course, this assertion of causation contains some truth. Darwin was extraordinarily widely read and extraordinarily influential. We are all aware of the great theological debates associated with his name in late Victorian Britain, of the counter-attack against Darwin begun by Bishop Wilberforce in June 1860, and of the tenacious war of attrition conducted by "Darwin's bulldog," T. H. Huxley, who coined the term "agnostic" in 1869 to define the lack of scientific evidence for the existence of God. 10 Much has been written of the moral panic and growing loss of religious faith, paralleling the course of Darwin's own "reluctant agnosticism," which followed the conclusion that human beings had been levelled to the status of animals and deprived of a special Providential creation as well as any divine purpose in the perpetuation of their species. In history a tremendous impetus was given to the search for certain laws of social development. In social... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 283-302 [Access article in PDF] Maistre, Donoso Cortés, and the Legacy of Catholic Authoritarianism Alberto Spektorowski According to the late Isaiah Berlin, the origins of fascism can be found in Joseph de Maistre's political thought. 1 This well-known thesis was anticipated by Carl Schmitt, a conservative Catholic intellectual who served as one of the most prominent jurists of the Third Reich. (...) He rescued the intellectual contributions of Joseph de Maistre and Donoso Cortés from obscurity by identifying them as the forerunners of his own non-normative theories of dictatorship. I suggest that by advancing such a claim Carl Schmitt paved the way toward a theoretical understanding of the notion of political authoritarianism characterized by what he defined as "non-normative decisionism." By interpreting Maistre and Cortés in this way, Schmitt was preparing his own political shift away from Catholic conservatism towards political authoritarianism, fascism, and National Socialism. At the same time, by removing the legitimacy of political decisionism embedded in traditionalist political thought, he eliminated the possibility of that middle road between fascism and liberalism known as traditionalist authoritarianism.The purpose of this study is to represent the Maistre-Donoso Cortés theoretical synthesis, in contrast to the thought of Carl Schmitt, as the cornerstone of a type of traditionalist political authoritarianism which paradoxically opposes Schmitt's idea of authoritarian rule. I suggest that Maistre could hardly be considered a non-legitimate decisionist or a prophet of fascism, since despite surpassing Maistre's defense of monarchical restoration, Donoso Cortés could hardly be connected to Schmitt's fascist decisionism. Moreover, precisely the model of traditional authoritarianism advocated by Maistre and [End Page 283] Donoso Cortés—or what I have labeled the synthesis of the Church and sword—not only did not generate fascism but because of its reliance on Providential legitimacy and the idea of transcendence, set an epistemological barrier against fascist development. For both Maistre and Donoso Cortés, in other words, the notion of legitimacy was never ignored.At first sight this claim, which releases Maistre and Donoso from any connection to non-normative decisionism and fascism, could be interpreted as a suggestion that the two theorists prefigured the idea of Christian Democracy of modern times; but nothing could be further from the truth. In contrast to other conservatives who endorsed democratic theory, Maistre and Donoso did not believe that any society could exist without authoritarian rule. However, there is a great difference between their traditional authoritarianism and secular authoritarianism. Traditional authoritarianism is based on Providential legitimization, the only source of legitimacy recognized by Maistre and Donoso. Although neither Maistre nor Donoso Cortés construed traditional authori-tarianism as a government of priests, they distinguished between political and religious authority and rejected the idea of political authority as severed from moral "religious" legitimacy. This is very different from secular authoritarianism which is a modernist reaction against liberal "chaotic" society emerging from the democratic revolutions and which leads to fascism, the worst type of modern dictatorship. Thus traditional authoritarianism should be distinguished from and even opposed to fascism, which epitomized a modern form of populist authoritarianism and is the highest representation of Schmitt's theory of the idea of non-normative decisionism. Although both authoritarian formulas are anti-liberal and anti-democratic, the ideological roots and political implications of both trends should be differentiated, just as scholars differentiate between liberal and social-democracy or between Marxist-Socialism and Lenin-ism. 2Maistre's intellectual activity is exemplified by his reaction to the bland, naturalistic optimism of the Enlightenment, whose validity the fashionable philosophers of the age, particularly in France, seemed to take wholly for granted. He identified the central sin of modern thought as the belief that the world could be understood by the sovereign human mind, and he perceived the dissolution of social bonds in the Europe of his time as a deviation from the divine injunction of society. Protestantism encouraged human pride to revolt against authority. Philosophy and science continued along the... (shrink)

Sophists’ apologia. -/- Sophists were the first paid teachers ever. These ancient Greek enlighteners taught wisdom. Protagoras, Antiphon, Prodicus, Hippias, Lykophron are most famous ones. Sophists views and concerns made a unified encyclopedic system aimed at teaching common wisdom, virtue, management and public speaking. Of the contemporary “enlighters”, Deil Carnegy’s educational work seems to be the most similar to sophism. Sophists were the first intellectuals – their trade was to sell knowledge. They introduced a new type of teacher-student relationship – (...) the mutually beneficial communication on equal terms. They taught pupils how to think independently and how to persuade others, which was inseparably connected with the rise of democracy in the most advanced Greek polices. Sophists were the first to proclaim that all people are naturally equal. They put forward the idea of natural rights and social contract, working out the fundamentals of the present-day law. In addition, they developed the basics of philology, psychology, logic, and gave a scientific explanation to the origins of religions. They embodied definite positive ideals of their epoch. Sophistry flourished in the second half of the Vth through he first third of the IVth centuries B. C. The period coincides with the heyday of the entire Greek history – the so called Greek Miracle epoch. Sophists expressed some present-day concepts of Ancient Greek ideology and mentality, characteristic of its Golden Age times. The Ancient Athens of the times of Periclus were similar to the Florence of Renaissance as to the type of social structure. That is why (?) the art of eloquence (public speaking) was highly respected in Florence. The two cities had a lot of features of the present-day capitalist society, which was due to their role as the main centres of industry of their “worlds-economies”. During the subsequent Hellenic period, the Old Order was restored, based on the feudal rent recipients’ rule. The degradation of society resulted in the decline of sophistry. Sophistry represents the highest point in the evolution of Greek philosophy. It is also the most prominent school as to the novelty of its ideas. That was owing to the common propensity for innovation typical of Periclus’ Golden Age, which in its turn resulted from the establishment of the individualistic and rationalistic thinking similar to present-day mentality. Among other aspects, close attention was paid to ethnic issues; some humanistic ideas such as Master and Servant ethics and Enlightment as the primary condition of man’s freedom, received scientific grounding. The genre of philosophical dialogue was developed, as well as the rationalistic scientific gnoceology, aimed at consistently opposing any religion. Dialectics, the most outstanding achievement of the Antiquity, was also worked out by the sophists. Zeno of Helleas was one of the sophists. Democrites’ ideas were, too, quite close to dialectics. Socrates’ contemporaries regarded him ironically, as shown, for example, in the Aristophanes’ comedy “Clouds”. Nevertheless, this scholar can still be referred to as a sophist, although of somewhat weird personality. Socrates’ popularity, which came later, should be attributed to the fact that he was the first philosopher ever to have been sentenced and executed by law, rather than to any valuable scientific contributions. Sophistry as such, rather than Socrates, marks the line between pre-Socratic and post- Socratic schools. Plato, with the exception of his latest works, is considered to belong to the same philosophical school. Specifically, there are valid reasons to believe that he was paid fees by his disciples. In Plato’s Dialogues, all points of view will be proven and then disproved, so that an integral philosophical system is hard to observe. Plato’s “Idealism” is but one of the many possible theories. His ideal philosophy is a high-minded argument of wise men. As late as towards the end of his life, Plato betrayed the ideals of sophistry, turning into the world’s first proponent of totalitarianism. Sophistry is Greek classical literature. Later on, philosophy, as well as the entire Greek civilization, started to fall into decline. Over 500 subsequent years, Hellenistic-Roman scholars never came up with anything novel. The entire process of antique philosophical evolution can be subdivided into the following six stages: Phoenician (IX–VIIth centuries B. C.), archaic (VIth – the first half of IVth century B. C., classic (the epoch of sophistry: the second half of the Vth through the first decades of the IIIrd centuries B. C.), late antique (middle of the IIIrd – first decades of the VI th centuries B.C.) The fact that early in the VIth century B. C. sophistry was rejected in Athens, has a lot to do with the consequences of their defeat in Peloponnesian war, a social catastrophe. Ever since, the prevalent part of the criticism of sophistry is a criticism of sophists’ immoral ways of life and personalities, rather than the essentials of their philosophy. For instance, Aristotle’s criticism primarily concerns their pragmatism and tendency to make a profit out of teaching. However, Aristotle himself taught his disciples along similar lines, showing them how to “be able to prove both opposites”. It was Aristotle who summed up sophists’ century-long elaborations. The traditional modern interpretation of sophists as shown in Plato’s dialogues appears to be groundless. The truth of the matter is that Plato regards sophists as more serious philosophers than Socrates was. It becomes especially clear in the dialogue titled “Protagoras”, which shows the latter as gaining an undoubted victory over Socrates. Generally speaking, Plato’s works never regard sophists as weak or worthless opponents. A common opinion as to the essence of sophists’, in particular, Protagoras’s philosophy, has hitherto not been worked out. Many researchers renounce the very existence of any specific philosophical position in sophistry. The term “relativism” itself now has a bad name. However, it should be borne in mind that Protagoras doctrine emerged as a result of an attempt to get out of the ontological dead-end to which the entire Greek natural philosophy had come. To this purpose, he employed Anaxagoras’s idea about everything comprising everything, whereupon he built his physical-ontological theory, and Zeno of Helleas’s concept that all objects are such and different at the same time in the same respect. According to Protagoras’s philosophy, every object does not only seem, but is different from every other object, including human beings. Therefore, every person is his or her own measure of all other entities. The objective reality is the Ego’s relations with the outer world. Every object’s essence is defined through its interaction with ourselves. Nothing remains stagnant – every existence already contains non-existence, and vice-versa. However, the relativity of being is not to be regarded as absolute. That means, that relatively stable and therefore relatively cognizable entities do exist, among them the words we say. Doubt is not considered absolute by relativists either, which differentiates them from skeptics and agnostics. They dare to believe. Uncertainty is Godly – here, Protagoras becomes very close to the concept of apathetic theology. Gorgius shared Protagoras’s views and tried to prove them applying the same method as Zeno applied when upholding Parmenidis’s philosophy. He argued that if one accepts the opposite point of view and agrees that nothing can exist and not exist at the same time, one is bound to come to an the absurd conclusion that nothing is cognizable and nothing exists. To prove that there is a universal contradiction within the Existence itself, Protagoras and his followers in their turn put forward a number of special logical arguments, called rules of contraries, or sophisms. The most well-known of them is the Euathle’s sophism, which proves that an object can be such and different at the same time in the same respect. Generally speaking, all relationships of any entity are extraneous. The idea that all entities, including concepts, exist and do not exist at the same time, was also accepted by Plato. It should be stressed, that Plato’s philosophy as a whole is relativists’ greatest achievement. In his dispute against relativism, Aristotle put forward the main concepts of his ontology: the existence falls into the existence in possibility and the existence in reality, or substance and accidence – the ever changing “sublunary” world and the stable world of divine heavenly bodies. This division made his system self-contradictory to the point of absurd. Aristotle quite realized, that the direct disproof of relativism is hardly possible, which fact makes his criticism a mere tautology. It is very indicative in this respect that materialists, idealists and even skeptical agnostics applied the same arguments do disprove relativism. That demonstrates that the inner contradiction between any forms of “absolutism” and relativism is the most fundamental philosophical problem. Relativist ideas were repeatedly renewed throughout history, provided the social conditions were favourable. In variations, the concepts were advanced by Tzuan Tsi and ancient Chinese sophists, apostle Paul, Nicolas of Cusa, Galileo, Rene Descartes, G. Berkley, D. Hume, Ch. S. Pierce, E. Mach, A. Bogdanov, F. de Saussure, N. Bore, P. Feuerabend, U. Quain and others. However, no consistent relativist ontological system was developed after Protagoras. Meanwhile, a valid relativist theory could provide a clue to a fuller and more adequate general physical concept of the world, and to a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics. -/- Relativism as an ontological system of beliefs. -/- The relativist principle of relativity of all that exists is fundamental for the entire system of philosophy. Absolutely everything exists, but, at the same time, no existence is absolute. Anything is possible, but those entities only exist for us with which we interact this way or another, i. e., reality is interaction, “I interact – hence, I exist”. However, an overly close relationship between entities leads to non-existence – in other words, there is a certain existential optimum. For all of us, information, or perceptible heterogeneities, is real. Each of us is the center of a definite system of interactions with the world. If God is an endless Possibility, then the World is but the man’s dialogue with God. However, the ties that bind us with the world are of some definite kind, which predetermines our reality. The principle of relativity constrains itself, as any relativity is relative. On the one hand, that calls forth the Evil – caused by our own weakness. On the other hand, it makes our world relatively stable and cognizable. Generally speaking, the world is what we are. Everybody has an own Universe, but since people are fairly similar, our universes can be regarded as one Universe with common laws and regulations. It is possible for us to change the degree of objects’ existence in relation to ourselves and one another. It is equally important, though, to remain ourselves (keep following our “warrior’s path”). Since everything exists and no existence is absolute, the process of cognition should involve a criticism of everything but never a complete rebuttal of anything. The criterion of verity for any theory then is in its capacity to build itself upon a bigger number of diverse statements than in any other theory. Theoretically, all philosophies should ideally be complementary. The question of what in fact happened is meaningless unless we specify the “we”, the “where” and the “when”. The past can only exist as part of the present. When we change, our past undergoes corresponding qualitative objective changes, all of which are irreversible. The contemporary physics regards all objects of the Universe as existing for one another, which results in absurd conclusions. In fact, only what we interact with, exists. The so called “speed of light in vacuum” c is the maximum speed of direct interaction and direct exchange of signals. Specifically, at the oncoming speed c with a significant blue parallax the gamma-quantum is unable to interact with the matter. When this speed is reached, the gravitational mass of objects in relation to one another becomes equal to zero (imaginary), whereas their inertial mass equals infinity. Further acceleration will bring us into an entirely different Universe. That means that the Universe is an open system, which fact destroys all present-day cosmological models. Anything is possible in this world. Our reality is magic. Every bit of space contains a potentially limitless number of bits of other, however virtual, universes, as well as an infinite number of particles, which are still virtual for us (as postulated by quantum mechanics). In other words, there exists an infinity of different realities. With all the above in mind, the different levels of entities’ existence, in particular, of Life and Reason, should be taken into consideration. For example, to which extent a live system exists in relation to the inanimate forms of being is very indefinite, as what life is has to be determined by living creatures. An even greater compass of levels of existence can be brought about through interaction – that is the core idea of Godel’s theorem. As a result, the range of forms of existence tends towards infinity – the evolution of matter through super-intelligence will bring us up to God’s heights. A more generalized mathematical model of the physical world, including a universal operator of the co-existence of objects, can be developed based on the above considerations. The bonds between objects become weaker owing to 1) a high speed, 2) acceleration, 3) rotation, 4) strong gravity, 5) strong fields of other kinds, 6) the difference of levels of existence , 7) phase shifts. Yet, there always is an existential optimum. Such mathematical model is to operate certain non-transitive algebras. Relativist ontology assumes that the notion of “temperature” is relative, thus making it possible to ignore the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In its turn, that will allow for phase shifts. A perpetual motion machine of the second type will become a reality. Rotation could presumably be used to increase inertial and decrease gravitational mass, slowing down the time. An experimental research could shed light on the mentioned effects. (shrink)

