Introduction I am a nuance. Nietzsche Reading is always a risky business: we confront an enigma or run the risk of roaming. But doesn't reading Nietzsche ...

En parlant de Wagner, depuis _Richard Wagner à Bayreuth_ jusqu'aux écrits de 1888, Nietzsche parle en réalité de la civilisation occidentale, c'est-à-dire de la morale, de la décadence, des Allemands et de la musique allemande. Il élargit donc et agrandit son propos d'une manière _polysémique_, ou même il le double ou le pluralise d'une manière _contrapuntique_, en procédant à plusieurs séries de glissements, d'usurpations d'identité, de substitutions, de condensations. Ces polysémies font éclater l'identité de Wagner selon la logique de la (...) « Flüssigkeit » des significations, fonction de l'ordre physiologique et psychologique. Ce n'est pas seulement de Nietzsche contre Wagner qu'il s'agit, mais de Dionysos contre le Crucifié, de la « Heiterkeit » contre la décadence, ainsi qu'en témoignent par exemple les multiples équivoques polysémiques du titre « Le Cas Wagner ». (shrink)

Cet article se propose d'élucider la problématique de la « psychologie de la foi » chez Nietzsche, qui inclut des notions clés telles que « morale », « idéalisme », « christianisme » et vérité. Cette reconstitution de la problématique est faite au moyen de l'explication linéaire de deux textes de Nietzsche : L'Antichrist, § 50, et Ecce homo, « Pourquoi je suis un destin », § 7. This paper tries to deal with the issue of what Nietzsche calls « (...) the psychology of faith », which includes such key notions as « morals », « idealism », « Christianity » and truth. This task is achieved by means of a line by Une commentary on two texts : The Antichrist, § 50, and Ecce homo, « Why I am a Fate », § 7. (shrink)

La morale se trouve aujourd'hui dans une situation équivoque. D'une part, les changements considérables subis par les conditions de l'action et des évaluations au XXe siècle la font apparemment tomber en désuétude : dissolution des structures sociales et institutionnelles, développement des techniques et de la puissance humaine, la pression irrésistible des idéologies-informations éclatées et simplifiées que diffusent les médias, enfin un cynisme snob ou un écoeurement blasé ou naïf face aux horreurs qui ont marqué le XXe siècle. Mais en même (...) temps, paradoxalement, elle semble ressusciter, voire revenir en force : les fondamentalismes, les intégrismes, orthodoxies, traditionnalismes en témoignent, donnant raison à ceux qui depuis trois millénaires, de l'Ecclésiaste à Nietzsche, ont vu dans la morale un remède pire que le mal, la Circé de l'humanité. On se demandera d'abord où se situe le problème moral et s'il ne s'agit pas là d'un faux problème, quelque prestige que la morale s'arroge par son antiquité. Peut-on encore parler de biens, de fins, de vertus? Le problème du mal s'avérera comme ce qui suscite la recherche d'un fondement de la morale. Mais tout au long du parcours, on s'efforcera de relier les traditions morales à ce qui concerne notre action et ses conditions aujourd'hui, en passant au crible notre présent, ses promesses et ses menaces, sous le double emblême des critiques de Rousseau et de l'intempestivité nietzschéenne. Texte de couverture. (shrink)

In this astonishingly rich volume, experts in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, political theory, aesthetics, history, critical theory, and hermeneutics bring to light the best philosophical scholarship on what is arguably Nietzsche's most rewarding but most challenging text. Including essays that were commissioned specifically for the volume as well as essays revised and edited by their authors, this collection showcases definitive works that have shaped Nietzsche studies alongside new works of interest to students and experts alike. A lengthy introduction, annotated (...) bibliography, and index make this an extremely useful guide for the classroom and advanced research. (shrink)

