In A History of Philosophy in the Twentieth Century , Christian Delacampagne reviews the discipline's divergent and dramatic course and shows that its greatest figures, even the most unworldly among them, were deeply affected by events of their time. From Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose famous Tractatus was actually composed in the trenches during World War I, to Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger -- one who found himself barred from public life with Hitler's coming to power, the other a member of (...) the Nazi party who later refused to repudiate German war crimes. From Bertrand Russell, whose lifelong pacifism led him to turn from logic and mathematics to social and moral questions, and Jean-Paul Sartre, who made philosophy an occasion for direct and personal political engagement, to Rudolf Carnap, a committed socialist, and Karl Popper, a resolute opponent of Communism. From the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School to the contemporary work of philosophers as variously minded as Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Hilary Putnam. The thinking of these philosophers, and scores of others, cannot be understood without being placed in the context of the times in which they lived. (shrink)

This paper provides an outline and critical introduction to a symposium on Garfield’s Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy. The main issues addressed concern: (i) the problem of personal identity, specifically the issue of whether the no-self view can satisfactorily account for such phenomena as agency, responsibility, rationality, and subjectivity, and the synchronic unity of consciousness they presuppose; (ii) a critique of phenomenal realism, which is shown to rests on a false dilemma, namely: either we must take people’s (...) introspective reports as reliable testimony, or see the task of phenomenology as necessarily involving what people believe about their introspective report; and (iii) the consequences of adopting Garfield’s physicalist stance for our understanding of Buddhist views of consciousness and the self. (shrink)

This popular introductory text provides a unique set of teaching tools for instructors who prefer a synoptic approach. The text is visually appealing and reader friendly. The author accents his accessible writing with cartoons, quotations, and related findings from the social and physical sciences, reinforcing his conception of philosophy as the individual's attempt to unify disparate world views. The style of writing makes central philosophical concepts readily engaging to students. Interspersed biographies give the student a feeling for the lives (...) of the great thinkers who have fashioned the Western philosophical tradition and have determined largely how we think today. Above all, this text nurtures the analytical skills students will need to critically engage the "big picture" of Western philosophy for themselves. (shrink)

Peace literacy shows why public philosophy and activism for peace and justice are better together while providing a practical framework designed to make the collaboration stronger and more effective. In this chapter, the authors begin with an overview of peace literacy and then show how it operates as an effective lens through which to read the strengths of various approaches to public philosophy and activism for peace and justice, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and into the (...) contemporary period. Then, they turn to the development of peace literacy themes as we find them in the work of philosophers dedicated to publicly engaged activism for peace and justice, especially in American movements for the abolition of chattel slavery, anti‐war and nonviolence, and civil rights. (shrink)

The question of why Nietzsche writes as he does defines his philosophy—much more so than for almost any other thinker. Let me begin with the following claim: Nietzsche does not primarily write books. Rather, he edits them from a huge reservoir of different kinds of notebooks. In the process, the “I” that is the subject of the “writing” becomes increasingly unstable. This is of course an intended philosophical effect. Take the case of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which Nietzsche considered to (...) be his most important and long-lasting book. Most philosophers, when they engage with it at all, still take it more or less at face value. Zarathustra’s speeches are quoted as if they were enunciations of Nietzsche himself... (shrink)