We fear that the growing threat of violent attack has upset the balance between existential concepts of political power, which emphasize security, and traditional notions of constitutional limits meant to protect civil liberties. We worry that constitutional states cannot, during a time of war, terror, and extreme crisis, maintain legality and preserve civil rights and freedoms. David Williams Bates allays these concerns by revisiting the theoretical origins of the modern constitutional state, which, he argues, recognized and made room for tensions (...) among law, war, and the social order. We traditionally associate the Enlightenment with the taming of absolutist sovereign power through the establishment of a legal state based on the rights of individuals. In his critical rereading, Bates shows instead that Enlightenment thinkers conceived of political autonomy in a systematic, theoretical way. Focusing on the nature of foundational violence, war, and existential crises, eighteenth-century thinkers understood law and constitutional order not as constraints on political power but as the logical implication of that primordial force. Returning to the origin stories that informed the beginnings of political community, Bates reclaims the idea of law, warfare, and the social order as intertwining elements subject to complex historical development. Following an analysis of seminal works by seventeenth-century natural-law theorists, Bates reviews the major canonical thinkers of constitutional theory (Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau) from the perspective of existential security and sovereign power. Countering Carl Schmitt's influential notion of the autonomy of the political, Bates demonstrates that Enlightenment thinkers understood the autonomous political sphere as a space of law protecting individuals according to their political status, not as mere members of a historically contingent social order. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Original Sin Revisited:A Recent Proposal on Thomas Aquinas, Original Sin, and the Challenge of EvolutionReinhard Hütter"For some years now, the theological layman has been surprised to note that in Catholic preaching, as well as in the theological literature that comes to his attention, there is either hardly any mention of the peccatum originale, or that this doctrine is even explicitly dismissed—with suppression of the canons of the Council of (...) Trent—as an erroneous path inspired by Augustine."—Robert Spaemann1Original Sin Passé—"after" Original Sin?The doctrine and later dogma of original sin had been a central topic of Catholic dogmatic theology up to the Second Vatican Council.2 One only has to consult the exhaustive bibliographies in the respective volumes Urstand, Fall und Erbsünde (in three parts) of the Handbuch der Dogmengeschichte.3 [End Page 693] Still echoing this long-standing, abiding preoccupation—researched during the Council and published in 1967—is the important tour d'horizon and noteworthy working hypothesis advanced by Henri Rondet, S.J., Original Sin: The Patristic and Theological Background.4 Soon after Vatican II a quite unexpected "sign of the time" found its way into Catholic theology—a widespread allergy to the theological topics of sin in general and of original sin in particular began to affect the post-conciliar mood, an unwillingness to acknowledge sin precisely as sin, let alone original sin and the concomitant original guilt. In polite and enlightened post-Vatican II Catholic theological society, one best ignored what was now seen as an unbecoming topic, unless the intention was, of course, to revise, that is, to "de-dogmatize," the received understanding of the Tridentine dogma of original sin, be it along Schleiermacherian lines (original sin as the sin of the world)5 or along Hegelian lines (the Fall and original sin as the unavoidable entailments of human finitude and freedom)6 or along Heideggerian lines (the co-conditionedness of the fundamental human existential situation of transcendental freedom by the historical facticity of collective human guilt since the inception of human history).7 Other post-conciliar progressive theologians took it upon themselves to go further than that and to "de-mythologize" the Catholic faith as a whole, and thus bring it up to date to the new standards of an [End Page 694] enlightened and increasingly secularized age: original sin, mortal sin, last judgment, hell, and eternal damnation all had to go in one or the other way together with angels, demons, and the evil one—at least the personhood (some sundry metaphysical principle of evil, possibly rooted in God, was, maybe, permissible; a person of a created, purely spiritual subsistence, definitely not)—into the dustbin of bygone theological notions, now thanks to a dynamic progressively transformative development of the understanding of faith, suddenly "untruths," or at best mythological remnants of a bygone pre-scientific age.8 Consequently, from the self-secularizing view of what took itself to be progressive Catholic theology, embracing the normative horizon of the immanent frame together with its immanent transcendence of perpetual human progress, the hamartiological and eschatological horizon brightened up considerably, especially in Germany, Holland, and Belgium, looking increasingly like the non-transcendent, historically immanent eschatology of Immanuel Kant's The End of all Things (1794)—a gradual vertical asymptotic approximation of human cultural and social progress to the ideal of the "kingdom of God." The problems that evolutionary theory and historical-critical exegesis of Genesis 1-3 might have posed for a de facto (salvation-)historical state of original justice became serendipitously immaterial, since the object of contention had been preemptively removed. A radically reinterpreted or simply dismissed doctrine of original sin made any concerns about a historical state of original justice and a historical fall immaterial.With original sin transposed by revisionist systematic theologians and mortal sin abolished by proportionalist moral theologians, it became increasingly unclear what Jesus Christ came to save humanity from, really, besides [End Page 695] offering the gnosis of the sublime all-embracing dynamic of an irresistible universal divine embrace, an unqualified transcendent acceptation and indeed affirmation of the very goodness of de facto human nature ("God accepts and affirms us exactly... (shrink)

Photographs of violence carry an implicit critique of the social order from which they emerge. This necessitates the systemic management of their affect. Recognition of the experience carried by these signals has the potential to catalyse and contribute to emancipatory thought and action. The apparatus of epistemic control – characterized here as the Archive – has evolved to neutralize their affective potential. Certain artworks that reconfigure photographs of violence illuminate the nature of this neutralizing mechanism. They mimic and (...) subvert the forms of representational archivization and suggest a counter-Archive – a repository of traumatic representation which serves to release affective trauma from its epistemic suppression. One example of this counter-archival practice is – War Primer 2. A body of work from 2011 by artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, which uses Bertolt Brecht’s Kreigsfibel or War Primer (1955) as a point of departure for examining the representation of twenty-first century violence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Freud, Archaeology and Egypt: Religion, Materiality and the Cultural Critique of Origins SIMON GOLDHILL In memoriam John Forrester i. With a rhetoric that is as self-serving as it is historically false, scientific writers since the Second World War have insisted that Darwin’s evolutionary biology was the breakthrough that heralded the triumph of secularism and materialism, the very conditions of modernity: the Scientific Revolution. Darwin’s theorizing does have a specific (...) purchase on one crucial aspect of Judaeo-Christian thinking, for sure. Darwin’s theory of evolution challenged the perfection of man, made in God’s image, by proposing instead a theory of continuous and continuing change. The Bible insists on a moment of origin—bereshit, “In the beginning... ” [Genesis 1 1]—and the rabbinical and Christian commentators on this opening demand that creatio ex nihilo is an unchallengeable principle, in the face of the considerable challenge of repeated philosophical rejections of such an idea.1 The Gospel of Luke proclaims that it will narrate the genesis of Jesus and to this purpose opens with a genealogy from Abraham to Jesus, an unbroken line that grounds and authorizes the fulfilment of the messianic prophesy of Isaiah. In aggressive and precisely polemical contrast, Darwin exclaimed: “What an infinite number of generations, which the mind cannot grasp, must have succeeded each other in the long roll of years!.”2 Rather than listing a precise number of generations from Adam and Eve, as the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels would have us do, arion 28.3 winter 2021 76 freud, archaeology and egypt Darwin imagines a narrative for the human race without beginning and without end and without perfection. But when Darwin does this, it was already nothing new. Not only had books like Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation scandalously opened the door to a model of evolutionary change without divine providential causation, but also Charles Lyell’s seminal Principles of Geology back in the 1830s had already revealed this chasm of time.3 “In the economy of the world,” he wrote, “I can find no traces of a beginning, no prospect of an end”—and he had the facts in the ground to prove it.4 James Playfair, who helped popularize Lyell’s stunning discovery of the deep time of the earth, demonstrates an iconic reaction to Lyell’s science: “in the distance of this extraordinary perspective... [t]he mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.”5 The abyss of past time makes the nineteenth-century scholar giddy, dizzy with an overload of imagination. It was geology, first of all, not biology that challenged the very ground on which Christian theories of time and human development stood. As Ruskin beautifully put it: “If only the Geologists would let me alone, I would do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.”6 But, more perhaps even than geology, the most challenging threat to the established intellectual and social understanding of things came from critical history. Ernest Renan, renegade Catholic, and one of the most influential and notorious writers on Christianity in the 19th century, was typical when he wrote “My faith has been destroyed by historical criticism, not by scholasticism nor by philosophy.”7 Critical history showed that the earliest stories, on which so much depended, were myths not history. The stories of earliest Greek history, as Grote argued, or Roman history, as Niebuhr had earlier demonstrated, were veined with legends and fantasies, and did not provide access to “wie es eigentlich gewesen hat,” to “what actually happened,” the watchword of empirical Simon Goldhill 77 historiography.8 As Bishop Wilberforce thundered in already too late anticipation, “The alarming question is... whether the human mind, which with Niebuhr has tasted blood in the slaughter of Livy, can be prevailed upon to abstain from falling next upon the Bible.”9 So, terrifyingly to the orthodox, the doubt which undermined Livy, did indeed focus sharply on the bible and even of the lives of the saints from a much later period. A series of horrifying books—Strauss or Renan on... (shrink)

From a social science perspective, a major purpose of religion is to organize the behavior of the community of believers in order to maximize its success as a collective. The underlying premise of this lecture is that religious authority will sanction violence and aggression when they are assessed to be an effective means of realizing the goals of the collective. Conversely, when violence and aggression become unhelpful or counter- productive for realizing community goals they are forbidden. This (...) phenomenology of religion and violence is applied to the history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to demonstrate that none of these religions is inherently more or less apt to engage in violence. Their use of belligerent and irenic behaviors are more profoundly influenced by historical context and social needs than by theology. (shrink)

E. H. Gombrich in 1968: Methodological Individualism and the Contradictions of Conservatism The commonalities Gombrich affirmed between his own positions on science, politics, and art and those of his friend Karl Popper are key to understanding both his work on the history of style and the conservative fulminations on method he published from the early 1950s onwards. United with Popper by their shared experience of exile from fascism, Gombrich failed to register the amateurish character of Popper's political theory (...) and that his aversion to notions of social determination disabled the historian. Popper's skepticism regarding the ontological status of social collectivities and rejection of the concept of totality reinforced Gombrich's suspicions of holistic analysis and led him to fall back on naturalistic descriptions of individuals acting in a social world glued together by such commonsensical categories as "traditions" and "institutions". In this regard he is representative of the common aversion to sociology of the British intellectual establishment in the early Cold War. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:War, Peace, and Reconciliation: A Theological Inquiry by Theodore R. WeberDavid H. MessnerWar, Peace, and Reconciliation: A Theological Inquiry Theodore R. Weber EUGENE, OR: WIPF & STOCK, 2015. 182 pp. $23.00Weber's book makes a helpful contribution to enlivening more theologically grounded strategies for peacemaking through reconciliation. It is a careful, systematic work that takes as its foundation a distinctively Christian view of [End Page 214] God's nature and (...) relation to the world. As a scholar and a pastor for over fifty years, Weber brings a much-needed, wise, and re-centered view to the questions entangled in war, peace, and reconciliation. He advises us not to look first into the realities of war for God, but to look to understand God as the context for all human conflict. He forcefully calls the reader to be a reconciler despite the intractability of conflict. The book is structured in three main parts, beginning with the theological context, then the political context, and, last, to peace, justice, and the church.The "war" that Weber addresses is interstate conflict, representing the negation of the web of relationships constituting a healthy international system. War disrupts God's plan and ruptures the right relationship between humanity and God (43–44). Throughout, Weber embraces a kind of Christian Realism, one that takes seriously the loving nature of God, the sinfulness of humanity, and the limits and possibilities for peacemaking in a human world. Downplaying the pacifistic message of Jesus, Weber highlights the necessities within a fallen world. We cannot eliminate war as a category of existence under the conditions of sin (until the eschaton), but with right orientation and action we can eliminate some war.Noting inadequacies of the just war tradition (though not dispensing with it), Weber identifies the need to ground it more firmly in theology, including enhanced attention to "just intention" as a primary criterion in evaluating the prosecution of war, displacing cause as the first question with which we must interrogate ourselves. Discernment about war and peace must be an ongoing conversation that should include people of faith as well as policymakers. Weber's theological and pastoral sensibilities, alongside his political savvy throughout, make the book a pleasurable and provocative read.The definition of reconciliation deployed is broad and complex, and Weber marshals it for powerful work. Reconciliation "is God's work—the movement of Divine grace through history, engaging all aspects of brokenness and promise and reaching its climax of fulfillment and disclosure in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ" (3). Grace continually calls humanity to enter into the work of reconciliation. Here Weber introduces the idea of relational power; more nuanced than mere substantive power, it connects to the core idea of institution building and the critical emphasis on strengthening the social fabric in the interest of peace. It is the hallmark of the reconciling transformation from systems of dominance to relationships of consent.The book raises questions regarding how to put reconciliation as described into concrete practice, responding to real cases and controversies. Also, there could be added discussion, against this theological backdrop, of what opportunities exist amid current US and global regime change to enter this reconciling activity more fully.Ultimately, the Christian context is central to understanding the ethics that Weber advances. Weber recommends a biblical foundation, one in which [End Page 215] we take the benefit of reading scripture backward from the Christ event. Such an exegetical strategy reveals that God has a plan for all of humanity, a vision of inclusiveness and reconciliation. It is from this vantage point of God's culminating vision, Weber illuminates, that we can understand and embrace human action throughout history and the meaningful, if incomplete, work of reconciliation to which we must commit ourselves, both politically and spiritually. [End Page 216]David H. MessnerEmory UniversityCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This research examines the most important historical, political, economic, social, cultural, and religious factors before, during, and after the reign of Communism in Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 2021 and their effect on the extreme increase in atheism and decrease in Christianity, particularly Roman Catholicism, in the present-day Czech Republic. It devotes special attention to the role of the Clandestine Catholic Church (Ecclesia Silentii) and the changing policies of the Holy See vis-à-vis this Church, examining these policies' impact (...) on the continuing decline of Roman Catholicism in the Czech Republic after the collapse of Communism. The article also deals with Pope Pius XII's Secret Mandates of 1948-1950, the Second Vatican Council, and the Holy See's Ostpolitik. Scholars, who previously relied only on the views of the Czechs, blame the unprecedented drop in Christianity, the near-total destruction of the Catholic Church, and the rise in atheism on the Czechoslovak communist government's four decades of totalitarianism. Although the increase in atheism and decrease in Christianity were substantial during the era of Communism from 1948 to 1989, our data indicate that the decline in Christianity, particularly the historically predominating Roman Catholicism, did not commence with the 1948 communist coup d’état but traces its origins to the breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the conclusion of WWI and the establishment of Czechoslovakia on October 28, 1918. What's more, this research shows that the most significant and unprecedented steep deterioration of the Christian Faith, namely Roman Catholicism, did not occur during the era of Communism but only after the Czechoslovak communist government collapsed in 1989. This massive decay did not happen even during the most extraordinary communist persecution of the Catholic Church during the era of Stalinism in Czechoslovakia. This research further finds that the Holy See's ill-advised policies and systematic, sustained, and prevalent failures in leadership, guidance, and teachings are responsible for the near destruction of the Roman Catholic Church and especially the end destruction of the Clandestine Catholic Church (Ecclesia Silentii), in the Czech and Slovak Republics after the fall of Communism. These failures furthermore contributed to the Czech Republic, the historical lands of Bohemia and Moravia that once were in the center of Christendom, degenerating into the most atheist country in Europe and the world today. (shrink)