Addressing the issue of how to read Nietzsche, this book presents an accessible series of essays for students and general readers on Nietzsche's individual works, written by such distinguished Nietzsche scholars as Frithjof Bergmann, Arthur Danto, Bernd Magnus, Christopher Middleton, Eric Blondel, Lars Gustaffson, Alexander Nehamas, Richard Schacht, Gary Shapiro, Hugh Silverman, and Ivan Soll. Among the works discussed are On the Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Twilight of the Idols and The Will to (...) Power. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche is generally received as a clever critic of metaphysics who nevertheless remained hopelessly entangled in the metaphysical tradition he sought to challenge. As a consequence perhaps of Heidegger's influential designation of Nietzsche as the "last metaphysician of the West," scholars have for the most part treated Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics as provocative and entertaining, but ultimately unsuccessful. In his important study of 1987, Eric Blondel attempts to recuperate and defend Nietzsche's immanent critique of metaphysics. The key to (...) Blondel's interpretation is his attention to the body as the central focus of Nietzsche's philosophy. For Blondel as for Nietzsche, the body stands for the "other" of metaphysics: flux, appearance, becoming, excess, incontinence, and difference. Any attempt to fix or define or stabilize the body necessarily involves its relapse into the procrustean bed of metaphysics. The central question of Nietzsche's philosophy thus becomes, How can we speak of the body without thereby violating it? According to Blondel, Nietzsche realized that a discursive account of the body is both necessary--lest philosophy degenerate into an idle exercise--and yet impossible to articulate without recourse to the suffocating categories of metaphysics. (shrink)

Reading Maurice Blondel the philosopher leads Henri Bouillard the theologian to claim, in his work on Karl Barth, a knowledge of God of philosophical origin. His acquaintance with the philosopher Éric Weil makes him advocate, in his later works, a knowledge of God of religious origin. His successive stances pass through an hermeneutic of the definition of the first Council of Vatican, and his final position is governed by presuppositions that will be confirmed subsequently.

La relation entre la philosophie et la mystique forme une question " à la limite ", que la fatalité a le plus souvent déclinée en une suite d'oppositions frontales : entre le rationnel et l'émotionnel, le logique et le pathologique, le discours et l'indicible... Depuis quelques années cependant, plusieurs motifs portent à reconsidérer cette relation singulière. Une somme d'informations sans précédent sur les diverses traditions mystiques, sur leurs variabilités historiques et géographiques est désormais accessible. En outre, la mystique est devenue (...) un objet œcuménique et interreligieux de premier plan qui invite à reposer la question de l'essence du religieux dans la traversée herméneutique des différences confessionnelles. Enfin, on enregistre une forte demande de redressement spéculatif face à l'essor actuel des sectes et au développement des syncrétismes religieux. Mais le philosophe est-il qualifié pour comprendre la mystique? A quelles conditions? De son côté, le mystique n'a-t-il point tendance à cacher sa dette à l'égard de l'expérience de la pensée, voire des concepts philosophiques? Plus profondément encore, faut-il lier la mystique au seul " religieux "? La philosophie n'est-elle pas un exercice spirituel, une expérience? C'est justement par cette entrée " expérientielle " dans la question que le présent ouvrage trouve son originalité. Grâce aux contributions de spécialistes qu'il réunit, il répond à trois tâches précises : redéfinir le concept d'expérience dès lors qu'il est assigné à la philosophie et au religieux ; évoquer dans une perspective critique les grands figures historiques, témoins et acteurs de l'intersection des deux champs, philosophique et mystique ; mettre à l'épreuve, selon une perspective systématique et au voisinage des œuvres majeures de Simone Weil, Franz Rosenzweig, Emmanuel Lévinas, Éric Weil et Maurice Blondel, les différentes théorisations d'une relation finalement plus présente qu'on ne le dit, dans la structuration du pensable contemporain. (shrink)

Henri Bouillard est initié par Kant à un regard critique. Sa rencontre avec saint Thomas le solidarise avec la «nouvelle théologie», et l'ouvre à une démarche herméneutique. Sa rencontre avec Maurice Blondel l'amène à opérer le tournant anthropologique en théologie. Sa rencontre avec Karl Barth le conduit à se rallier avec réserve à la position de celui-ci. Sa rencontre avec Éric Weil l'entraîne à approfondir le tournant anthropologique, mais à récuser les théologies politiques, et à repousser le recours aux (...) sciences humaines en théologie. Bref, ces quatre rencontres l'engagent à passer d'une démarche dogmatique à une approche herméneutique, mais à écarter une méthode généalogique entée sur les sciences humaines. (shrink)

Do university ethics classes influence students’ real-world moral choices? We aimed to conduct the first controlled study of the effects of ordinary philosophical ethics classes on real-world moral choices, using non-self-report, non-laboratory behavior as the dependent measure. We assigned 1332 students in four large philosophy classes to either an experimental group on the ethics of eating meat or a control group on the ethics of charitable giving. Students in each group read a philosophy article on their assigned topic and optionally (...) viewed a related video, then met with teaching assistants for 50-minute group discussion sections. They expressed their opinions about meat ethics and charitable giving in a follow-up questionnaire (1032 respondents after exclusions). We obtained 13,642 food purchase receipts from campus restaurants for 495 of the students, before and after the intervention. Purchase of meat products declined in the experimental group (52% of purchases of at least $4.99 contained meat before the intervention, compared to 45% after) but remained the same in the control group (52% both before and after). Ethical opinion also differed, with 43% of students in the experimental group agreeing that eating the meat of factory farmed animals is unethical compared to 29% in the control group. We also attempted to measure food choice using vouchers, but voucher redemption rates were low and no effect was statistically detectable. It remains unclear what aspect of instruction influenced behavior. (shrink)