Comment les philosophes peuvent-ils penser les mythes de la tradition biblique? Les " mythes " sont en effet d'abord des textes qui restent à interpréter pour faire sens, et non de simples fictions ; c'est pourquoi ils donnent à penser. Les contributions réunies ici sont les fruits de la réflexion de spécialistes internationaux qui examinent, hors de tout engagement religieux, les rapports, tant de compréhension que de tension, que la pensée philosophique entretient avec ces récits spécifiques que sont les (...) mythes de l'Ancien ou du Nouveau Testament. Leur attention s'attache tant aux contenus que la philosophie réfléchit qu'aux méthodes mises en œuvre pour " lire en philosophe ". C'est là que se dégagent les enjeux de ce travail d'interprétation de textes largement symboliques et pris dans les grandes religions monothéistes : confronter la raison à une intelligence " autre " tout en lui permettant d'accéder à une compréhension rationnelle et universelle. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Bonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social ThoughtCharles W. ChristianBonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social Thought Edited by Willis Jenkins and Jennifer M. McBride Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010. 304 pp. $25.00Countless books have been written about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr., assessing their individual leadership in the areas of social justice and theology in the twentieth century. Relatively few (...) works have brought these two individuals together in comparative analysis. This book, edited by Willis [End Page 216] Jenkins (assistant professor of social ethics at Yale Divinity School) and Jennifer M. McBride (visiting lecturer at Candler Divinity School), seeks to do that; it brings together a wide array of scholars in the fields of ethics, theology, pastoral ministry, political theory, African American studies, and feminist theology.As McBride points out in her introduction, the “significant differences in their historic, sociopolitical contexts” can present challenges in comparing the work of these two men and in seeking to contemporize them (8). However, the thought and life of both martyrs “demand[s] action”; in other words, the “thought” of both Bonhoeffer and King remains incomplete without “courageous, constructive, redemptive social engagement” (3). It is in this spirit that the book unfolds.The book is divided into four parts. The first four chapters compose part 1 (titled “Critical Distance”), which takes a broader look at the legacies, key concepts, and limitations or critiques of the thought of Bonhoeffer and King. For example, the second chapter by Stephen R. Haynes (“King and Bonhoeffer as Protestant Saints”) reminds us of the perils of the larger-than-life legacies of both these individuals. When noteworthy persons become personalities or cultural heroes, key aspects of their legacies can be minimized or overlooked. This is particularly important in contemporary American settings where politicians and commentators tend to reduce the legacies of both Bonhoeffer and King to fit their own political agendas.Part 2 pays specific attention to the influence of Bonhoeffer and King on matters related to social justice, such as poverty, racism, and violence. Among the notable contributions in this section is the chapter by Craig J. Slane that deals with the “unexpected turn toward violence” (112) for Bonhoeffer during his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler during World War II. Part 3 looks at the ways in which the lives and teaching (and especially preaching, in King’s life in particular) of Bonhoeffer and King are instruments of social redemption. In addition to noting the influence of Niebuhr’s emphasis on social sin and social redemption on King’s preaching and leadership, it points out that both Bonhoeffer and King were deeply influenced by the economic and social upheavals of their time; their preaching, teaching, and writing sought to address, in concrete ways, the racial, economic, and political realities of their contexts. In part 4, “Peacemaking,” four authors highlight the contributions King and Bonhoeffer have made to peacemaking and the influence these contributions continue to have. They discuss both men’s commitment to nonviolence and pacifism and the particular challenges this commitment created for them (especially for Bonhoeffer, given his participation in a plot to overthrow Hitler).The essays in this book do not present these two martyrs as unblemished. The book contains rich discussions that honestly assess their personal struggles [End Page 217] of conscience as well as their contextual struggles with such issues as the role of women. Furthermore, the reader will find a solid introduction to the lives and thought of both men while at the same time sitting in on a diverse conversation about how their influential interpretations of the Christian faith can continue to be fleshed out. May this kind of conversation (and action) continue!Charles W. ChristianMount Vernon Nazarene UniversityCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Jonardon Ganeri’s The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance is a trailblazing study in cross-cultural philosophy of mind. Its liberal conception of naturalism makes room for a rich analytic taxonomy of conceptions of personal identity that go well beyond the standard models of Cartesianism, Physicalism, and Reductionism. But this naturalistically respectable model of the self must contend with the fact that the findings of the cognitive sciences are also compatible with ontological antirealism about the self. And while the (...) book opens new avenues for systematic reflection that thoroughly engages the historical material, its solutions to the problem of personal identity and the problem of self-knowledge often shortcut descriptive accounts that take agency and self-awareness to be constituted by their proprietary phenomenology. (shrink)