This book tells the story of modern ethics, namely the story of a discourse that, after the Renaissance, went through a methodological revolution giving birth to Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s new science of natural law, leaving room for two centuries of explorations of the possible developments and implications of this new paradigm, up to the crisis of the Eighties of the eighteenth century, a crisis that carried a kind of mitosis, the act of birth of both basic paradigms of the two (...) following centuries: Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. The new science of natural law carried a fresh start for ethics, resulting from a mixture of the Old and the New. It was, as suggested by Schneewind, an attempt at rescuing the content of Scholastic and Stoic doctrines on a new methodological basis. The former was the claim of existence of objective and universal moral laws; the latter was the self-aware attempt at justifying a minimal kernel of such laws facing skeptical doubt. What Bentham and Kant did was precisely carrying this strategy further on, even if restructuring it each of them around one out of two alternative basic claims. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics of the Enlightenment attacked both not on their alleged failure in carrying out their own projects, but precisely on having adopted Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s project. What counter-enlightenment has been unable to spell out is which alternative project could be carried out facing the modern condition of pluralism, while on the contrary, if we takes a closer look at developments in twentieth-century ethics or at on-going discussions on practical issues, we might feel inclined to believe that Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s project is as up-to-date as ever. -/- Table of Contents -/- Preface I. Fathers of the Reformation and Schoolmen 1.1. Luther: passive justice and the good deeds; 1.2. Calvin: voluntarism and predestination; 1.3. Baroque Scholasticism; 1.4. Casuistry and Institutiones morales -/- II Neo-Platonists, neo-Stoics, neo-Sceptics 2.1. Aristotelian, neo-Platonic, neo-Epicurean and neo-Cynic Humanists; 2.2. Oeconomica and the art of living; 2.3. Neo-Stoics; 2.4. Neo-Sceptics; 2.5. Moralistic literature -/- III Neo-Augustinians 3.l. The Jansenists on natura lapsa, sufficient grace, pure love; 3.2. Nicole on the impossibility of self-knowledge; 3.3. Nicole on self-love and charity; 3.4. Nicole against civic virtue, for Christian civility; 3.5. Malebranche on general laws and necessary evil; 3.6. Malebranche on Neo-Augustinianism and Platonism. -/- IV Grotius, Pufendorf and the new moral science 4.1. Grotius against Aristotle and the sceptics; 4.2. Mersenne and Gassendi; 4.3. Descartes on ethics as the last branch of philosophy’s tree; 4.4. Hobbes on scepticism and the new moral science; 4.5. Spinoza on the new moral science as a descriptive science;4.6. Locke on voluntarism and probabilism; 4.7. Pufendorf on natural law as an exact science; 4.8. Pufendorf on physical and moral entities; 10. Pufendorf on self-preservation -/- V The empiricist version of the new moral science: from Cumberland to Paley 5.1. Cumberland against Hobbesian voluntarism; 5.2. Cumberland and theological consequentialism; 5.3. Cumberland on universal benevolence and self-love; 5.4. Shaftesbury on the moral sense; 5.5. Hutcheson on natural law and moral faculties; 5.6. Gay, Brown, Paley and theological consequentialism. -/- VI The rationalist version of the new moral science: from Cudworth to Price 6.1. The Cambridge Platonists; 6.2. Shaftesbury on the moral sense; 6.3. Butler and a third way between voluntarism and scepticism; 6.4. Price and the rational character of moral truths; -/- VII Leibniz’s compromise between the new moral science and Aristotelianism 1.Leibniz against voluntarism; 2.Leibniz against the division between the physical and the moral good; 3.Leibniz on la place d’autrui and theological consequentialism; 4.Thomasius, Wolff, Crusius -/- VIII French eighteenth-century philosophers without the new moral science 8.1. The genealogy of our ideas of virtue and vice; 8.2. Maupertuis and moral arithmetic 8.3. The philosophes and the harmony of interests; 8.4. Rousseau on corruption, self-love, and virtue; 8.5. Sade on the merits of vice -/- IX Experimental moral science: Hume and Adam Smith 9.1. Mandeville’s paradox; 9.2. Hutcheson on the law of nature and moral faculties; 9.3. Hume on experimental moral philosophy and the intermediate principles; 9.4. Hume’s Law; 9.5. Hume on the fellow-feeling; 9.6. Hume on natural and artificial virtues and disinterested pleasure for utility; 9.7. Adam Smith’s anti-realist metaethics; 9.8. Adam Smith on self-deception and the paradox of happiness; 9.9. Adam Smith on sympathy and the impartial spectator; 9.10. Adam Smith on the twofold criterion for moral judgement and its paradox; 9.11. Reid on the refutation of scepticism and the self-evidence of duty -/- X Kantian ethics 10.1. Kantian metaethics: moral epistemology; 10.2. Kantian metaethics: moral ontology; 10.3. Kantian metaethics: moral psychology; 10.4. Kantian normative ethics; 10.5. Kant on the impracticability of applied ethics; 10.6. Kantian moral anthropology; 10.7. Civilisation and moralisation; 10.8. Theology on a moral basis and the origins of evil; 10.9. Fichte and the transformation of theoretical philosophy into practical philosophy XI Bentham and utilitarianism 11.1. Bentham’s linguistic theory; 11.2. Bentham’s moral ontology, psychology, and theory of action; 11.3. The principle of greatest happiness; 11.4. The critique of religious ethics; 11.5. The new morality; 11.6. Interest and duty; 11.7. Virtues; 11.8. Private ethics and legislation -/- XII Followers of the Enlightenment: liberal Judaism and Liberal Theology 12.1. Mendelssohn; 12.2. Salomon Maimon; 12.3. Haskalā and liberal Judaism; 12.4. Liberal Theology. -/- XIII Counter-Enlighteners 13.1.Romanticism and the fulfilment of individuality as the Summum Bonum; 13.2. Hegel on history as the making of liberty; 13.3. Hegel on the unhappy consciousness and the beautiful soul; 13.4. Hegel on Morality and Sittlichkeit; 13.5. Marx on ideology, alienation, and praxis; 13.6. Schopenhauer on compassion; 13.7. Kierkegaard on faith beyond ethics. -/- XIV Followers of the Enlightenment: intuitionists and utilitarian 14.1 Whewell‘s criticism of utilitarianism; 14.2 Whewell on morality and the philosophy of morality; 14.3 Whewell on the Supreme Norm; 14.4 Whewell on the conflict between duties; 14.5 Mill and the proof of the principle of utility; 14.6 Mill’s eudemonistic utilitarianism; 14.7 Mill on rules -/- XV Followers of the Enlightenment: neo-Kantians and positivists 15.1. French spiritualism; 15.2. Neo-Kantians: the Marburg school; 15.3. Neo-Kantians: the Marburg school; 15.4. Comte’s positivism and the invention of altruism; 15.5. Social Darwinism; 15.6. Wundt and an ethic of humankind -/- XVI Post-enlighteners: Sidgwick 16.1. Criticism of intuitionism; 16.2. On ethical egoism; 16.3. Criticism of utilitarianism -/- XVII Post-enlighteners: Durkheim 17.1. Sociology as physics of customs; 17.2. Morality as physics of customs and as practical science; 17.3. On Kantian ethics and utilitarianism; 17.4. The variability of moralities;17.5. Social solidarity as end and justification of morality; 17.6. Secular morality as “sociodicy”; XVIII Post-enlighteners: Nietzsche 18.1. On the Dionysian; 18.2. On the deconstruction of the world of values 18.3 On the twofold genealogy of moralities; 18.4. On ascetics and nihilism; 18.5. Normative ethics of self-fulfilment -/- Bibliography / Index of names / Index of concepts -/- . (shrink)

The recent worldwide resurgence of militant nationalism, fundamentalist intolerance and right-wing authoritarianism has again put the issues of violence and xenophobia at the center of social science research and theory. German psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm's work provides a useful theoretical microfoundation for contemporary work on nationalism, the politics of identity, and the roots of war and violence. Fromm's analysis of Nasism in Escape from Freedom (1941), in particular, outlines a compelling theory of irrationality, and his later writings (...) on nationalism provide an existential psychoanalysis that can be useful for contemporary social theory and sociology of emotions. Escape from Freedom synthesizes Marxist, Freudian, Weberian, and existentialist insights to offer an Original theoretical explanation of Nazism that combines both Macrostructural and micropsychological levels of analysis. After forty-five Years of research into the social origins of fascism and with recent Theorizing in the sociology of nationalism and emotions, Escape from Freedom, its analysis of Nazism, and Fromm's larger theoretical perspective are worth reconsidering. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Philosophical Assessment of Theology: Essays in Honour of Frederick C. Copleston. Edited by Gerard J. Hughes. Language, Meaning and God: Essays in Honour of Herbert McCabe OP. Edited by Brian Davies. God Matters. By Herbert McCabe. Philosophies of History: A Critical Essay. By Rolf Gruner. The ‘Phaedo’: A Platonic Labyrinth. By Ronna Burger. Lessing's ‘Ugly Ditch’: A Study of Theology and History. By Gordon E. Michalson, Jr. Peirce. By Christopher Hookway. Frege: Tradition and Influence. (...) Edited by Crispin Wright. The Private World. Selections from the Diario Íntimo and Selected Letters 1890–1936. By Miguel de Unamuno, translated by Anthony Kerrigan, Allen Lacy, Martin Nozick. A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J.F. Lonergan, S.J. Edited by Frederick E. Crowe. Philosophical Papers. By Charles Taylor. 2 vols. Principles of Language and the Mind. By T.P. Waldron. The Principle of Double Effect: A Critical Appraisal of its Traditional Understanding and its Modern Reinterpretation. By L.I. Ugorji. Human Rights: Fact or Fancy By Henry B. Veatch. Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay towards a Trinitarian Theology. By Colin Gunton. Only Human. By Don Cupitt. The Roots of the Modern Christian Tradition. Edited by E. Rpzanne Elder. ‘Africanische Theologie’: Darstellung und Dialog.. By Heribert Rücker. African Religions in Western Conceptual Schemes. By Emefie Ikenga Metuh. The Destiny of Man: Dagaare Beliefs in Dialogue with Christian Eschatology. By Edward Kuukure. The World in Between: Christian Healing and the Struggle for Spiritual Survival. By E. Milingo. Theology in Africa. By Kwesi A. Dickson. The Future of Anglican Theology. Edited by M. Darrol Bryant. Reconciling. By John Coventry. The Genesis of Faith: The Depth Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel. By John C. Merkle. Anthropology in Theological Perspective. By Wolfhart Pannenberg. Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Religion. Volume II: The Social Sciences. Edited by Frank Whaling. American Sociology: Worldly Rejections of Religion and Their Directions. By Arthur J. Vidich and Stanford M. Lyman. A Critical Theory of Religion: The Frankfurt School. By Rudolf J. Siebert. The Anthropology of Evil. Edited by David Parkin. The Wealth of Christians. By Redmond Mullin. Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel. By Michael Fishbane. Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction. By Lawrence Boadt. Old Testament Theology: Its History and Development. By John H. Hayes and Frederick C. Prussner. God's Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea: Echoes of a Canaanite Myth in the Old Testament. By John Day. Law and Wisdom from Ben Sira to Paul. By Eckhard J. Schnabel. The Order of the Synoptics: Why Three Synoptic Gospels? By Bernard Orchard and Harold Riley. The Making of Mark. By J. Duncan M. Derrett. Argumentation bei Paulus. By Folker Siegert. Christians and the Military: The Early Experience. Edited by Robert J. Daly. Origienes' Eucharistielehre im Streit der Konfessionen; Die Auslegungsgeschichte seit der Reformation. By Lothar Lies. L'église de Cappadoce au IVe siècle d'après la correspondance de Basile de Césarée. By Benpit Gain Cave Monasteries of Byzantine Cappadocia. By Lyn Rodley. Augustine of Hippo, Selected Writings. Translated with an Introduction by Mary T. Clark. Wisdom from St Augustine. By Vernon J. Bourke. A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 3: From Muhammad to the Age of Reforms. By Mircea Eliade. Les Lectionnaires Copies Annuels: Basse‐Egypte. By Ugo Zanetti. Humanism and Scholasticism in Late Medieval Germany. By James H. Overfield. Wyclif. By Anthony Kenny. The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude and Experience in Twelfth Century France. By Penny Shine Gold. Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth‐Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu. By Richard Kieckhefer. Luther: Theologian for Catholics and Protestants. Edited by George Yule. La Réforme Catholique: Le Combat de Maldonat. By Paul Schmitt. Roman Catholicism in England: From the Elizabethan Settlement to the Second Vatican Council. By Edward Norman. The Life of David Brainerd. Edited by Norman Pettit. Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West. Edited by Ninian Smart, John Clayton, Patrick Sherry and Steven T. Katz The Significance of Jesus Christ in Asia. By Hans Staffner. Is the Virgin Mary Appearing at Medjugorje? By René Laurentin and Ljudevit Rupčić. Mary Queen of Peace: Is the Mother of God Appearing in Medjugorje? By Lucy Rooney and Robert Fancy. (shrink)

This article reinterprets the Dialectic of Enlightenment as a retelling of the Christian myth of the Fall. Through its account of the aporia, which Horkheimer and Adorno maintain stands at its core, the Dialectic of Enlightenment rearticulates the doctrine of original sin. The human condition is presented as tragic, and the source of this tragedy is inscribed into the very structure of human subjectivity. While the Dialectic of Enlightenment refuses to abandon hope, emancipation is reconceptualised on the model of (...) redemption; a kind of fulfilment of human nature, which would at the same time be an escape from it. Horkheimer and Adorno dispense, however, with any transcendent source of grace. Instead, the activity of philosophy itself takes on redemptive quality. (shrink)

This article reflects on the dynamics of the public sphere in the early modern period by analyzing the figure of the peasant and the notion of the common(s) in dialogue pamphlets. Beginning with a discussion of what it means to speak of a public sphere in relation to the early modern period, it examines one of the most famous Reformation dialogues, _Karst-hans_, published anonymously in 1521 in Strasbourg. Just before the German Peasants’ War (1524–26), the Lutheran dialogue, polemically directed against (...) the theologian and satirist Thomas Murner, positions the peasant as a critically mature citizen, with the hoe (_Karst_) symbolizing his potential militancy. This article specifically draws on the notion of publicity that the dialogue articulates. Using it as an example, this article analyzes the transitions and mutual projections between fiction, urban culture, and peasant protest, the structures of which are significant for the literary representation of agrarian protest far beyond the Reformation. In its final section, this article closely examines the media genre of the dialogue pamphlet and outlines some horizons of its historical development up to the Enlightenment concerning its political use and its relation to the ideal of a dialogic and socially leveled public sphere. By arguing that there existed an implicit ideal of the public sphere as a common good in the early modern period, the aim is also to clarify what distinguishes this early modern understanding of the public sphere from its conceptualization as a marketplace that has dominated our understanding of it since the Enlightenment. The prehistory presented here should provide resources for reimagining the future of the public sphere at a time when its actual structure is once again very much at stake. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Horizons of Grace:Marilynne Robinson and Simone WeilKaty RyanThe sorrow is that every soul is put out of house.Marilynne Robinson1All of us, even the youngest, are in a situation like Socrates' when he was awaiting death in prison and learning to play the lyre.Simone Weil2Marilynne Robinson's first novel Housekeeping (1980) is a meditative and lyrical reflection on old themes: abandonment, loss, grief, renewal, hope, memory—what the narrator Ruth Stone calls (...) the "sad and outcast state of revelation" (p. 184). The novel returns in its opening pages to the suicide of Ruth's mother, Helen, and concludes with a bridge crossing, misinterpreted by other characters as intentional death. Critical responses to the novel usefully explore its nineteenth-century American literary impulses (Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Melville), its reworking of female subjectivity, its quiet insistence on the transience of all things and the unmaking of boundaries.3 Words on suicide are scarce. In this inattention, critics may be following the lead of the novel, which, among novels containing acts of self-destruction,is exceptional in its almost total reticence on the subject. Not one character asks why Helen kills herself, and little emerges from the narrative to shed light on the unasked question.Structurally, the function of the mother's suicide seems obvious. Helen's death creates two orphans—that preferred status in literature that frees characters up for adventure and self-discovery. It also appears to be the cause, or at least a leading cause, of Ruth's sadness. Ruth's aunt Sylvie assumes this to be true. After the deaths of their mother and [End Page 349] grandmother, Ruth and her sister Lucille are passed off by their overwhelmed great aunts to Sylvie, a woman who has been wandering the country, hopping trains, getting by. When the concerned women in the town of Fingerbone attempt to determine how best to keep Ruth from following in Sylvie's uncivil footsteps, to keep her "safely within doors" one of them remarks on how sad Ruth always looks.And Sylvie replied, "Well, she is sad." Silence. Sylvie said, "She should be sad." She laughed. "I don't mean she should be, but, you know, who wouldn't be?" Again, silence.(p. 185)The unsaid is met with repeated silence. Sylvie proposes that anyone who had survived what Ruth has survived, understood to be her mother's death, would be sad, should be sad. A long silence also greets Sylvie's discomforting observation that Ruth is "'like another sister to me. She's her mother all over again'" (p. 182).The generating absence of the mother sets the stage for Ruth's spiritual exile and eventual communion, the moment when a "word so true" comes home to her. Ruth does not, in fact, become "her mother all over again."Born of people falling to their deaths (Ruth's mother and grandfather), Housekeeping ends with a counter-image, an image of crossing over a bridge (horizontality) rather than falling from it (verticality). One way to think about the philosophical movement in the novel is provided by Simone Weil's writing, which relies of tropes of gravity. I am particularly interested in connections between Housekeeping and Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace (1952) and Waiting for God (1992). These texts explore the nature of suffering by focusing on the inevitability of waiting, the practice of attention, and the necessity of detachment.Although Weil wrote movingly and persuasively about industrial labor, war, and other forms of political oppression, here I emphasize her spiritual writings. In his introduction to First and Last Notebooks, Richard Rees writes of Weil, "One may say that two of her chief preoccupations were, first, how to organize a society so that suffering should be reduced to a minimum, and, second, how to ensure that the (large) irreducible minimum should not be valueless" (p. viii). Housekeeping dramatizes this second concern. The novel also provides a needed fictional example of decreation, Weil's difficult name for the [End Page 350] process by which something created can be transformed into something uncreated, or "the act of allowing moments empty of meaning to remain 'unfilled.'"4 The suicide... (shrink)

Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism brings together ten innovative contributions by outstanding scholars working across a wide array of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Interdisciplinary in its methodology and compass, with a strong comparative European dimension, the volume examines discourses ranging from literature, historiography, music and opera to anthropology and political philosophy. It makes an original contribution to the study of 18th-century ideas of universal peace, progress and wealth as the foundation of future debates on cosmopolitanism. At the same (...) time, it analyses examples of counter-reaction to these ideas and discusses the relevance of the Enlightenment for subsequent polemics on cosmopolitanism, including 21st-century debates in sociology, politics and legal theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Origins of War: A Catholic Perspective by Matthew A. ShadleJoyce Kloc BabyakThe Origins of War: A Catholic Perspective Matthew A. Shadle Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011.246pp. $29.95Matthew A. Shadle’s The Origins of War, in Georgetown University Press’s Moral Traditions series, makes a genuinely fresh contribution to contemporary scholarship on Christianity and war. This is not a work on the morality of war, just war theory, or (...) alternatives to that theory. Instead, Shadle directs our attention to Christian understandings of war’s origins. Through a rich and careful analysis of the early tradition’s treatment of the origin of war in light of its overall understanding of human existence, Shadle sets the stage for his examination of the decentering of Christianity in modernity and the implication of this for assumptions about humanity and human possibilities that became encoded in both political theory and Catholic writings on war. In the process, Shadle offers us not only a primer on international theory but also an account of the transition of fundamental liberal assumptions from their beginnings as anti-Christian to their twentieth-century embrace by Catholic theologians and a thoughtful new approach to understanding the causes of war today.Making his case serially, Shadle moves from biblical and early Christian thought on the origins of war to the Middle Ages and onward. He argues that the overriding context for a Christian understanding of the origins of war is the Christian worldview that sees human life in a theological framework (25), and he locates the impulse to war in the human struggle between sin and grace (5). With modernity, however, war has come to be seen as a result not of sin but of unresolved conflicts, clashes of interest and power—all viewed in materialist rather than transcendent terms. Moving into the twentieth century, he demonstrates that Roman Catholic writings on war, including church writings, have adopted a liberal framework for articulating positions on the causes of war. This liberal framework has in turn supported the hope that international institutions will be able to resolve the conflicts of interests that lead to war by fostering dialogue across divides but at the same time have also led away from the more fundamental Christian view that sees war as the result of sin.Shadle criticizes the liberal optimism that has infused Catholic writings with the hope that international structures will succeed at preventing war. Linking [End Page 215] that optimism to dominant versions of international relations theory, he argues instead for a new version of international relations theory known as “constructivism.” This theory challenges presumptions of earlier versions of international relations theory and sees war as the result of “a clash of the identities, interests, and norms of states... all of which are socially constructed by both domestic and international factors” (86). In Shadle’s view, constructivism is a theory that is more compatible with traditional Christian views on the origin of war as well as contemporary Catholic theology because it focuses on clashes in socially constructed (though not entirely relativistic) identities and values as causes of war. Avoiding war on this view will take more than relying on international structures such as the United Nations to resolve conflicts by translating conflicting interests into terms erroneously presumed to be accessible to all.The Origins of War: A Catholic Perspective deserves serious study. From its careful account of the biblical and early Christian understanding of the origin of war to its analysis of the ways that liberal assumptions came to undergird Catholic writings on war, it sheds new light on how assumptions about the origins of war influence all aspects of our thinking about war. And it is in the end provocative. Shadle’s historicist orientation reminds us that the liberal optimism that undervalued the role of sin as a cause of war was itself tempting because of the challenges of the time and dominant political theories. Yet Shadle’s preference for constructivism is no less historically shaped. Liberalism’s fit with Catholic understanding of human existence has certainly been strained, but it remains to be seen whether a historicist, constructivist set of assumptions can do... (shrink)

"The central advantages of this book are undoubtedly its lucidity, range and unorthodox approach to presenting key thinkers who have deeply influenced political philosophy. ... This wide range is covered with surprising agility and clarity. The book offers an engaging account of political philosophy where great schools of thought are audaciously summarized in a paragraph or two." --- Times Higher Education Supplement "Reliable and fair... Clear, relaxed, jargon-free and often attractively witty." --- The Philosopher "A handbook of the history of (...) political philosophy." --- Choice Guiding the reader through the key arguments of the classic figures of Western political philosophy, from Plato through to the modern era, this revised edition includes new essays on Aristotle's "Politics", Confucianism, Islamic social philosophy, and Nazism as well as additional material on "Roman Law", Anarchism and "anti-capitalism". Cohen moves chronologically through the development of political philosophy presenting it as a series of "key texts", which (after setting in context) he allows to speak in their own terms before offering short, precise analyses of their strengths, weaknesses and influence. The book finishes with a discussion of modern liberalism and conservatism. Providing both a broad overview and precise summaries of key ideas, this guide will be invaluable for all students of political thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry by Pramit ChaudhuriMartin T. DinterPramit Chaudhuri. The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. xvi + 386 pp. Cloth, $74.We are all fighting our own demons, but some of us—so Chaudhuri tells us—are even fighting our own gods. Accordingly, a wide range of theomachs and their representation in classical literature fills (...) the ranks of this excellent book that will certainly elbow its way onto Mt. Olympus to sit comfortably next to divine Feeney (1991 and 1998) and sublime Hardie (1986 and 1993). Indeed, Chaudhuri transcends the scope of Feeney (1991) by including not only Senecan (and Attic) tragedy but also texts and contexts ranging from panegyric to philosophy and from lyric to historiography.Chaudhuri’s book falls into three parts. Its first three chapters cover theomachy in Greek poetry (Homer and Attic tragedy), as well as the development of theomachy in Augustan epic, with chapters on Lucretius and Vergil and Ovid. Here, Chaudhuri introduces some of the main patterns and contexts that will be developed in later imperial poetry. Chaudhuri also states clearly what will not be covered here at length: the voyage myths of the Odyssey and the Argonauts, Aristophanes’ Birds, and the (pseudo-) Aeschylean Prometheus Bound. Part 2 covers Neronian literature with Seneca’s Hercules Furens and Lucan, while Part 3 focuses on the Flavian era, with Silius and Statius. Statius’ Capaneus forms a highpoint amongst the theomachs and thus deservedly receives extra attention. Chaudhuri rounds off the Flavian section with a chapter on the politics [End Page 177] of theomachy, in which he samples theomachy as a trope for the confrontation between subject and ruler, ruler and god, rival emperors and the confrontation of dynasties. After all, the Flavian poets had witnessed the principate develop over time, the struggles for the throne, and the rise and fall of dynasties. This is followed by a titillating epilogue showcasing how the themes developed in the previous chapters that breach the divide between mortal and immortal (such as fame, equanimity, skepticism, and poetic and imperial apotheosis) echo through the centuries. Rarely, however, do we find simple didactic moralism. Instead, “the theomach is instrumental in generating a dialogue on the broader symbolism of fighting the gods, its stakes and implications” (323). Chaudhuri can but hint at the rich afterlife of the theomach across Europe from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, a subject that would fill a second volume. He nevertheless whets the reader’s appetite by pointing to Milton’s Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Dante’s Inferno, and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, as well as a host of epigraphs to each chapter, and concludes with a glance at the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Richard Dawkins versus God, and modern physicists’ search for a God particle.Chaudhuri sets the volume off by contrasting theomachy with gigantomachy. While the feats of the Giants “remain far distant in time from the activities of humankind … the theomach speaks the language of humanity … offering a richer context for his radical aspirations and … inviting the audience to adopt an alternative view on the theological status quo” (5). He also places theomachy in its cultural context when he follows Momigliano’s (1984) suggestion that under Augustus poetry replaced antiquarianism and philosophy as the primary genre in which to think about the gods. The figure of the contemptor divum (despiser of the gods) thus comes to embody the contrast between piety and impiety which itself is grounded in the empirical basis of Roman religion. But rather than testing methods of communication with the divine, as the Romans so often did with divinatory practices and ritual protocols, the contemptor divum tackles the question of whether it is possible to know the divine at all and whether the gods even exist. “By placing these conflicts at the heart of their works, the epic poets expanded the cultural conversation to include the testing of the divine in the Romans’ attempts to make sense of the epistemological, theological, and political concerns pertaining... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:From Feasting to Fasting: The Evolution of a Sin; Attitudes to Food in Late AntiquityJohn F. DonahueVeronika E. Grimm. From Feasting to Fasting: The Evolution of a Sin; Attitudes to Food in Late Antiquity. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. x 1 294 pp. Cloth, $49.95.The role of food in the ancient world has been the focus of much attention in recent years, as both Greek (...) and Roman dining practices have been examined from a number of perspectives—sociological, anthropological, and semiotic, to name but a few. Noticeably absent, however, has been any sustained study of attitudes toward feasting and fasting in major early Christian writers. Veronika Grimm attempts to correct this deficiency by clarifying the social [End Page 655] and symbolic meanings given to food, eating, and fasting in the writings of those who shaped Christian thinking from the first to the fifth century.Chapters 1 and 2 offer necessary background by surveying both Jewish and Graeco-Roman attitudes toward feasting and fasting. Here we come to an essential difference between the two cultures. For the Jew, food and fasting were part of an ethical conduct, the rules for which were given by God. The result was a keen interest in fasting to serve as “penitence, expiation for transgression, the humbling of the self in order to arouse the pity of the Deity” (32). Even so, this focus never implied dualistic negation of “the flesh,” except with Platonic Philo. On the other hand, pagan gods expected worship and sacrifice, yet showed little interest in regulating the daily life of worshipers, what they ate, or with whom they slept. As Grimm reveals, people worked the rules out for themselves, physicians set guidelines for physical well-being, and philosophers stressed moderation as the appropriate human conduct concerning food.Grimm devotes the remainder of her study to a chronological review of feasting and fasting in the works of the principal early Christian writers, beginning with Paul (chapter 3) and continuing with the Acts of the Apostles (chapter 4), Clement of Alexandria (chapter 5), Tertullian (chapter 6), and Origen and Eusebius (chapter 7). Two concluding chapters trace attitudes to food and feasting in ascetic propaganda and practice in the works of Jerome and Augustine.Within these chapters lies the author’s central achievement: the charting of a course from occasional fasting to active self-denial. Thus, writing in the early years of the Church, Paul and the apostles emphasize the religious significance of the celebration and sharing of food but place little value on fasting as an ascetic or religious practice. By the late second and early third centuries, Clement of Alexandria, heavily influenced by Philo, neither regards food as a religious issue nor promotes fasting; nevertheless, he pleads for moderation and decorum in eating, drinking, and sexual activity. Origen, another Alexandrian of the third century, exhibits similar views, despite Eusebius’ attempts to cast him as the stereotypical “holy man” in his Ecclesiastical History. Tertullian, a contemporary of Clement’s from North Africa, reveals an even stronger revulsion from sexuality and, more importantly, holds the distinction of being the first Christian propagandist of expiatory fasting whose writings survive. In Grimm’s analysis it is clearly Jerome, however, who emerges in the fourth century as the true advocate of fasting, especially as an antidote to sexual appetite in women. She portrays him as a spirited supporter of anorexia and as one obsessed with the dangers of sexual temptation. Similarly, Grimm views Augustine’s ascetic program of corporal self-management as perilously approaching anorectic behavior.Thanks to Grimm’s careful treatment of the relevant texts and her professional training as a psychologist, there is much of value in these pages, especially her insights into the relationship between eating and physical, mental, and [End Page 656] spiritual well-being in the ancient world. Even so, a few minor concerns persist. First, her assertion that the Gospels “have no special message concerning food” (74) is puzzling, given that the evangelists frequently mention banquets, both earthly and divine, in their writings. Second, Grimm’s longest chapter, on Graeco-Roman attitudes toward food and fasting, seems to be her most problematic. She cites... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Handbook of Roman Catholic Moral Terms by James T. Bretzke, SJJohn J. FitzgeraldHandbook of Roman Catholic Moral Terms James T. Bretzke, SJ washington, dc: georgetown university press, 2013. 260 pp. $24.95The Handbook of Roman Catholic Moral Terms continues the recent sequence of concise dictionaries published by Georgetown University Press, including the Key Words volumes for various religions and A Handbook of Bioethics Terms. James Bretzke’s (...) contribution is especially welcome as it is the first such English-language reference work in Catholic moral theology since the Second Vatican Council. The author covers fundamental, social, medical, and sexual issues while providing frequent cross-references and further readings. Special attention is also given to scripture and ethics, the history of moral theology, the nature and authority of the Magisterium, canon law, Protestant thought, and moral philosophy. The longest entries are those on dissent (67–70), Humanae vitae (111–16), infallibility (122–24), and the Pontifical Commission on Births (180–82), which in advance of Humanae vitae produced the well-known Majority Report favorable to the use of contraception. The sections on these vexed issues delve into some of the relevant arguments from different sides.Given its space constraints as a portable paperback, the Handbook covers an impressive amount of historical and contemporary ground. The eight-hundred-plus entries are generally clear and irenic, and often illuminating. Consider the page-long entry on just war theory (131–32), which succinctly summarizes its development from Augustine to the present-day Catechism, calls attention to the importance of ius post bellum alongside the traditional categories of ius ad bellum and ius in bello, and outlines four possible critiques of the theory. Particularly helpful throughout are the various examples the author provides. For instance, in the course of explaining that moral norms and human laws may not bind at all times, he suggests that it is justifiable to forgo the duty to sustain life when this can only be done through extraordinary means (140), or to exceed the speed limit in case of a medical emergency (15, 81; see also 183 and 239–40 for other relevant examples).On the other hand, a few key topics are either overlooked or not fully dealt with. This book rightly highlights ecumenical ethics (77–78 and passim), but there is essentially no coverage of Eastern Orthodoxy and very little on pre-twentieth-century Protestant thought. In addition, considering the prevalence of a “morality-of-happiness” perspective in historical and modern-day Catholic thought, and given Bretzke’s own thorough attention to law, the book might have incorporated separate entries on happiness and grace, law’s complement. [End Page 221] (To his credit, he does mention grace several times—a fact that the preface points out—and includes the beatific vision, Gloria Dei vivens homo, and Summum Bonum among his definitions.) And speaking of law, the author’s treatment of the divine law is slightly confusing; he appears to alternately conflate it with and differentiate it from both the eternal law and the law of the Old and New Testaments (70–71, 136, 138).In the end, despite Bretzke’s best efforts to remain above the ideological frays of moral theology, one’s overall evaluation of his book may depend somewhat on one’s place within them. Some will chafe at his suggestions that contraception (116), certain forms of assisted reproduction (198–99), and artificial nutrition and hydration that sustain those in a persistent vegetative state (10, 224–25) remain open questions to an extent. Others will point out, as Bretzke does, that Church doctrine has previously undergone substantial development on other issues, such as religious freedom (65–66, 151, 193, 229) and the charging of interest (107, 241). What most should be able to agree upon is that in many respects the Handbook is a valuable resource, one that will help professionals and students alike come to a much better understanding of the key terms and debates within the field. [End Page 222]John J. FitzgeraldSt. John’s University (New York)Copyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The following is excerpted from Sean Gurd’s translation of Euripides’ Hippolytus published with Uitgeverij this year. Though he was judged “most tragic” in the generation after his death, though more copies and fragments of his plays have survived than of any other tragedian, and though his Orestes became the most widely performed tragedy in Greco-Roman Antiquity, during his lifetime his success was only moderate, and to him his career may have felt more like a failure. He was regularly (...) selected to have his plays performed in the annual festival of Dionysus at Athens. But the plays were performed in a competition, and in the competitions he lost and lost, winning first place only five times in a career that spanned more than forty years. His corpus reads like the remains of a life spent trying to get a few things right and never being quite satisfied: scenes and schematized combinations of elements recur again and again, each time slightly changed. Hippolytus itself is an example: it contains two scenes in which a sick or dying character lies on a couch or a stretcher and is surrounded by silence and grief; he had experimented with such scenes in Alcestis, and would work with them again in Herakles and Orestes. Nor, judging from appearances, was he immune to the desire to score a hit, or to satisfy the audiences and the judges at the competition. Hippolytus is a rewrite of another Hippolytus, performed several years earlier, which scandalized the audience and certainly did not take first place. In that earlier Hippolytus (called by later writers Hippolytus Veiled), Euripides fashioned a Phaedra who was neither ashamed of loving her stepson nor incapable of taking steps to satisfy her desire. The forwardness of her approach to Hippolytus so outraged him that he covered his head with a robe (hence the play’s later title). Euripides liked to write energetic and self-confident women like this. He staged his Medea in 431, just three years before he revised Hippolytus, and in it the jilted title character murders her children in revenge for Jason’s new marriage to a more politically advantageous wife. Another flop: the play came in third of three. Evidently the judges did not like their women showing agency, especially when the consequences were transgressive. “The ornament of women,” wrote another great Athenian a little earlier, “is silence.”i Euripides’ Medea and his first Phaedra had other decorations. So three years after Medea crashed and burned and some time after the first Hippolytus suffered the same fate, he produced another Hippolytus play with a different setting and story. How could this one not have been a reaction to the failure of the first? “Second thoughts are always better,” he has one of his characters say, as though he were offering an apology for his first thoughts on the same story. In this new version, Phaedra is suicidally ashamed of her love, choosing to die rather than have it discovered, and willing to bring down her beloved Hippolytus in the service of the same end. Now it is Phaedra herself who covers her head in shock and horror at her desire. Only an intermediary, a slave of the house and an old crone with her fingers in all sorts of illicit pots, communicates Phaedra’s secret – against orders – and in consequence brings about the demise of two resolutely moral figures. It worked. For his tale of two well-born nobles with an unswerving commitment to moral action, destroyed by the meddling of a slave (and by the hostility of some particularly uncaring divinities), the judges crowned Euripides winner. It was the first time he had won, after almost thirty years of work. *** What Hippolytus wants more than anything else, as he protests with outrage just before leaving Trozen for the last time, is the benefit of due process – oaths, witnesses, an investigation that would reveal who really lusted after whom. Ironic, given that in the first Hippolytus, as far as we can make out, he did get a trial – but too late, and Theseus’ successful processing of Hippolytus failed to prevent his death. I cannot help hearing in the second Hippolytus’ complaints the anger of his authorial semblable who lost year after year by a process of judging that might have seemed brutal to him. Judges took no cognizance of how he worked, how long or hard or why; they just voted, and Euripides lost. But then I hear, in the fate of the first Hippolytus, an even grimmer commentary. Processed or not, we lose. We run aground. At the very least, this might cast a darker shadow on the business of watching or reading a play: in that twilight, things move too fast to make a fair assessment and, in any case, the reasonably high definition of what you see and hear belies the truth of indistinction, the multiplicities just below the surface. Watching is a constrained activity, a form of captivity, but reading is plastic. This translation was begun to supply the script for an audio version of the play, recorded in the spring of 2012, and here and there it sacrifices literalness for sayability and the voices and passions of the actors on that occasion. But it was finished to be read, and engineered to create a reading caught between the poles of specificity and non-specificity that the play itself conjures and relies on at its generative core. Thus two texts: the one clear, perhaps overprecise, respectably modern in its presentation, and the other ancient, a reasonable approximation of the classical reading process, and indistinct in vital ways. Like early modern dramatic texts, the exact provenance and original function of the scripts that have made it down to us are unknown. We do know that the ultimate survival of Hippolytus was thanks to its wide-spread use as a school text. But its relation to the first performance in 428 BCE is a matter only of speculation. Euripides presumably had a fair copy before production began; it was probably modified during rehearsals. The actors may have had copies, too (probably the young men who served in the chorus did not). The chor?gos, a wealthy Athenian who paid for the production, might have been presented with or just made sure to get his hands on a high-quality text, to commemorate the play’s success. Fans might have been able to buy copies. Any one of these sources might have provided the ultimate progenitor of our text. Several of them might have, in fact, if later editors compared and conflated traditions. The plays toured extensively in the Greek-speaking world, and were restaged as repertoire for centuries afterwards. In the process they were subjected to enough modifications by producers and actors that in the later fourth century the Athenian statesman Lycurgus had a law passed prohibiting performances at Athens from deviating from the official “city” text of the tragedies (which he had commissioned). It is unlikely that the city text was the last word; but it marks an important moment in Athens’ role in their dissemination, since after this the major sites of textual curatorship moved overseas, to Alexandria, Pergamum, Rome, Antioch, Constantinople. Any single text of any single play is thus no more than a moment of clarity and stability, crossed and subtended by multiple vectors of change, including that of textual flux (from Euripides’ first drafts to the latest printed text) and that of Euripides’ life work as a writer, in the light of which the Hippolytus is just one attempt to produce something exactly right, to win the prize or finally satisfy himself or prove to himself that all this longing for perfection was a waste of time. I am intrigued by the possibility that a single text might somehow serve as a lens onto this wider zone of indistinction, representing a small region clearly but nonetheless containing a blurred image of the whole, like a Leibnizian monad. After all, no text is a witness: it is, rather, a perception and a performance, and what every Hippolytus must perform is the awkward overlay of singular and plural, social practise and subliminal drive, that structures the tragedy. Modern critical editions can do this by juxtaposing a (relatively) clean and simple text with a textual apparatus reporting variants and theorizing the relationship between textual instantiations. A translation lacks the resolution to catch the fine variations which feed into the construction of an apparatus. But there are other means to hand. Guessing at the exact words of the original text is always just that – guessing – though Hippolytus is less problematic than plays like Iphigenia at Aulis. But we can make a pretty secure guess at what such a text looked like. Texts read by fifth-century readers were fundamentally different from what is presented in the best medieval MSS and printed in modern publications. The texts of Euripides’ time and for many centuries afterwards did not indicate word division with spaces (or by any other means) and were extremely sparing in punctuation, often avoiding it altogether. There was only one “case” of letters – what we call “capitals.” Musical sections were inscribed as though they were prose, without line endings to reflect their rhythm or their rhetorical structure. There was no indication of the speakers within a dramatic text, either. The earliest surviving dramatic texts, which come from over a century after Euripides’ death and a time which was much more elaborate and precise in its textual culture, indicated speaker-change with a little line or paragraphos below the line and a double-point [:] at its end. This convention almost certainly does not date back to Euripides’ own time; it may not even date to Lycurgus. In any case, such indications were understood to be readers’ marks: they did not have the same authority as the text and they were subject to readers’ revisions. At least ideationally, if not in concrete and distinguishable fact, a dramatic text was understood as containing no indication of speaker-change (and certainly none of who was saying what). The reader had to figure that out for him-/herself. The clear, legible, easy texts we are accustomed to reading are the fabrications of medieval and modern reading cultures. The first text, then, presents the translation as the text would have been in the mid-fourth century, perhaps decades after Euripides’ death. The second text processes Hippolytus, makes sense of it and makes it “readable.” That is: too distinct, dangerously so. It gets in your way, conjures fantoms, tries to make you see. Fragments of the Hippolytus Veiled, otherwise almost entirely lost, are juxtaposed with similar passages in the text – not to suggest a reconstruction, but a dialogue and a complex set of reassessments. I have not tried to represent the full variety of textual variants, but I have signalled where, for one reason or another, the text is soft and different editions propose excisions or changes. The two texts must be read together: you, reader, form the bridge between the distinctly seen and the indistinct invisible. You, in the end, will be its mask. *** illsandhateddiseaseswhatcanidoforyouwhatshouldinotdohereisthelightandthebrightairyoursickbedisnowout s idethehouseyoureverywordwastocomeherebutyouwillrushbacktoyourbedroomagainyoufadequicklyyoudelig htinnothingyoudislikewhatyouhaveyoulovewhatyoudontitsbettertobesickthantendthesickthefirstissimpleto the secondattachesheartspainandhandsworkeveryhumanlifeispainfulthereisnoendtotoildarknesshidesbehindclo udswhateverisdearerthanlifeweproveunhappyloversofwhatshineshereforlackofknowledgeofanotherlifethere isnoproofforthingsbeneaththeearthonlystoriessustainus liftmybodystraightenmyheadthebondsofmylimbsareloosenedtakemyhandsandmypalearmsthishatistooheavy formyheadtoweartakeitoffspreadmyhairovermyshoulders couragechilddonttossandturnsoviolentlyyouwillbearyoursicknessmoreeasilywithpeaceandanoblemindallmort alssuffer aiaiiwanttodrinkpurewaterfromadewyspringiwanttoliebackandrestunderthetreesinsomegrassymeadowchildw hycrydontsaythesethingsnearthecrowdhurlingwordsmountedonmadness sendmetothemountainiwillgototheforestwherebeastkillingdogspressthespotteddeergodsilongtoshouttothedo gstoshootthethessalianjavelinpastmyblondhairtoholdthebarbeddartinmyhandwhythisanxietychildwhatdoyouc areabouthuntingwhydoyoulustforflowingspringstheresahillwithwaterjustnexttothetowerwecangetyouadrinkt h ereartemismistressofthesaltlakeandthecoursethunderingwithhorseshoovesiwishiwereonyourplainsbreakings t uds whythrowthesefrenziedwordsaboutjustnowyouweresettingoutforthemountaintohuntandnowyoulongforhorses onthewavelesssand thesethingsneedanoracletotellwhichgodreinsyouinanddrivesyoufromyoursenseschild whathaveidonehowfarhaveibeendrivenfromgoodthoughtsiwascrazyiwascursedbysomepowerpheupheualasn ursecovermyheadagainimashamedofwhativesaidcovermeatearmovesdownfrommyeyeanditembarrassesm eithurtstostraightenourmindanditisterribletobeinsanebesttodiebeforeyoubecomelucidagain illcoveryoubutwhenwilldeathcovermeimoldivelearnedalotmortalsshoulddrinkoffriendshipmoderatelynotfrom th edeepestmarrowofthesoulamindslovecharmsshouldbeeasytoundoorthrustawayortiemoretightlyitisaverydiffic ultweightforonesoultolaborovertwopeopleasiamwrackedbypainforhertoomuchdisciplinecausesmoreharmthan pleasureandwarswithhealthipraisetoomuchlessthannothinginexcessandthewiseagreewithme *** Scene 1 Enter Phaedra and the Nurse; the former is recumbent on a couch while the latter bustles about her with gestures that might be those of a caregiver or a guard. NURSE Ills and hated diseases! What can I do for you? What should I not do? Here is the light, and the bright air; your sick bed is now outside the house. Your every word was to come here, but you will rush back to your bedroom again. You fade quickly. You delight in nothing. You dislike what you have. You love what you don’t. It’s better to be sick than tend the sick – the first is simple. To the second attaches heart’s pain and hand’s work. Every human life is painful. There is no end to toil. Darkness hides behind clouds whatever is dearer than life. We prove unhappy lovers of what shines here for lack of knowledge of another life. There is no proof for things beneath the earth. Only stories sustain us. PHAEDRA Lift my body, straighten my head: the bonds of my limbs are loosened. Take my hands and my pale arms. This hat is too heavy for my head to wear. Take it off, spread my hair over my shoulders. NURSE Courage, child; don’t toss and turn so violently. You will bear your sickness more easily with peace and a noble mind. All mortals suffer. PHAEDRA Aiai. I want to drink pure water from a dewy spring. I want to lie back and rest under the trees in some grassy meadow. NURSE Child, why cry? Don’t say these things near the crowd, hurling words mounted on madness. PHAEDRA Send me to the mountain. I will go to the forest where beast-killing dogs press the spotted deer. Gods! I long to shout to the dogs, to shoot the Thessalian javelin past my blond hair, to hold the barbed dart in my hand. NURSE Why this anxiety, child? What do you care about hunting? Why do you lust for flowing springs? There’s a hill with water just next to the tower; we can get you a drink there. PHAEDRA Artemis, mistress of the salt lake and the course thundering with horse’s hooves: I wish I were on your plains breaking studs! NURSE Why throw these frenzied words about? Just now you were setting out for the mountain to hunt – and now you long for horses on the waveless sand. These things need an oracle to tell which god reins you in and drives you from your senses, child. PHAEDRA What have I done? How far have I been driven from good thoughts? I was crazy, I was cursed by some power. Pheu pheu. Alas. Nurse, cover my head again. I’m ashamed of what I’ve said. Cover me – a tear moves down from my eye and it embarrasses me. It hurts to straighten your mind and it is terrible to be insane. Best to die before you become lucid again. NURSE I’ll cover you. But when will death cover me? I’m old; I’ve learned a lot. Mortals should drink of friendship moderately, not from the deepest marrow of the soul. A mind’s love-charms should be easy to undo, or thrust away, or tie more tightly. It is a very difficult weight for one soul to labor over two people, as I am wracked by pain for her. Too much discipline causes more harm than pleasure and wars with health. I praise “too much” less than “nothing in excess,” and the wise agree with me. ***. (shrink)