We propose four policies of ethical design of human-grade Artificial Intelligence. Two of our policies are precautionary. Given substantial uncertainty both about ethical theory and about the conditions under which AI would have conscious experiences, we should be cautious in our handling of cases where different moral theories or different theories of consciousness would produce very different ethical recommendations. Two of our policies concern respect and freedom. If we design AI that deserves moral consideration equivalent to that of human beings, (...) that AI should be designed with self-respect and with the freedom to explore values other than those we might impose. We are especially concerned about the temptation to create human-grade AI pre-installed with the desire to cheerfully sacrifice itself for its creators’ benefit. (shrink)

If explicit cognition about morality promotes moral behavior then one might expect ethics professors to behave particularly well. However, professional ethicists' behavior has never been empirically studied. The present research examined the rates at which ethics books are missing from leading academic libraries, compared to other philosophy books similar in age and popularity. Study 1 found that relatively obscure, contemporary ethics books of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy were actually about 50% (...) more likely to be missing than non-ethics books. Study 2 found that classic (pre-1900) ethics books were about twice as likely to be missing. (shrink)

This paper investigates the implicative conditional, a connective intended to describe the logical behavior of an empirically defined class of natural language conditionals, also namedimplicative conditionals, which excludes concessive and some other conditionals. The implicative conditional strengthens the strict conditional with the possibility of the antecedent and of the contradictory of the consequent.$${p\Rightarrow q}$$p⇒qis thus defined as$${\lnot } \Diamond {(p \wedge \lnot q) \wedge } \Diamond {p \wedge } \Diamond {\lnot q}$$¬◊(p∧¬q)∧◊p∧◊¬q. We explore the logical properties of this conditional in (...) a reflexive normal Kripke semantics, provide an axiomatic system and prove it to be sound and complete for our semantics. The implicative conditional validates transitivity and contraposition, which we take to be integral parts of reasoning and communication. But it only validates restricted versions of strengthening the antecedent, right weakening, simplification, and rational monotonicity. Apparent counterexamples to some of these properties are explained as due to contextual factors. Finally, the implicative conditional avoids the paradoxes of material and strict implication, and validates some connexive principles such as Aristotle’s theses and weak Boethius’ thesis, as well as some highly entrenched principles of conditionals, such as conjunction of consequents, disjunction of antecedents, modus ponens, cautious monotonicity and cut. (shrink)

" Dr. Cassell discusses the world of the sick, the healing connection and healer's battle, the role of omnipotence in the healer's art, illness and disease, and ...

De-extinction raises anew ontological and epistemological problems that have engaged environmental philosophers for decades. This essay re-examines these issues to provide a fuller understanding—and a critique—of de-extinction. One of my claims is that de-extinction as a philosophical problem merely recycles old issues and debates in the field (hence, “zombie” arguments). De-extinction is a project that arises out of the assertion of human domination of the natural world. Thus the acceptance of de-extinction as an environmental policy is an expression of a (...) human-nature relationship that disvalues the natural world and subjugates nature completely to the interests of humanity. (shrink)

Ecological restoration has been a topic for philosophical criticism for three decades. In this essay, I present a discussion of the arguments against ecological restoration and the objections raised against my position. I have two purposes in mind: to defend my views against my critics, and to demonstrate that the debate over restoration reveals fundamental ideas about the meaning of nature, ideas that are necessary for the existence of any substantive environmentalism. I discuss the possibility of positive restorations, the idea (...) that nature can restore itself, the meaning of artifacts, and the significance of the distinction between humanity and nature. (shrink)

How do you know what you want? Philosophers have lately developed sophisticated accounts of the practical and doxastic knowledge that are rooted in the point of view of the subject. Our ability to just say what we are doing or what we believe—that is, to say so authoritatively, but not on the basis of observation or evidence—is an aspect of our ability to reason about the good and the true. However, no analogous route to orectic self-knowledge is feasible. Knowledge of (...) desire is distinctive in being a matter of our affective response to imagined prospects. An examination of this idea yields the following thesis: I know what I want just in case the object pursued in anticipation of a certain pleasure actually yields the anticipated pleasure. (shrink)