This introduction concerns the place that Indian philosophical literature should occupy in the history of philosophy, and the challenge of championing pre-modern modes of inquiry in an era when philosophy, at least in the anglophone world and its satellites, has in large measure become a highly specialized and technical discipline conceived on the model of the sciences. This challenge is particularly acute when philosophical figures and texts that are historically and culturally distant from us are engaged not only (...) exegetically but also with a view to recruiting their topics and arguments for contemporary philosophical debates. (shrink)

This volume deals with the connection between thinking-and-speaking and our form of life. All contributions engage with Wittgenstein’s approach to this topic. As a whole, the volume takes a stance against both biological and ethnological interpretations of the notion "form of life" and seeks to promote a broadly logico-linguistic understanding instead. The structure of this book is threefold. Part one focuses on lines of thinking that lead from Wittgenstein’s earlier thought to the concept of form of life in his later (...) work. Contributions to part two examine the concrete philosophical function of this notion as well as the ways in which it differs from cognate concepts. Contributions to part three put Wittgenstein’s notion of form of life in perspective by relating it to phenomenology, ordinary language philosophy and problems in contemporary analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This paper argues that Tugendhat's critique of Heidegger's existential conception of truth as disclosedness is usually misunderstood. The main claim of this paper is that Tugendhat insists against Heidegger on certain conventional features of truth such as conformity of the law of non-contradiction, not because he adheres to an ideal of truth as correctness; rather, he proposes an alternative existential conception of truth in terms of an active, critical or self-critical, engagement with untruth. Various recent objections to Tugendhat's critique (...) of Heidegger are discussed against the background of his alternative and are rejected. The paper concludes by outlining several challenges to Tugendhat's alternative existential conception of truth. (shrink)

The aim of this exploratory paper is to review an under-appreciated parallel between group agency and artificial intelligence. As both phenomena involve non-human goal-directed agents that can make a difference to the social world, they raise some similar moral and regulatory challenges, which require us to rethink some of our anthropocentric moral assumptions. Are humans always responsible for those entities’ actions, or could the entities bear responsibility themselves? Could the entities engage in normative reasoning? Could they even have rights and (...) a moral status? I will tentatively defend the (increasingly widely held) view that, under certain conditions, artificial intelligent systems, like corporate entities, might qualify as responsible moral agents and as holders of limited rights and legal personhood. I will further suggest that regulators should permit the use of autonomous artificial systems in high-stakes settings only if they are engineered to function as moral (not just intentional) agents and/or there is some liability-transfer arrangement in place. I will finally raise the possibility that if artificial systems ever became phenomenally conscious, there might be a case for extending a stronger moral status to them, but argue that, as of now, this remains very hypothetical. (shrink)

Adolf Deißmann (1866–1937), New Testament scholar in Heidelberg and Berlin as well as one of the most important figures in the ecumenical movement after World War I, studied with the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen (1844–1918) in Marburg and felt a lifelong debt to him. Documents presented here from Deißmann's literary estate not only convey insight into the personal relationship between Deißmann and Cohen, but also show the connections between Cohen's philosophy and Deißmann's engagement in Friedrich Naumann's National Social Union (...) as well as his research on the New Testament. The edition thus serves at the same time as a contribution to the controversial matter of the relationship between Kulturprotestantismus and liberal Judaism around 1900. (shrink)