: This study aims to discuss the basic argument that sociology, as a science, emerged as an intellectual response to the lost sense of community during social and cultural changes. This argument carries the assumption that the dominating metaphors and perspectives of classical sociology are informed by conservatism. In sociology, this claim is supported by well-known and ambivalent theoretical structures that are developed to explain the process of social change. This study aims to make a criticism of nostalgic (...) sociology considering the idea that the fundamental assumptions of the ambivalent theoretical structure in sociology are nostalgic. In addition, this study also aims to critically read the historical development of Islamism, one of the modern ideologies, with nostalgia and utopia. The suggestion of the article is that either classical sociology or Islamism –two subject appear differently in terms of their topics- gave similar intellectual reactions about the subject that they are unable to cope with ‘the present’ and produce a ‘golden age’ discourse as a solution to ‘the present’. The argument of the study is that either the effort of idealizing ‘the past’ in classical sociology or the myth of coming back home in Islamism against cultural alienation and sense of loss which are lived in ‘the present’ are actually determined by sovereign modernity paradigm. Summary: Behind the nostalgic paradigm, there is a rebuilt history that is shaped as a transition from feudalism to capitalism. In this history, the decline of feudalism corresponds to the loss of rural community, the loss of personal expressionism and the loss of unregulated society. In classical sociology, the heritage left by the solution of this historical reconstruction of society has become common. The anomaly of the modern world is precisely where the modern society from traditional society has emerged in the pathological state created by the loss of social ties with the passing. This pathological condition was first seen in Swiss mercenaries serving away from home, diagnosing nostalgia as a diagnosis of discomfort. We know that Johannes Hofer, who has a sense of humor, has not written any prescription for this disease, which gives some common signs with his melancholy. Sociology, shaped by three different intellectual movements as intellectual responses to the French and Industrial revolutions that allow the transformation of the European society, has taken its place as its focal point, and in the pioneering names, this change is "a change in everything at a dizzying pace, everything that has happened has evaporated and the glory of the world has deteriorated.” Modernity, which refers to the ideals of enlightenment, is blessed not to progress by nature, fluid, rational, contingent, lacking certainty. In fact, this blessing has brought with it the enemy of tradition to the 'new' with reference to its etymological origin. This sophisticated and complex structure unique to modernity only, has inspired some thinkers to conceive of an idealized past or future that is now determinative. Both of these ideas are moderators. The nostalgia becomes modern because of the longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is coeval with modernity. The article refers to Stauth-Turner's nostalgic paradigm, which provides the meta-phasic and meta-phase dominance of classical sociology detailed in Nietzsche's Dance. This paradigm consists of four main components. The first is that the history that we can summarize as a departure from the golden age when the world was a nest for man is seen as a decline and a loss. History is a history of sorrow and despair, as this decline will continue to exacerbate in the future. The example of such a feeling of grief in society theory is Weber's fate sociology. Because, according to Weber, whatever is waiting for us in the future is the polar night of the icy darkness, not the sunlight of summer. The second component of the nostalgic paradigm is the sense of secularization, together with the loss of integrity and moral certainty. This nostalgic trajectory is a very powerful secularization that emphasizes that such devastating social processes as urbanization, capitalist industrialization and the rationalization of everyday life, such as the diversity and complexity of social structure, the spread of scientific knowledge, urbanization with increasing population ratio, it brings forward its theory. With the announcement of the death of God, the gate of a competing and conflicting world has been opened, from which we have been transformed into a very godlike world. It is possible to observe a similar point of view in classical sociology in Durkheim, which has a theoretical basis for the transformation of social structures through professional distinction in the form of mechanical and organic solidarity. Durkheim analyzes social change in a deliberate way, and pre-change stake favors moral coherence. Moral coherence is now lost when collective consciousness is generally weakened in the post-change phase. The third trajectory we encounter in the nostalgic paradigm is the loss of individual autonomy and the decline of genuine social relations. With the loss of the moral unity, the individual has been caught under the domination of the bureaucratic state, in macro-social processes and institutions. It is inevitable that the individual who lost his autonomy is subject to the denial. The increasing exposure of the individual to social bureaucratic associations has been conceptualized by the iron cage metaphor in Weberian sociology. The enlightenment is the result of the panoptic collection of prison. So there is a nostalgic stance in this compound of the nostalgic paradigm that autonomy-ben lost because of the fall of the bureaucratic world under the domination of the modern state. In the nostalgic paradigm, the ultimate component is the feeling of laxity, spontaneity and loss of naturalness. Here, the individual is subject to not only macro-social processes but also micro-ethics. That is, it is understood that Adorno's "managed society" or Foucault's notion of closure prevents the individual's true emotions and enthusiasm, and that the consumer culture is preoccupied with certain preconceived ways of doing in a world dominated. To sum up, the metaphor of nostalgia that we are living in a world where we have been seized by administrative rules of a central state in a way that has lost the moral certainty and autonomy of the individual. The return to home, which is found in a significant part of the texts and practices put forward in the name of Islamism, has reached a deterministic attitude just as it was in classical sociology. In the nostalgic imagination where those who cannot cope with it are thought of as a safe harbor, there is a certain attitude towards deterministic ideologists that simplify, sanctify, and therefore falsify. Indeed, the imagination of a supra-historical, supra-community model for a time like the Golden Age discourse and for all time is itself history from the very beginning to the end. Therefore, it is a manifestation of a major historical process and the ideological design of sociality. The rhetoric discourse presented as a remedy in the present is possible with an anachronistic point of view which idealizes the past, and therefore the reality is distorted. The authentic one is extremely informal. This kind of discourse of authenticity, which is produced as opposed to the modernity that all that is solid melts into air, eventually has to make iron cages around it. As a result, the nostalgic rhetoric, which aims to be a modern chivalrous remedy that everything changes at a dizzying pace, has been determined by the paradigm of modernity, thanks to its self-reflexive nature which contains the opposite. (shrink)

This is a study of the encounter with the problem of heresy in Europe between the World Wars, in Germany and among Jews above all. It is first and foremost an intellectual history, though not exclusively so, and has four related aims. It argues, first, that the advent of a heretical ideal among Jews in the interwar period marked the definitive end of a chapter in German-Jewish history that began with Moses Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn's gambit and the liberal Judaism that arose (...) in its wake proved unworkable by this time, and the arrival of avowedly heretical forms of Jewish return signaled the end of his epoch. But we also find in this period the beginnings of a search for post-liberal modes of Jewish identity in which its predecessor endured in interesting and unexpected ways. Second, the dissertation reconstructs and analyzes the two leading languages of heresy in the interwar period, the gnostic and the pantheist. The first pined for salvation from a sinful world by the grace of a wholly transcendent, extramundane and therefore absent God, or a deus absconditus , and was associated in the interwar period with the Protestant representatives of dialectical theology. The pantheist language of heresy, by contrast, contested the gnostic spirit by divinizing the world, and was associated with the interconfessional revival of Spinoza. On the strength of this contextual reconstruction, the study aims, third, to reinterpret the philosophical careers of three important twentieth-century thinkers, all of them German-Jewish emigres: Hans Jonas, whose philosophical biology made him an unproclaimed "guru" to the German Green movment; Leo Strauss, the philosopher and unwitting father of a neo-conservative revolt in American politics; and Gershom Scholem, the eminent scholar of religion and Jewish culture. The study shows how their diverse projects all had origins in their encounter with the problem of heresy in interwar Europe. Their projects had also a common end: all resurrected the ancient Greek distinction between physis and nomos , and all contested normative Judaism by coming down squarely on the side of the former as the ground for Jewish identity in particular and human being more generally. Fourth and last, the dissertation makes an argument for the abiding salience of a theological dimension to European intellectual life between the wars and beyond. If nothing else, the stories presented here should alert us to the ways in which talk about God could be adapted for talk about nature, or politics, or art, to the ways in which discourses of the divine not only endure in this worldly world of ours, but flourish. (shrink)