The prospects of enhancing cognitive or motor functions using neuroscience in otherwise healthy individuals has attracted considerable attention and interest in neuroethics (Farah et al., Nature Reviews Neuroscience 5:421–425, 2004; Glannon Journal of Medical Ethics 32:74–78, 2006). The use of stimulants is one of the areas which has propelled the discussion on the potential for neuroscience to yield cognition-enhancing products. However, we have found in our review of the literature that the paradigms used to discuss the non-medical use of stimulant (...) drugs prescribed for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) vary considerably. In this brief communication, we identify three common paradigms—prescription drug abuse, cognitive enhancement, and lifestyle use of pharmaceuticals—and briefly highlight how divergences between paradigms create important “ethics blind spots”. (shrink)

Understanding the motivations behind those who partake in extreme sports can be difficult for some. If the popular conception holds that the incentive behind extreme sports participation is entirely to do with risking one's life, then this confusion will continue to exist. However, an in-depth examination of the phenomenology of the extreme sport experience yields a much more complex picture. This book revisits the definition of extreme sports as those activities where a mismanaged mistake or accident would most likely result (...) in death. Extreme sports are not necessarily synonymous with risk and participation may not be about risk-taking. Participants report deep inner transformations that influence world views and meaningfulness, feelings of coming home and authentic integration as well as a freedom beyond the everyday. Phenomenologically, these experiences have been interpreted as transcendent of time, other, space and body. Extreme sport participation therefore points to a more potent, life-enhancing endeavour worthy of further investigation. This book adopts a broad hermeneutic phenomenological approach to critique the assumed relationship to risk-taking, the death wish and the concept of "No Fear" in extreme sports, and repositions the experience in a previously unexplored manner. This is valuable reading for students and academics interested in Sports Psychology, Social Psychology, Health Psychology, Tourism, Leisure Studies and the practical applications of phenomenology. (shrink)

Living labs are interdisciplinary and participatory initiatives aimed at bringing research closer to practice by involving stakeholders in all stages of research. Living labs align with the principles of participatory research methods as well as recent insights about how participatory ways of generating knowledge help to change practices in concrete settings with respect to specific problems. The participatory, open, and discussion‐oriented nature of living labs could be ideally suited to accompany ethical reflection and changes ensuing from reflection. To our knowledge, (...) living labs have not been explicitly trialed and reported in ethics literature. In this discussion paper, we report and discuss four initial issues that marked the process of setting up a living lab in ethics: (1) determining the goals and expected outcomes of an ethics living lab; (2) establishing operational procedures; (3) selecting communities and defining pilot projects; and (4) adopting a lens to tackle emerging questions and challenges. We explain these four issues and present the paths taken based on the novel and specific orientation, that is, living ethics, at the basis of this project. In alignment with living ethics and É‐LABO, we approach challenges as learning opportunities to ask not only “how” questions but also “why” questions. We hope that this discussion paper informed by our experience helps to clarify the theoretical, methodological, and practical approaches necessary to successfully adopt and employ living labs in ethics. (shrink)

The notion of domain specificity plays a central role in some of the most important debates in cognitive science. Yet, despite the widespread reliance on domain specificity in recent theorizing in cognitive science, this notion remains elusive. Critics have claimed that the notion of domain specificity can't bear the theoretical weight that has been put on it and that it should be abandoned. Even its most steadfast proponents have highlighted puzzles and tensions that arise once one tries to go beyond (...) an initial intuitive sketch of what domain specificity involves. In this paper, we address these concerns head on by developing an account of what it means for a cognitive mechanism to be domain specific that overcomes the obstacles that have made domain specificity seem so problematic. We then apply this understanding of domain specificity to one of the key debates that it has figured prominently in—the rationalism-empiricism debate concerning the origins of cognitive traits—and introduce several related theoretical notions that work alongside domain specificity in helping to clarify what makes a view more (or less) rationalist. This example illustrates how the notion of domain specificity can, and should, continue to play a central role in ongoing debates in cognitive science. (shrink)

In _On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World_ from 1975, Quine formulated a thesis of underdetermination roughly to the effect that every scientific theory has an empirically equivalent but logically incompatible rival, one that cannot be discarded merely as a terminological variant of the former. For Quine, the truth of this thesis was an open question. If true, some would argue that it undermines any belief in scientific theories that is based purely on their empirical success. But despite its potential (...) significance, surprisingly little has been done by way of establishing or refuting it. My aim is to establish the thesis for as large a class of theories as possible. Under various precisifications of the concepts involved, I show that it holds for all consistent and recursively axiomatizable theories that postulate infinitely many theoretical entities. (shrink)