"Mathématicien et philosophe, Jean Cavaillès (1903-1944) a compris en toute clarté que la philosophie n'est ni maîtresse ni servante des mathématiques et des sciences, mais qu'elle peut être leur amie. Elle n'a pas à s'arroger la fonction magistrale de vérifier à leur place la solidité de leurs fondements ni à contrôler ou exploiter leurs résultats pour la plus grande gloire de Dieu ou de la Cause. Elle n'a pas non plus à s'asservir aux mathématiques ou aux sciences comme sources uniques (...) de vérité, justice ou justesse. Une philosophie amie des sciences entretient avec elles un dialogue à bénéfice mutuel : elle s'instruit auprès d'elles et peut, en retour, procurer aux mathématiciens et scientifiques une conscience plus claire de leur propre pratique, s'ouvrant avec eux à l'histoire de cette pratique. Observer la pensée scientifique, dans son travail, ses difficultés et ses succès, et l'aider à s'observer elle-même : tâche aussi libératrice que difficile qui vise l'impérissable idéal aristotélicien de la pensée de la pensée. Voilà la haute et rayonnante ambition de Cavaillès. C'est cet héritage que les cinq auteurs de ce livre ont voulu transmettre et commencer à faire fructifier. Et il fallait pour cela : libérer Cavaillès des interprétations unilatérales, souvent enjeux de pouvoir universitaire, telle celle qui en fait le héraut d'une "science sans cogito" ; retrouver la pluralité de ses inspirations philosophiques. Refusant aussi bien filiation que rupture définitive, il a une lecture critique-productive de Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Brunschvicg... Spinoza, explicitement évoqué par lui à propos de son engagement dans la Résistance, est une de ses références possibles quand il traite de l'auto-développement des mathématiques ; respecter la diversité de ses centres d'intérêt mathématiques. Il s'intéresse, on le sait, à l'axiomatisation et à la formalisation de la théorie des ensembles, mais tout autant ou plus à son surgissement chez Dedekind et Cantor, à la construction des ensembles finis à partir des ensembles infinis, à l'hypothèse du continu, etc. mettre ses catégories emblématiques (paradigme et thématisation) à l'épreuve d'autres moments essentiels de l'histoire des mathématiques que celui de l'essor de la théorie des ensembles ; pratiquer un dialogue amical entre mathématiciens et philosophes dans des études d'"épistémographie" entrelaçant histoire fine et philosophie. Aux lecteurs de juger si l'héritage est entre de bonnes mains."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the genuinely philosophical engagement with the idea of Europe twentieth century philosophy. Here, especially phenomenology has developed a distinct tradition of conceiving Europe not as a geographical and political entity but rather as a ‘spiritual shape.’ Husserl, as the originator of this thought, traces this spiritual Europe back to Ancient Greece of the 7/6 century B.C. in which an unprecedented ‘theoretical attitude’ towards the world originated. Hence, Europe is conceived as a project of reason, of (...) pure rationality while at the same time leaving out the constitutive dimension of religion. Furthermore, this non-historical philosophical genealogy proves itself to be an arbitrary but intentional genealogy whose intentions have to be put into critical reconsideration. In this article, I will introduce Patočka and Zambrano as important critiques of Husserl’s genealogy, or even potentially violent mono-genealogy, as Derrida has emphasized. Following Foucault, it is the aim of this article to put into question the myth of a single historical-political origin of Europe’s spiritual heritage and furthermore to pay attention to the transformations and conflictual relations between Europe’s different forms of reason and religion. (shrink)

What kind of citizenship education, if any, should schools in liberal societies promote? And what ends is such education supposed to serve? Over the last decades a respectable body of literature has emerged to address these and related issues. In this state of the debate analysis we examine a sample of journal articles dealing with these very issues spanning a twenty-year period with the aim to analyse debate patterns and developments in the research field. We first carry out a qualitative (...) analysis where we design a two-dimensional theoretical framework in order to systematise the various liberal debate positions, and make us able to study their justifications, internal tensions and engagements with other positions. In the ensuing quantitative leg of the study we carry out a quantitative bibliometric analysis where we weigh the importance of specific scholars. We finally discuss possible merits and flaws in the research field, as evidenced in and by the analysis. (shrink)