Since 2008 I have been closely following the conceptual/performance/video work of Daniel Peltz. Gently rendered through media installation, ethnographic, and performance strategies, Peltz’s work reverently and warmly engages the inner workings of social systems, leaving elegant rips and tears in any given socio/cultural quilt. He engages readymades (of social and media constructions) and uses what are identified as interruptionist/interventionist strategies to disrupt parts of an existing social system, thus allowing for something other to emerge. Like the stereoscope (...) that requires two identical images to create an illusion of a three-dimensional image, Peltz sometimes visualizes two separate elements to create an object or moment that requires space and depth to focus on its varied layers. They say your brain has to process and make meaningful sense out of all that visual information before it can accept the illusion. I say your brain has to do a similar thing when looking and seeing the divine, magical, and faithful (social) art making of Daniel Peltz. Daniel Peltz is Associate Professor of Film/Animation/Video at RISD. He divides his time between Rhode Island and Sweden and is currently at work on an exhibition at Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm opening February 2013 and a new project to be included in the IASKA: Spaced Biennial (Australia) in 2014. This interview took place on Skype and is part one of a two-part interview. Feliz Lucia Molina: Are you in Providence, RI? Daniel Peltz: I’m at my house in Providence. I’ve been back for six days teaching winter session at RISD and doing this workshop series—these investors’ drum circles with a group of wealth managers. a client of the firm, 2013, photo Shirin Adhami FLM: The wealth managers were all drumming together? DP: They were all drumming in response to the performance of their retirement portfolios. FLM: Is this part of the “Unrealized Gain/Loss” piece? DP: Yes, it’s part of a show I’m working on in Sweden. I can show you because it was just today. I’ll show you some of this. Lets see—share screen [click, click, click]. This is the room. I’ve been using the camera system that’s already installed in the conference rooms to record them. So the video is being recorded directly by the wealth management office’s tech staff. These are the people I worked with in the last workshop. This conference table is less wondrous. They’ve been learning to drum in response to their retirement portfolios. I started by bringing in my little bit of wealth for them to propose a management strategy, I came to the follow-up meeting with a counter proposal, which was this workshop. So they agreed to do this series of workshops instead of managing my wealth. FLM: Does everybody in the room manage your wealth? That’s kind of a lot of people. DP: That woman in the back there and Craig —they handle new client business. So when you come there with your wealth, they sit down with you and suggest to you how they would manage it. They’re very nice, responsible people. FLM: And where is this? DP: This is in Providence and the one I was showing you is in Waltham, where I was today. Then I’m going to Newport for the last one on Friday. So I will have done four of them. This is the group in Waltham that I just played with today. I played directly with the two groups in Providence and I’m working with an ethnomusicologist at Brown, Asha Tamarisa, who is facilitating the last two. She’s helped develop the workshop in terms of figuring out how to train a group to do this and thinking about the compositional challenges of working in response to retirement portfolio data. FLM: Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project. DP: I might even be able to play you a little of the audio I’ve also been working with a group of professional percussionists on what will become a quarterly public investors’ drum circle event. Their stuff was really nice, but I want you to hear what we sounded like in the workshops. They’ve all been recorded by the a/v system in the offices. We use a simple structure where the drummer investors interpret the sensation of gain or loss as embellishments to a base heartbeat rhythm. The group holds the heartbeat and, as each person experiences gain or loss, they embellish that rhythm. "Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project" FLM: Is the process all very spontaneous? DP: Its actually quite structured. We produce a custom stock ticker that shows the performance of their collective portfolios. In advance of the workshop each participant submits assets in their retirement portfolio. Then we make a stock ticker that shows the real-time performance of their assets so that they can respond to almost live data. FLM: Are they reading the stock ticker projected up on the screen in the room? Do people drum in correspondence to the visual live data of the performance of their assets? DP: Exactly. They’re looking at the stock ticker as opposed to each other, so it’s a slightly shifted drum circle. They’re looking at the ticker but they’re listening to each other—that’s what we’re practicing. For example, NVO—the price is 172.08 but it’s down -1.16 and as that moves across the screen, the person who’s retirement is invested in that asset starts to embellish when that arrow first appears, based on their experience of loss. They stop when it exits the screen and return to the heartbeat. You could have one ticker for each retirement portfolio, but the way the workshop is constructed is that we just isolate one asset from each person’s portfolio so that everyone in the group is represented in a single ticker. So they’re drumming and looking at the ticker, but they’re hearing each other experience gain and loss. We’ve removed direct visual engagement from the social structure of a drum circle but the oral engagement is still there. FLM: So they had their own sound interpretation of gain and loss? DP: Yeah and that part is quite spontaneous as you were saying. In some of the preparatory exercises we’ve been working to give the participants more strategies for interpreting the sensations of gain and loss. We’re trying to develop their capacity to embellish a heartbeat or base rhythm but I’m not invested in having a melodious result. I’m quite curious about what this kind of structure will result in without any desire for a particular result. FLM: For context, can you talk about the project you did a couple years ago in Bali, “Unrealized Gain/Loss” in relation to this current wealth management project? DP: The workshops I’ve been doing use a similar strategy to the other components in this project. It started in Indonesia on my sabbatical and I was really trying to understand where I was physically and where I was being on sabbatical—this kind of strange jubilee structure where every seventh year you’re supposed to renew your self. And it was around the time of the global financial crisis. I was on sabbatical for the global financial crisis. I remember watching my father, in particular, respond to the financial crisis by monitoring his retirement portfolio and trying to make sense of it. I realized on a visit to their home that he checked his retirement portfolio every single day and I was really struck by that because in some way our parents are mysteries to us as children, especially their moods. We know how important their moods are but we don’t know what governs them. And somehow it was like I’d figured it out, it’s the performance of the DOW! So I think there was something in that. Then I was in Indonesia and I had been drawn there by an interest in their highly ritualized Hindu culture, where so much of life is driven by a ceremonial calendar. I was interested in Bali as this predominantly Hindu pocket within a predominantly Islamic country and life there being organized by this ritual calendar functioning as a kind of resistance to the dominant global religion of free-market capitalism. So I started to explore that correlation between the ways in which this culture that I was living in was sort of “living for the afterlife” and this idea within certain segments of American society of “living for the afterwork life”. The idea that your wellbeing in the “afterwork life” is tied to forces that are unseen and largely beyond your control has strong similarities to many religious understandings of the universe. So I started to explore that and the crafts and materials that were around me were primarily Batik and percussion. Percussion is a huge part of daily life in Bali. These gamelan troupes were everywhere. And I also happened to be there for Nyepi, the day of silence, which is preceded by a very elaborate procession and construction of demonic statues. These were the things that were around me and I started studying Batik with one of the Batik artists there and also started a conversation with two master Batik artists, one who is American and her Indonesian husband. I developed these patterns that were based on symbols from the performance of my retirement portfolio and worked with the batik artists to produce two sarongs. d. peltz - 2012 In producing the designs, I treated the performance of my retirement portfolio since my arrival at RISD [7 years] as a significant interval and then I looked at the ways in which decisions are made within retirement portfolios as having an extension outwards from the individual assets that underlie the retirement portfolio, which are kind of like the base elements of the retirement world. Then there’s the allocation of your assets, which is a global way of understanding an individual according to typologies, which are often referred to in terms of risk—this notion of a ‘risk profile’. What type of ‘person’ you are is determined by your attitude towards risk, or potentiality, and I found that to be a really fascinating way of understanding the universe. I remember looking at the tabs in my retirement portfolio and finding this one for viewing ‘Unrealized Gain/Loss’ and that’s often how I work—is just going through the Cambridge Parking Code, for example, and finding this section of the code that was called ‘Crossing Non-Signalized Locations’ and just feeling “I can’t do any better than that,” you know? That’s what I was talking about in terms of ready-mades that exist in the social sphere. So I found that tab, actually, a long time ago, and I pulled it out of a journal when I was there [in Bali] working on these pieces and I wound up making these two sarongs and later on a series of porcelain vessels for holding one’s unrealized gains and losses. At the time, I knew that I wanted a performance to come out of them, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I was inspired very much by this sort of thing: Pulls out a TIAA-CREF brochure with a man in a suit seated at a table. This guy is probably an actor, and [the brochure] says “TIAA-Cref announces “Individual counseling sessions at the Rhode Island School of Design. Individual counseling sessions at no additional cost to you. You can discuss your personal financial situation with an experienced TIAA consultant on a confidential basis. We are available to help you discuss how to achieve your financial goals by investing in financial solutions such as mutual funds, brokerage, life insurance, and annuities...etc....What retirement benefits best fits your situation?” Often I encounter this and I think O.K., this is one way to prepare for the after-work life and it seems inadequate to me. But, I also find it really inspiring. I really like the visual language of it. I kind of want to be that man. I’d like to see if I could maybe buy his clothes. FLM: What it is about the man on the brochure that interests you? DP: He’s offering personalized objective advice and a detailed evaluation of everything you need to know and do. Who wouldn’t want that? But he’s also something of a contemporary priest or priestess, mediating between the unseen all-powerful universe of global capitalism and the common worker. So I started off developing Unrealized Gain/Loss directly from the charts that represent the performance of my retirement portfolio. Then I came home and I wanted to use those. I had this word in my journal “unrealized gain/loss vessel.” I had this notion of vessels that would contain unrealized gains and losses. That felt really important to me that they would have somewhere to go. I had been thinking a lot about altars and making offerings—that somehow this really fickle, massive, difficult-to-comprehend-universe of the financial world—that somehow it might be nice if you could making an offering to it. [In Bali] they made such beautiful elaborate offerings. So I studied offering making as well with one of the women there and she taught me some of the standard forms created by folding leaves and the significance of the floral arrangements. I started working in clay and then moved to porcelain and I made these unrealized gain/loss vessels. I made a few of them, they have holes on either side that you can’t get your fingers in. But something can go in there and something can go out of there. It’s a nice size for putting on an altar. Then I got this commission from Artists in Context who was interested in my doing something for this project “Artists Perspectives for the Nation” project. I proposed initiating these investors’ drum circles as a new public performance form. I’m interested in bringing together those two symbols—the symbol of the djembe and the drum circle. unrealized gain/loss vessel - d.peltz - 2012 FLM: I can imagine the public digital stock ticker performing like a soft fleeting stream of information, a kind of (meaningless) illusory comfort blanket. DP: In some way you have to understand its relevance outside of the obvious, right? Because the obvious is illogical. Nobody is actually using that data to day trade, for example. People aren’t sitting there with their computers watching the market data in Times Square or setting up an outdoor office and being like “OK it’s up 3 points or it’s up 1.56, trade! Ok now buy, Ok now sell!” That would be a kind of a nice performance, actually. But actual day traders would want more up to date data than that. To understand what that data is doing is really important. And that’s something I’ve realized—that I’m interested in a particular kind of data visualization, which is not about what data can tell people, but what data can tell people who are visualizing it. For example, in the Cambridge Project “Crossing Non-Signalized Locations” I was interested in the 10,000 excuses archive of data recording five years worth of excuses for why people thought they shouldn’t have received their parking ticket. I was not interested in making that excuse wall so that the public could see and understand this data. Inevitably the data will be seen by others but I was really interested in what the action of visualizing the data told those who were visualizing it. The parking attendants themselves were writing those excuses on the wall—I was interested in what that kind action of writing the excuses on the wall told them about the data. Similarly, I’m interested in designing a way to allow people to pass this data from the unseen universe of the market, through their own bodies, which happens through the merging of the drum and the stock ticker. I’m interested in those two also as symbols; the drum as this symbol of the earth, the body and a pagan counterculture, and the stock ticker referring to the ethereal world of global markets—bringing those two together and making them dependent. I’m often drawn to conceptual propositions that I become invested in testing in a sincere way—at first they often they sound humorous to others, but I have to remember that there is humor in them. I don’t sit around and laugh about these things. I stop finding them funny at all. I’m interested in the proposition that we could know something about the after-work life by drumming in response to our retirement portfolio. So then I become really interested in how to craft that into a viable performance form for myself and others. FLM: The aspect of using sound in “Unrealized Gain/Loss” as a way of embodying the information to the asset holder is really intriguing—using sound as a means of embodying the asset data. Was sound a medium that made sense to use immediately or were you considering other means of attempting to embody it? DP: Well I do use other mediums within the project like textile, ceramic, and batik patterns. I was first drawn to the history of Batik patterns as a socio-economic stratification system and the vessels as a way of embodying or manifesting this data of unrealized gain and loss. My first approach was to work with meditation actually—a meditation workshop with my colleagues. I was going to offer this “Unrealized Gain/Loss” workshop where you would explore the sensations of gain and loss by adapting the way yogi-nidra brings you into contact with your physical surroundings and stretches your perception. FLM: At Naropa University there are/were business & compassion workshops—a sort of mash-up of business and compassion and how compassion could be incorporated into a business model. This process and engagement of “embodying data” also has to do with “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” you created at the DNC in Denver in 2008. DP: That kind of appropriation and instrumentalization of spiritual practice could be disturbing and thus compelling as a strategy. For various reasons, I’ve come to be drawn to both the form of a quarterly public performance and the established performance form of a drum circle. Its something I’ve seen myself do before, that is to mess up a really good functional social system like a drum circle or karaoke. I remember I was developing language for the karaoke project and started calling it “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” and one of my assistants on the project, who’s an incredible artist, said, “but don’t you think the future of karaoke is guitar hero?” and I realized that maybe he thought I was trying to improve the form. I’m just trying to get people to have this shifted embodied experience, I need to craft the performance context so that they can do that. In the case of the karaoke project, for example, what did I need in order to be able to do this [a person to stand up in front of a bar and deliver a karaoke speech]? I realized that the body is very vulnerable so I built a podium so that the speaker can feel secure enough to do this, otherwise you couldn’t get to this state achieved by passing these speeches through the body. Then I was, like, well you need to be able to practice the lyrics because you don’t know all the “songs” by heart, which became an insert to the massive track books carried by most karaoke VJs. And then sometimes the crowd in the bar isn’t there with me, so I needed to extract the voice of the crowd cheering from the original venue and I needed the local audience to cheer if they wanted to. I’m interested in both where the form succeeds and fails. In particular, one of the most interesting things is this auditory gap between the space where you are, the reduced scale of applause in your own little bar, and this grand scale of applause at the convention center where the speech was originally delivered. FLM: How did the concept of “Participatory Democracy Karaoke” come about and why did you use karaoke as a means of engaging what was happening at the DNC in 2008? DP: I was looking at a lot of different readymade media infrastructures within the city at the time. I was interested in the emergency broadcast systems and I developed a proposal to repurpose that system and karaoke became an important symbol because it was this populist form that was already engaged in exploring the sensation of celebrity but also visualizing the gap between ourselves and those with more power and influence. So it had this readymade capacity to play with power and celebrity and I felt like the Obama presidential campaign, the first one in particular, had some very curious overlaps with this culture of celebrity. Obama of course rose to power partly based on his oratory abilities and I was interested in how karaoke as a vehicle was so adept at offering people all that was left of authentic expression in a political speech. Managing a politician and constructing their identity is such a developed practice that it becomes, kind of automatically, a metaphor for the way that our own identities are constructed. Of course the Obama campaign was very hip and savvy and deploying this notion of grassroots. It was really pioneering in its use of social media and this deployment of notions of populism. I was interested at that time in the capacity of karaoke to track speech patterns, precise tempos of anyone’s delivery, and that to me was a way of thinking about what might be left of the authentic self. I was interested in karaoke’s capacity to extract that authentic component and offer it to others. So not just to stand up and be them, but to [literally] pass their speech patterns through your own body. A long time ago, it started to strike me as odd that one would make media at all. It struck me as a kind of un-contemporary way of going about making art in an age of media overflow. That logic extended into my thinking on delivery devices and installation as well. Why would one buy a screen or even set one up when there are so many out there? And the way in which these media displays function in karaoke bars and bars in general is very interesting to me. I’m drawn to this passive consumption of media where your primary social interaction is with the bartender or a few other individuals but these screens are around you and your attention is shifting back and forth between these spaces. So much political rhetoric is spoken to a half-listening audience. I was interested in what was happening in the slippage and that karaoke was a kind of slippage amplifier. So if you put people in a bar and they are delivering a Kucinich speech and Kucinich comes up on a screen then your getting a sound bite of Kucinich and an image of Kucinich and your friend is talking to you— FLM: A kind of magic takes place in that incongruency between sound and image and the karaoke participant who’s relaying the speech-text at the same time. DP: Exactly and there’s some kind of truth in that experience of reality. FLM: Yeah, there’s something uncanny about seeing the body close-up like that as though it can’t lie to you in that moment or context. It’s a weird moment of luminous clarity. The work you’ve done and all of what you’re saying about karaoke is so very interesting to me. Growing up, my dad and uncles sang karaoke a lot (and still do) and being first-generation Filipino American is a different cultural subtext entirely. I’m also seeing it from the position of witnessing family members who are carriers of these stories and songs. And seeing them cherish these Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley songs so much, I also see how their bodies are literal vessels of popular music that signifies something greater—it signifies their cultural and socioeconomic place in the world. The way that they cherish these American 1950s and 1960s pop songs is similar to having a certain kind of reverence for their spiritual faith or Catholicism. It’s a similar kind of care, focus, and attention exerted in karaoke and Catholicism—that these two structures and systems give something to focus on. Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Obama in Indiana — d. peltz — 2008 DP: Sure there something about the relationship we have to our candidate or the way we go about choosing a candidate, which is very similar to a deity or idol. I learned a lot about karaoke culture through this project. I’d never done karaoke. I’d never been interested in it as a form and then I travelled to Japan as part of the project when I made “Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Barack Obama in Indiana” and it was quite fascinating because my image of karaoke had always been this very public forum in a karaoke bar and then I discovered there’s this whole other world of karaoke where people even go on their own, they go and rent a room or cubicle and sing, or they go on a date—just the two of them go and sit in a room and do karaoke together. FLM: I’m interested in issues that take place within or as a result of specific karaoke culture(s). In the Philippines within the last several years there’s been occurring the “My Way Killings” phenomenon. Apparently baklas or gay men are employed by karaoke establishments to help “smooth over conflicts over karaoke singing”—these social forms of conduct, or lack thereof that arise out of the infrastructures of this social sport. In this one rural part of the Philippines there’s a village karaoke machine that the whole village shares—the Aeta indigenous people have an appointed “keeper” of the karaoke machine. I also see karaoke as a proxy to the confessional box in Catholicism where one goes to pour out their sins (minus the penance and redemption). The karaoke machine enables one to literally sing out whatever’s going on internally, but through highly saturated popular song lyrics. While karaoke is a public and social sport, it can also be a private one. Karaoke is a means of communion with each other. DP: Right, this preference for this kind of mediated communication. In Japan I was trying to organize people to work on this project and I was talking about throwing a party and they were like, well, we have to rent a karaoke machine because what else are we going to do? And I think its kind of serving that function of surrogacy—emotional surrogacy. FLM: And karaoke tools can be read as ritual tools—the magic mic that holds everything. There’s got to be some overlap at some point—between religious ceremony and devotion to the karaoke machine. DP: The way I designed the piece was so that it could slip right on top of the ready-made karaoke infrastructure. There was a flat-packed podium and it was made of a single sheet of plywood with no fasteners that slotted into itself. Those were sent out to a network of karaoke bars that I invited to become “karaoke convention centers.” The local VJs downloaded our custom-made, speech-extracted tracks that were designed to play on their existing equipment. In this sense the piece is a permanent installation. If you go to Denver today, some of the VJs still have the tracks in their library of offerings, the Ramones and Romney. It was this notion of re-purposing readymade infrastructure to create a distributable populist form. Obama was coming and the convention was in the Pepsi Center and 30,000 people were coming including 10,000 journalists. The impetus behind the larger art project that commissioned international artists to make works in Denver, was that local people weren’t going to have much access to this convention. It was like an invasion, the city was being descended upon, but if you lived a block away from the site, you had the same access as people in Zimbabwe&mash;30 second media bits excerpted from the speeches. So it seemed to me that the fundamental gesture was how do I take that signal, which was travelling out of the convention center, and create a local interruption? FLM: Is that what you mean by ‘intervention’? The term is frequently used to help describe your work. DP: It depends on the day. Around that karaoke project I had a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko and he was proposing that maybe rather than intervention, we should consider the word interruption. Because intervention is kind of an overused term in the field of art and it has militaristic and therapeutic associations outside of the art context. Fundamentally, the idea of intervening speaks to the readymade social world as your primary material. So it’s basically suggesting a kind of subtractive process, which gets back to this question: what is the role of the contemporary media artist in a world that’s so saturated with media? You can’t work additively in a saturated field. If you want to make a visible mark you have to work subtractively. That’s what intervention is about to me, just another way of saying “to work subtractively.” FLM: So the interventions or interruptions aren’t necessarily adding or subtracting, but are they putting orange cones there? What are they doing exactly? DP: I think you’re right about that, they’re not really subtracting. They’re adding to the scope of possibility. I’ve been thinking (with this exhibition I’m mounting next month) about the work as explorations and expansions of social possibility. Maybe it’s more insertion. I started calling the pieces ‘insertions’ that I was making in Rejmyre—a small town in Sweden where I’ve been working for six years now. My favorite site to install there is the tourist bureau. I started calling the video pieces that I made for the tourist bureau, video insertions. This idea that you’re inserting something into the readymade media infrastructure of the world resonates with me. Insertion leverages a context, creating a possibility that the inserted object might be naturalized in the process — that someone can encounter my video in Rejmyre as tourist information. And then all of a sudden tourist information can include some American guy prostrating through town and it can include really bad relationship advice. Maybe insertion is a better word. tourist information – d. peltz 2009-present  . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Divine Grace and the Play of OppositesTrent PomplunIn Prisoners of Shangri-la: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, Donald Lopez treats his readers to a provocative but entertaining history of Western fantasies about Tibet. Lopez discovers at the root of these fantasies a "play of opposites" between "the pristine and the polluted, the authentic and the derivative, the holy and the demonic, the good and the bad."1 Not surprisingly, Catholic missionaries (...) to Tibet play an important role in Lopez's history, and he depicts them as prisoners to the play of opposites par excellence. Truth be told, it is difficult to deny his charges; in a passage quoted by Lopez, the seventeenth-century Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher describes Tibetans' veneration of the Dalai Lama in these words:Strangers at their approach fall prostrate with their heads to the ground, and kiss him with incredible Veneration, which is no other than that which is performed upon the Pope of Rome; so that hence the fraud and deceit of the Devil may easily and plainly appear, who by his innate malignity and hatred, in way of abuse hath transferred, as he hath done all the other Mysteries of the Christian Religion, the Veneration which is due unto the Pope of Rome, the only Vicar of Christ on Earth, unto the superstitious Worship of barbarous people.Whence as the Christians call the Roman High-Priest Father of Fathers, so these Barbarians term their false Deity the Great Lama, that is, the Great High-Priest, the Lama of Lamas, that is, the High-Priest of High-Priests, because that from him, as from a certain Fountain, floweth the whole form and mode of their religion, or rather mad and brain-sick idolatry, whence also they call him the Eternal Father.2Lopez explains this passage in light of what he calls the "doctrine" of demonic plagiarism, a relatively common belief among Christian theologians that resemblances between Christianity and other religions could be explained as parodies of the true faith authored by the Devil. Athanasius Kircher undoubtedly believed in such parodies; in point of fact, he had much stronger views about them than many of his contemporaries. But Lopez continues,Why must this appearance be demonic? The answer derives in part from the Christian Church's claim to historical and ontological particularity. It is the [End Page 159] task of the missionary to transmit the word of particularity to those realms where it has not spread, to diffuse it from its unique point of origin. To carry its accoutrements from Rome in a time and to a place they could not possibly have been taken before, and to find them already there, suggests the workings of a power beyond history, which could only be seen as demonic.3I would like to take issue with this unfortunately misleading presentation of Christian theology. No orthodox Catholic theologian believed that such appearances were necessarily demonic, nor did any think that demonic influences ruled out other, more positive, ones. A cursory reading of the writings of Ippolito Desideri, the Jesuit adventurer and missionary who lived in Tibet from 1716 to 1721, should demonstrate that Roman Catholic theologians developed several complex theories about the resemblances between Christians and non-Christians in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. If we situate the Jesuit missionary squarely in the theological currents of the seventeenth century, especially in debates about the salvation of non-Christians, I think we can come to see that the views of Roman Catholic missionaries about Tibetans, and non-Christians in general, were considerably more complex than Lopez imagines.Ippolito Desideri on the Salvation of Tibetan BuddhistsIppolito Desideri arrived in Lhasa on March 18, 1716. As a result of his acquaintance with Khang chen nas and Don grub tshe ring, Desideri quickly gained access to the court of the Qōśot Mongol chieftain Lha bzang Khan.4 Much to the missionary's delight, the Khan granted his request to preach the Gospel in Tibet with great enthusiasm and—if we are to believe Desideri's account—no small amount of paternal sentimentality. In order to facilitate his preaching, Desideri composed a small book explaining the errors... (shrink)