Free will has been the object of debate in the context of addiction given that addiction could compromise an individual’s ability to choose freely between alternative courses of action. Proponents of the brain-disease model of addiction have argued that a neuroscience perspective on addiction reduces the attribution of free will because it relocates the cause of the disorder to the brain rather than to the person, thereby diminishing the blame attributed to the person with an addiction. Others have worried that (...) such displacement of free will attribution would make the person with a drug addiction less responsible. Using the paradigmatic literature on the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations, we tested whether neuroscience information diminishes attributions of free will in the context of addiction and whether respondent characteristics influence these attributions and modulate the effect of neuroscience information. We performed a large-scale, web-based experiment with 2,378 German participants to explore how attributions of free will in the context of addiction to either alcohol or cocaine are affected by: (1) a text with a neurobiological explanation of addiction, (2) a neuroimage showing effects of addiction on the brain, and (3) a combination of a text and a neuroimage, in comparison to a control group that received no information. Belief in free will was measured using the FAD-Plus scale and was, subsequent to factor analysis, separated into two factors: responsibility and volition. The investigated respondent characteristics included gender, age, education, self-reported knowledge of neuroscience, substance-use disorder (SUD), and having a friend with SUD. We found that attributions of volition (in the cocaine-subsample) were reduced in the text and neuroimage-treatment compared to the control group. However, respondent characteristics such as education and self-reported knowledge of neuroscience were associated with lower attributions of responsibility for both substances, and education was associated with lower attribution of volition for the alcohol sub-sample. Interaction analyses showed that knowledge of neuroscience was found to generally decrease attribution of responsibility. Further research on attribution of free will should consider the effects of context and respondent characteristics, which appeared surprisingly larger than those induced by experimental treatments. (shrink)

This paper explores the connective ‘because’, based on the idea that ‘_C_ because _A_’ implies the acceptance/truth of the antecedent _A_ as well as of the consequent _C_, and additionally that the antecedent makes a difference for the consequent. To capture this idea of difference-making a ‘relevantized’ version of the Ramsey Test for conditionals is employed that takes the antecedent to be relevant to the consequent in the following sense: a conditional is true/accepted in a state \(\sigma \) just in (...) case (i) the consequent is true/accepted when \(\sigma \) is revised by the antecedent _and_ (ii) the consequent fails to be true/accepted when \(\sigma \) is revised by the antecedent’s negation. To extend this to a semantics for ‘because’, we add that (iii) the antecedent and (iv) the consequent are accepted/true in the state \(\sigma \). We get metaphysical or doxastic interpretations of these clauses, depending on what we mean by a model and a state. We introduce several semantics known from suppositional conditionals, which we reinterpret for difference-making conditionals and ‘because’. We present a minimal logic for ‘because’ sentences and show how it can be extended in ways that parallel the hierarchy of extensions of the logic of suppositional conditionals. We establish correspondence results between axioms for ‘because’ and properties of states, and prove that the specified logics are sound with respect to the semantics. (shrink)

Does a penny viewed at an angle in some sense look elliptical, as though projected on a two-dimensional surface? Many philosophers have said such things, from Malebranche (1674/1997) and Hume (1739/1978), through early 20th-century sense-data theorists, to Tye (2000) and Noë (2004). I confess that it doesn't seem this way to me, though I'm somewhat baffled by the phenomenology and pessimistic about our ability to resolve the dispute. I raise geometrical complaints against the view and conjecture that views of this (...) sort draw some of their appeal from over-analogizing visual experience to painting or photography. Theorists writing in contexts where vision is typically analogized to less-projective media--wax signet impressions in ancient Greece, stereoscopy in introspective psychology circa 1900--are substantially less likely to attribute such projective distortions to visual appearances. (shrink)

Medicine and ethics alike must learn properly to attend to suffering. We can never truly experience another's distress. We can, however, learn to recognize the particular purposes, values, and aesthetic responses that shape the sense of self whose integrity is threatened by pain, disease, and the mischances of life.

Differing views on reduction are briefly reviewed and a suggestion is made for a working definition of 'approximate reduction'. Ab initio studies in quantum chemistry are then considered, including the issues of convergence and error bounds. This includes an examination of the classic studies on CH2 and the recent work on the Si2C molecule. I conclude that chemistry has not even been approximately reduced.