What are some of the distinctive virtues of the confluence approach that sets it apart from other attempts to do philosophy across cultural boundaries? First, unlike comparing and contrasting, the confluence approach remains faithful to the dominant conception of philosophy as an intellectual enterprise centered on dialogue and argumentation, in which philosophers pursue unresolved problems by building on the achievements of their acknowledged forbears. Second, confluence philosophy implements a syncretic and creative approach to doing philosophy by (...) drawing on non-Western philosophical sources while using the tools and conceptual resources of analytic philosophy. Third and last, the confluence approach highlights possible tensions when the traditions of thought brought into dialogue are on a diverging path on certain matters. Contemporary philosophy, at least in the Anglophone world and its satellites, is an avowedly secular enterprise, deferring to the sciences for its account of what can be said to exist at the most fundamental level and for its understanding of the processes that realize cognition. Buddhism at its core is often understood as a soteriological project manly concerned with overcoming suffering, which sometimes is taken to entail an insight into the emptiness of all the constitutive elements of existence and/or experience. Confluence philosophy thus makes it possible to ask whether defending a theoretical framework which affirms this truth of emptiness means that one must engage in the very sort of activity, namely, rational self-assertion, that hinders enlightenment. (shrink)

The ontological turn is one of the most debated issues in contemporary anthropology, but what it means for anthropology to become ontological is rarely made clear. Bruno Latour’s suggestion that anthropology should revolve around “modes of existence” is arguably the most robust proposal to date, but the connection between modes of existence and properly anthropological concerns remains obscure. This paper argues that William James is a key figure for getting a better understanding of what ontology and modes of existence mean, (...) and that in particular “The Perception of Reality” – chapter XXI of the second volume of the Principles of Psychology – offers many possibilities for linking a framework centered on human being-in-the-world, such as anthropology, with properly metaphysical concerns. In this paper, the content of “The Perception of Reality” is summarized, and James’s proposal to ground modes of existence on belief is discussed, to show how, once we are clear about what we mean by “ontology,” anthropology can (and should) engage in metaphysical debates in order to make its stakes explicit. The conclusion suggests that James’s grounding of modes of existence on individual belief can compensate for ontological anthropology’s tendency to erase the internal differences of a collective in order to speak of a supposedly unified and homogeneous “cosmology.”. (shrink)

This thought-provoking book discusses the concept of progress in economics and investigates whether any advance has been made in its different spheres of research. The authors look back at the history, successes and failures of their respective fields and thoroughly examine the notion of progress from an epistemological and methodological perspective. The idea of progress is particularly significant as the authors regard it as an essentially contested concept which can be defined in many ways – theoretically or empirically; locally or (...) globally; or as encouraging or impeding the existence of other research traditions. The authors discuss the idea that for progress to make any sense there must be an accumulation of knowledge built up over time rather than the replacement of ideas by each successive generation. Accordingly, they are not concerned with estimating the price of progress, reminiscing in the past, or assessing what has been lost. Instead they apply the complex mechanisms and machinery of the discipline to sub-fields such as normative economics, monetary economics, trade and location theory, Austrian economics and classical economics to critically assess whether progress has been made in these areas of research. -/- Bringing together authoritative and wide-ranging contributions by leading scholars, this book will challenge and engage those interested in philosophy, economic methodology and the history of economic thought. It will also appeal to economists in general who are interested in the advancement of their profession. (shrink)

Jennifer Nado has recently argued that conceptual engineers should focus on (re-)designing representations and may safely ignore issues of implementation. I make a general case for the methodological importance of implementation to conceptual engineering. Using the Social Norms Account as a foil, I argue for three claims. (1) Inquiring into methods of implementation is a theoretically challenging and philosophically worthwhile project in and of itself. (2) A sound theoretical understanding of implementation is imperative for theorists of conceptual engineering. It proves (...) vital for their assessment of the prospects for engineering interventions and the political risks inherent in them. (3) A sound theoretical understanding of implementation is imperative for practitioners of conceptual engineering. The usefulness of their representational (re-)designs depends on respecting broadly cognitive and social constraints on the part of the target population. I conclude that conceptual engineers have very good reasons to seriously engage with issues of implementation. (shrink)