From the Upanishads to Homer -- Philosophy, did the Greeks invent it -- Pythagoras and the divinity of number -- What is there? -- The Greek tragedians on man's fate -- Herodotus and the lamp of history -- Socrates on the examined life -- Plato's search for truth -- Can virtue be taught? -- Plato's Republic, man writ large -- Hippocrates and the science of life -- Aristotle on the knowable -- Aristotle on friendship -- Aristotle on the perfect (...) life -- Rome, the Stoics, and the rule of law -- The Stoic bridge to Christianity -- Roman law, making a city of the once-wide world -- The light within, Augustine on human nature -- Islam -- Secular knowledge, the idea of university -- The reappearance of experimental science -- Scholasticism and the theory of natural law -- The Renaissance, was there one? -- Let us burn the witches to save them -- Francis Bacon and the authority of experience -- Descartes and the authority of reason -- Newton, the saint of science -- Hobbes and the social machine -- Locke's Newtonian science of the mind -- No matter? The challenge of materialism -- Hume and the pursuit of happiness -- Thomas Reid and the Scottish school -- France and the philosophes -- The federalist papers and the great experiment -- What is enlightenment? Kant on freedom -- Moral science and the natural world -- Phrenology, a science of the mind -- The idea of freedom -- The Hegelians and history -- The aesthetic movement, genius -- Nietzsche at the twilight -- The liberal tradition, J.S. Mill -- Darwin and nature's "purposes" -- Marxism, dead but not forgotten -- The Freudian world -- The radical William James -- William James' pragmatism -- Wittgenstein and the discursive turn -- Alan Turing in the forest of wisdom -- Four theories of the good life -- Ontology, what there "really" is -- Philosophy of science, the last word? -- Philosophy of psychology and related confusions -- Philosophy of mind, if there is one -- What makes a problem "moral" -- Medicine and the value of life -- On the nature of law -- Justice and just wars -- Aesthetics, beauty without observers -- God, really? (shrink)

The twenty-first century so far has seen the global rise of authoritarian populism, systematic racism, and dogmatic metaphysics. Even though these events demonstrate the growth of an age of 'unreason', in this original and compelling book John Roberts resists the assumption that such thinking displays an unthinking irrationality or loss of reason; instead he asserts that an important feature of modern reactionary politics is that it offers a supposedly convincing integration of the particular and the universal. This move is defined (...) by what Roberts calls the 'reasoning of unreason' and has deep roots in the history of Western thought and politics. Tracing the dark history of enlightenment-disenlightenment, John Roberts explores 'the reasoning of unreason' across centuries from Aquinas, William of Ockham, the most important treatise on witchcraft Malleus Maleficarum, Locke, Kant, and Count Arthur de Gobineau, to Social Darwinism, Nazism, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Friedrich von Hayek. Roberts provides a new set of philosophical-political tools to understand the formation and denigration of the rational subject and the current reinvestment in various forms of political unreason globally. The Reasoning of Unreason is the first book to draw on the philosophy of reason, political philosophy, political theory and political history, in order to produce a dialectical account of the 'making of reason' internal to the forces of unreason and the limits of reason. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic Perspectives. Edited by FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA and JOHN P. GALVIN. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991. Vol. 1: Pp. xv+ 336. Vol. 2: Pp. xv+ 384. $21.95 each; $39.95 set. Not too long ago a fellow Dominican who wanted to do some personal updating and retooling in theology asked me to recommend to him some hooks in Catholic systematics which would show him the lay (...) of the land in contemporary theology. I was happy to be able to apprise him of the two volumes under review. Most of the essayists do not explore new territory or establish new beachheads (nor was this their task) hut instead skillfully sketch the revised maps of terra cognita and graciously occupy already conquered lands, sometimes repeating their own creative work published elsewhere. Without doubt the majority of the Catholic theological guild who belong to the College Theology Society or the Catholic Theological Society of America would recognize in the overall thrust and import of these articles a broad harmony with the main themes and general methodology of contemporary Catholic theology, while they would also acknowledge in the articles' various emphases and organizational techniques the legitimate pluralistic expressions of that theology. In e:ffect, the authors offer, in a balanced and evenhanded way, albeit from their own individual perspectives (hence the subtitle), a rich distillation and compact presentation of the state of contemporary Catholic theology as it is probably taught by the majority of professors in North America. The editors see the volumes as opening up the diverse theological perspectives within Roman Catholic systematic theology, hut as the list of authors reveals, these perspectives actually cluster within the moderate center-to-left-of-center spectrum of contemporary Catholic theology : Systematic Theology: Tasks and Methods (Fiorenza); Faith and Revelation (Avery Dulles) ; Approaching the Christian Understanding.of God (David Tracy) ; The Trinitarian Mystery of God (Catherine Mowry LaCugna); Creation (Anne M. Clifford); Jesus Christ (Galvin); Church (Michael A. Fahey); Sin and Grace (Roger Haight); Saints and Mary (Elizabeth A. Johnson) ; Sacraments in General, Baptism and Confirmation, Penance, Anointing of the Sick (Regis A. Duffy); Eucharist, Order (David N. Power); Marriage (Fiorenza); Eschatology (Monika K. Hellwig). The traditional topics in the traditional order reveal that the volumes 305 306 BOOK REVIEWS are meant to serve as a summary and survey of the major courses of· fered within most Master of Arts and Master of Divinity programs. The intended audience is the beginning student, the student who needs to review the major themes of systematic theology, and the student who needs some updating in contemporary theology. In my opinion, the best articles for the intended audience and purpose are those hy Fior· enza (Systematic Theology), Dulles, Galvin, Haight and Johnson. The editors asked the authors to bear in mind five specific goals: to root their work in Roman Catholic theology; to help recover, in Rahner 's words, " the forgotten truths " of Catholicism, by displaying how historical studies have uncovered heretofore neglected traditions; to make use of current hermeneutical theories and philosophical reflections ; to take into account the ecumenical dimension of theology, while also clarifying the distinctive Roman Catholic position on various topics; and to he attentive to the current stress on praxis. In general, whenever their topic required it, the authors have fulfilled these goals. What has resulted is a combined work deeply grounded in historical understanding which is ecumenically broad while also distinctively Roman Catholic. The articles have tended to retrieve Catholicism's forgotten truths from the church's patristic era, since the dominant tradition until Vatican II was the one defined by the high Middle Ages and Trent. Indicative of this trend is the fact that, among the brief annotated bibliographies appended to each essay, only those by Dulles and Haight contain a work by Thomas Aquinas-and in Dulles's opinion the treatment of faith in the Summa theologiae is " stilil the most authoritative and incisive Catholic treatise on faith" (I :128). Never· theless, the authors are fair in giving medieval theology its rightful place within the Catholic tradition. Instead of offering even the briefest summary of the seventeen individual essays, since the aui:hors' basic introductory treatment of their topics... (shrink)

The idea of enlightenment entails liberty, equality, rationalism, secularism, and the connection between knowledge and human well being. In spite of the setbacks of revolutionary violence, political mass murder, and two world wars, the spread of enlightenment values has become the yardstick by which moral, political, and even scientific advances are measured. Indeed, most critiques of the enlightenment ideal point to failure in implementation rather than principle. By contrast, David Stove, in On Enlightenment, attacks the intellectual roots of enlightenment thought, (...) to define the limitations of its successes and the areas of its likely failures. Stove is not insensitive to the many valuable aspects of enlightenment thought. He champions the use of reason and rationality, and recognizes the falsity of religious claims as well as the importance of individual liberty. What he rejects is the enlightenment's uncritical optimism regarding social progress and its willingness to embrace revolutionary change. What evidence is there that the elimination of superstition will lead to happiness? Or that it is possible to accept Darwinism without Social Darwinism? Or that the enlightenment's liberal, rationalistic outlook will ever lead to the kind of social progress envisioned by its advocates. Despite their best intentions, social reformers who attempt to improve the world as a whole inevitably make things worse. He advocates a conservative "go slow" approach to change, pointing out that today's social structures are so large and complex that any widespread social reform will have innumerable unforeseen consequences. For example, the welfare state may diminish individual initiative, the use of pesticides may increase the food supply while polluting the water supply, the popularizing of university education may lead to a decline in academic standards. Since government has a virtual monopoly on large-scale change, it follows, in Stove's view, that its powers must be limited in order to prevent large-scale damage. Instead, he argues that reforms, when they are to be made at all, must be realistic, local, necessary and never coercive. Writing in the conservative tradition of Edmund Burke with the same passion for clarity and intellectual honesty as George Orwell, David Stove was one of the most precise, articulate, and insightful philosophers of his day. "Never just an academic, Stove was also a prominent, often crotchety, public intellectual of a conservative and, all too often, reactionary bent, many of whose views were extremist on any account, and his targets were many.... For Stove the important question about a belief is not whether it is extreme or mainstream, but whether it is true, or probable, or has sound evidentiary and/or rational credentials. In this he was surely right." -D. D. Todd, Philosophy in Review David Stove taught philosophy at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney. He is the author of Against the Idols of the Age and Scientific Irrationalism, both available from Transaction. Andrew Irvine is professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Roger Kimball is managing editor of the New Criterion. (shrink)

The interview revolves around the idea that Al Qaeda is a distinctively modern phenomenon dependent upon modern and Western ideas of transformation of the human condition through mass violence. Meanwhile, the USA and Europe are deeply superstitious about their own unique position in the world. Professor John Gray outlines a clash of modernisms, the one not less ambitious or global in nature than the other. He applies an analysis of modernity upon present phenomena such as the war in Iraq, the (...) failed EU constitution, the debate about Muslims and more broadly religion in secular societies, etc., and sketches an alternative path for the West than the present liberal revolutionary; a path informed by an awareness of limitations. (shrink)

Mass ideology is unique to modern society and rooted in early modern philosophy. Traditionally, knowledge had been viewed as resting on metaphysics. Rejecting metaphysical truth evoked questions about the source of "truth." For nineteenth-century ideologists, "truth" comes either from dominating classes in a progressively determined history or from a post-Copernican freedom of the superior man to create it. In From Physics to Politics Robert C. Trundle, Jr. uncovers the relation of modern philosophy to political ideology. And in (...) rooting truth in human nature and Nature by modal reasoning, he resolves the problem of politicized truth. Our concepts of scientific truth, logic, and necessity are essentially connected. Modern philosophy restricts our understanding of necessity to the political dreams and aspirations of Enlightenment intellectuals. As a result, these intellectuals refuse to acknowledge as factual or meaningful whatever is not intelligible within the practical goals of establishing science as a system of enlightened ideas. The effect of these ideas is that in our time metaphysical principles, speculative truths, our understanding of science, and the nature of logic have become subordinated to ideological dreams. Fascism, Nazism, Marxism, political correctness, and moral relativism are not historical aberrations but essential consequences. Trundle's work is groundbreaking and daring, and his underlying thesis demonstrates why scientific truth demands a modal defense. The defense not only integrates science, ethics, and politics, but shows how "truth" may be ascribed to moral and scientific principles in contrast to a modern philosophical tradition. Since this tradition is the origin of political ideology, it has led to an irrational politicization of truth. The book will appeal particularly to those interested in political history, histories of philosophy, the philosophy of sciences, and ethics. Robert C. Trundle, Jr. is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and the Scientific Research Society of Sigma Xi, an affiliate scholar for Idealistic Studies, and has served as reader for University de Laval's Laval Theologique et Philosphique. His publications include over three dozen articles in Res Publica, Logique et Analyse, Thought, Philosphy in Science, and New Horizons in the Philosophy of Science. His books include Beyond Absurdity (with R. Puligandla), Ancient Greek Philosophy, and Medieval Reasoning. He is currently professor in the department of social sciences and philosophy at Northern Kentucky University. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 357 chorus of Protestants calling for a recovery of church discipline, of use of creed and sacrament in worship, of christian education as character formation, etc. Unfortunately, he gives no suggestions about how much a. recovered sense of authority and sacramentalism can avoid the distortions of this necessary element of Church life that gave rise to the original Protestant Reformation (distortions recognized and warned against at Vatican (...) II). Those engaged in Christian ministry in North America from all Christian traditions will find this book a helpful tool in deepening their theological reflection on (and in) ministry. Catholics and Arminians will :find it particularly amenable to their theological convietions. Catholics will identify with the ecclesial and sacramental sense. Both they and Arminians will find that Lee's degnostification of the doctrine of total depravity -by claiming this affirmation of fallenness is an imagined state apart from the graciousness of God (86)-sounds familiar: compare Rahner's "supernatural existential" and Arminius's "preventient grace." (Unfortunately, Lee misses this similarity because he accepts the classic caricature of Arminians as denying the need for grn.ce, cf. 103)" Could there be a correlation between Lee's more pastoral approach to theology and the narrowing of this classic theological distinction~ One can only hope. RANDY L. MADDOX Sioux Falls College Sioux Falls, Smith Dakota Darwinism and Dfrinity: Essays on Evolution and Religious Belief. By JOHN DURANT, Ed. Oxg·ord: Basil Blackwell, 1985, Pp. ix + 210. Cloth, $25.00. The work is based largely upon a collection of papers. delivered in 1982 at a conference on the relationship behveen evolutionary theory and relig ·ious. belief sponsored by the British Society for the History of Science. It consists of a brief Introduction, and seven chapters ranging in content from a general review by the editor of the problems which still persist in our day for anyone attempting a consistent interpretation of Darwin a8 a person and Darwinism as a doctrine in science, to topics.such as the popularization of Darwinism via writers such as Spencer, the current relevance of Darwinism to contemporary Christian theology, the religious nature of evolutionism itself, and the "scientific creationism" debate in the United States. In his overview Dura11t emphasi2;es the point that in reeent years there 358 BOOK REVIEWS has been an increasing dissatisfaction among historians of science concerning the supposed conflict that there either is or should be between science and religion. The latter have been in fact more often than not in close association with each other, and often in harmony with one another. This is especially true with respect to religion and Darwin's Origin of Species, which Durant describes as the "last great work of Victorian natural theology " (p. 16). Foolish as this may at first sound to some, it is in fact much closer to the historical truth than the forced conflict theories which so dominated the earlier part of our eentmy. This is certainly true and will, I think, become more and more widely accepted as time goes on. What is not the case, though, and what not only Durant but others in the volume insist upon continuing to maintain, is that Darwin himself was not a "progressivist." Durant tries to make out that Darwin is the good guy because of his neutrality on the topic of necessary prog-ress in nature while Spene.er is the bad guy who is largely responsible for turning a nicely neutral scientific doctrine into a " metaphysical " system of the world. This, however, is not what Darwin himself had to say, both publicly and privately. In chapter 2 J. H. Brooke discusses the relationship between Darwin's science and his religion. What was Darwin's personal religious position'l Brooke states that "Despite the fluctuation of his religious beliefs, in both content and strength, a faiTiy consistent position does emerge" (p. 42). Darwin was certainly not an atheist. He may, though, have been some sort of deist. He was, in fact, very likely a theologian in his own manner, desiring to offer the world a new and scientific alternative to the traditional theology of Paley and the Church of England. In any event, even though it is... (shrink)

Background: In Ontario, Canada, patients who lack decision-making capacity and have no family or friends to act as substitute decision-makers currently rely on the Office of the Public Guardian and Trustee to consent to long-term care (nursing home) placement, but they have no legal representative for other placement decisions. Objectives: We highlight the current gap in legislation for difficult transition cases involving unrepresented patients and provide a novel framework for who ought to assist with making these decisions and how these (...) decisions ought to be made. Research design: This paper considers models advanced by Volpe and Steinman with regard to who ought to make placement decisions for unrepresented patients, as well as current ethical models for analyzing how these decisions should be made. Participants and research context: We describe an anonymized healthcare transition case to illustrate the fact that there is no legally recognized decision-maker for placement destinations other than long-term care facilities and to show how this impacts all stakeholders. Ethical considerations: The case provided is an anonymized vignette representing a typical transition case involving an unrepresented patient. Findings: As a result of a gap in provincial legislation, healthcare providers usually determine the appropriate placement destination without a clear framework to guide the process and this can cause significant moral distress. Discussion: We argue for a team decision-making approach in the short term, and a legislative change in the long-term, to respect the patient voice, evaluate benefit and risk, enhance collaboration between healthcare providers and patients, and promote social justice. We believe that our approach, which draws upon the strengths of interprofessional teams, will be of interest to all who are concerned with the welfare and ethical treatment of the patients for whom they care. Conclusions: One of the main strengths of our recommendation is that it provides all members of the healthcare team (including nurses, social workers, therapists, and others) an increased opportunity to advocate on behalf of unrepresented patients. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic hit healthcare professionals (HCPs) hard, potentially leading to mental health deterioration. This longitudinal study investigated the 1-year evolution of psychological health of acute care HCPs during the COVID-19 pandemic and explored possible differences between high and low resilient HCPs. From April 2020 to April 2021, a convenience sample of 520 multinational HCPs completed an online survey every 3 months, up to five times. We used mixed linear models to examine the association between resilience and the variation (...) of COVID-19-related anxiety, depressiveness, perceived vulnerability, and psychological trauma symptomatology. We demonstrated “u-shaped” trajectories for all mental health symptoms. We also explored differences in the abovementioned variables between front-line and second-line acute care HCPs. In contrast to HCP.s with lower levels of resilience (-1SD), those with higher levels of resilience (+1SD) showed increased COVID-19 anxiety and perceived vulnerability over time. Front-line and second-line HCPs differed in their depressiveness and psychological trauma variation during the 1-year analysis. High and average resilient second-line HCPs showed steeper depressiveness increases with time than high and average resilient front-line HCPs. Acute care HCPs reported their most elevated clinical symptoms of depressiveness (5–7%) and psychological trauma symptomatology (26–46%) in April 2020. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, second-line HCPs with more resilience showed a steeper worsening of their depressiveness than more resilient front-line HCPs. HCPs with low resilience may benefit from interventions at the beginning of a pandemic, whereas HCPs with high resilience might benefit from resilience-enhancing interventions at later phases.Trial RegistrationThe study protocol was pre-registered with the International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number (ISRCTN13694948) published (Fuchs et al., 2020). (shrink)

Al cumplirse doscientos años de la muerte de Immanuel Kant 2004), considerar la vigencia de su pensamiento filosófico, se constituyó en un imperativo categórico, para quienes nos inscribimos en la tradición de la filosofía occidental. En cumplimiento del mismo, el texto que se presenta se ocupa de la vigencia de la filosofía del filósofo de Königsberg a través de la consideración de dos expresiones de la inteligencia filosófica en América Latina: Arturo Andrés Roig y Franz J. Hinkelammert . Los programas (...) de investigación en curso de los dos autores elegidos, en el abordaje y desarrollo de distintos tópicos, proceden argumentativamente desde, contra y más allá de Kant, exhibiendo una singular vigencia de su filosofía al interior de los mismos. En el pensamiento de Arturo Andrés Roig, los tópicos de referencia que se consideran son: la normatividad del pensamiento filosófico, la filosofía de la historia, la fundamentación de una moral emergente y la fundamentación de una estética motivacional. De la producción teórica de Franz J. Hinkelammert, se presentan: la crítica a la razón utópica y el realismo político, la crítica trascendental de los marcos categoriales de los pensamientos sociales, la trascendentalidad del sujeto y el problema del universalismo ético en la tensión entre la ética de la responsabilidad y la ética de principios. Surge de la consideración de los asuntos enumerados, que en relación al universalismo abstracto de Kant, estos dos exponentes de la inteligencia filosófica en América Latina, convergen en la fundamentación de un universalismo concreto.Currency of Kant's philosophy in two recent expressions of the philosophical intelligence in Latin America: Arturo Andrés Roig and Franz J. Hinkelammert. When it is twohundred years of Immanuel Kant´s death , to consider the currency of his philosophical thought means a categorial must, for those who are involved in the tradition of occidental philosophy. Taking this into account, the next introduced is based on the currency of the philosopher of Königsberg from the consideration of two expressions of the philosophical intelligence in Latin America: Arturo Andrés Roig y Franz J.Hinkelammert . The curriculums of investigation of the chosen authors in the search and developement of different topics, come, from the point of view of arguments, from, against and beyond Kant, showing a particular currency of his philosophy within them. In Arturo Andrés Roig´s thought, the topics of reference considered are: normativity of philosophical thought, philosophy of history, the explanation of an emergent morality and of a motivational aesthetics. From the theoretical production of Franz J. Hinkkelammert, we introduce: the criticism to utopical reason and the political realism, the outstanding criticism of the categorical frames of social thoughts, the trascendentality of the subject and the question of ethical universalism in the tension between ethics of responsability and the ethics of principles. It comes out from the previous topics that, in relation to Kant´s abstrac universalism, these two samples of philosophical intelligence in Latin America, are gathered in the foundation of a concrete universalism. (shrink)

The biography and views of Oscar Goldberg (1885–1952), a Jewish-German philosopher, psychologist and religious thinker, have in recent years attracted increasing attention from specialists in the history of philosophy, religious and cultural studies. The interpre­tation of metaphysical problems, the nature of myth and ritual, and the concepts of the sa­cred and profane that he proposed had a significant influence on a number of thinkers and writers of the first half of the twentieth century. The article discusses one of the (...) most important sources of Goldberg’s views – the Jewish esoteric tradition (Kabbalah), with which he had a difficult relationship, while simultaneously criticizing its concepts and adapting some of them for his own system. It was in dialogue with the ideas of Kabbalah that Goldberg developed an original approach to the interpretation of the biblical text – the idea of the existence of a universal pre-biological force that manifests itself in both world and human history. (shrink)

The nature of light is a focus of Thomas Hobbes’s natural philosophical project. Hobbes’s explanation of the light of lucid bodies differs across his works, from dilation and contraction in Elements of Law to simple circular motions in De corpore. However, Hobbes consistently explains perceived light by positing that bodily resistance generates the phantasm of light. In Letters I.XIX–XX of Philosophical Letters, fellow materialist Margaret Cavendish attacks the Hobbesian understanding of both lux and lumen by claiming that Hobbes has (...) illicitly made abstractions from matter. In this paper, I argue that Cavendish’s criticisms rely on an incorrect understanding of the nature of Hobbesian geometry and the role it plays in Hobbes’s natural philosophy. Rather than understanding geometry as wholly abstract, Hobbes attempts to ground geometry in different ways of considering bodies and their motions. Furthermore, Hobbes’s own criticisms of abstraction suggest that he would share many of the worries she raises but deny that he falls prey to them. (shrink)

We implemented a user-centered approach to the design of an artificial intelligence (AI) system that provides users with access to information about the workings of the United States federal court system regardless of their technical background. Presently, most of the records associated with the federal judiciary are provided through a federal system that does not support exploration aimed at discovering systematic patterns about court activities. In addition, many users lack the data analytical skills necessary to conduct their own analyses and (...) convert data into information. We conducted interviews, observations, and surveys to uncover the needs of our users and discuss the development of an intuitive platform informed from these needs that makes it possible for legal scholars, lawyers, and journalists to discover answers to more advanced questions about the federal court system. We report on results from usability testing and discuss design implications for AI and law practitioners and researchers. (shrink)

Encouraged by the financial incentives in the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009, electronic health record adoption is on the rise. According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in 2014, 78% of office-based physicians had adopted some type of EHR system, up from 18% in 2001. Implementation of EHRs able to support the Department of Health and Human Services “meaningful use” requirements has also significantly increased since 2010. Such (...) a growth in EHR adoption with the capacity to achieve “meaningful use” standards suggests that the goal of nationwide, interoperable health records is moving closer to a reality.While movement toward a system-wide, interoperable EHR promises benefits of such an electronic information management tool, the risks related to patients’ privacy of their health information remains a concern. (shrink)

This paper draws attention to the significance of incorporating decolonial methodologies in analyzing political discourse in a postcolonial world, particularly in Africa. The decolonial approach to political discourse focuses on the ways politics in postcolonial context is imbricated in the logic of coloniality. Decolonial approach is considered necessary rather than sufficient in interrogating the hegemonic structure of colonialism in Africa's political discourse. The paper uses critical discourse analysis situated within decolonial methodologies to analyze former President of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan's declaration-of-intent (...) speech to seek re-election. The paper specifically draws on [Mignolo, W. (2011). The darker side of western modernity: Global futures decolonial options. Duke University Press.] and [Macgilchrist, F. (2014). Media discourse and de/coloniality: A post-foundational approach. In C. Hart & P. Cap (Eds.), Contemporary critical discourse studies (pp. 385–405). Bloomsbury Publishing] decolonial frameworks and [Chilton, P. (2004). Analysing political discourse. Routledge] legitimization model. Situating decolonial approaches together with Chilton's legitimization model is, on the one hand, a way of interrogating hegemonic structures in Goodluck Jonathan's speech and on the other hand works to show the limitation of Chilton's theory in analyzing discourses from Africa. This limitation of Chilton's model underscores the need to bring decolonial approaches in constructing a nuanced understanding of Africa and its epistemic diversity because it is impossible to think of overcoming the coloniality of power without approaching it from the perspective of the colonized. (shrink)