This paper engages with Kant‘s account of space as a continuum. The stage is set by looking at how the question of spatial continuity comes up in a debate from the 1920s between Ernst Cassirer and logical empiricist thinkers about Kant‘s conception of spatial representation as a pure intuition. While granting that concrete features of space can only be known empirically, Cassirer attempted to save Kant‘s conception by restricting it to the core commitment of space as a continuous coexistent manifold. (...) Cassirer did not however come up with a transcendental argument for spatial continuity. The paper presents such an argument by providing a reading of Kant‘s from which it transpires that Kant does not simply rely on supposed into the continuity of space. It is by way ofinstead that we can know space to be continuous and Kant’s distinction between intuitions and concepts does hinge on such knowledge. (shrink)

At the end of his life, Stuart Hall called for the reengagement of Cultural Studies and Marxism. This paper contributes to this task. It analyses Stuart Hall’s works on communication and the media.The goal of the paper is to read Stuart Hall in a manner that can inform the renewal of Marxist Humanism and the development of a Marxist-Humanist theory of communication. This involves reconstructing elements of Hall’s approach, criticising certain aspects of his work, and through this engagement developing (...) new theory elements.The article’s analysis of Stuart Hall’s theory of communication and the media is conducted in four steps. First, the paper reengages and re-evaluates what Hall called the two paradigms of Cultural Studies: Structuralism and “Culturalism”/Humanism. It discusses the role of human agency in society. Second, the paper engages with Hall’s and Althusser’s notions of articulation and sets the notion of articulation in relation to the concept of communication. Third, it discusses the relationship between communication and work in the context of Hall’s works. Fourth, the article revisits and engages with Hall’s encoding/decoding-model in the context of digitalisation.This paper grounds a dialectical concept of communication that is based on the dialectic of articulating and articulatedness, the dialectic of work and communication, as well as the dialectic of communication in the public sphere and society’s power forcefields. It shows how a critical, dialectical theory of communication benefits from engagement with Stuart Hall’s works. The present work argues with, for, against, and beyond Stuart Hall in order or productively draw on ideas that emerge from this engagement. (shrink)

Chez Saint-Simon, la substitution d'une réorganisation sociale et d'un autre rapport à la nature à l'exploitation de l'homme par l'homme, de l'administration des choses au gouvernement des hommes, entre autres, ont pris corps théoriquement en partant de l'expérience plutôt que de 'raisonnements a priori' (Le Producteur, oct. 1825 - oct. 1826). De la lecture de ses Œuvres éditées pour la première fois en 2012 en Œuvres complètes émergent des liens entre action et pensée, corps et esprit. Le saint-simonisme (1825-1835) apparaît, (...) au lendemain de la Révolution de Juillet, comme un 'espace-temps' élargi aux prolétaires et aux femmes attirés par cette 'nouvelle et puissante doctrine', prêts à s'impliquer dans la pratique de ces liens et les discussions dramatiques entre les deux 'Pères', Bazard et Enfantin (sur la 'question de la femme', les rapports internes et externes - silence sur les émeutes des canuts lyonnais). Saint-Simon et le saint-simonisme ont été /sont des 'passe-frontières' entre les sexes, les cultures, les états (réciprocité des échanges avec la Toscane pré-unitaire et l'Allemagne des intellectuels post-hégeliens). À la promesse 'd'être sincères en tout', véritable leitmotiv du saint-simonisme, les 'prolétaires saint-simoniennes' ont répondu en créant un mouvement autonome où vivre leur désir de ne pas séparer cœur, corps et esprit, 'dans la foi religieuse qui nous donne la force de vaincre' (La femme libre, 1832) ; par la création de cette forme sociale-politique et l'audace de leur pensée, elles ont précédé les hommes ; leurs écrits et ceux de leurs proches (Cl. Démar, S. Voilquin) nous bouleversent encore. Des formes de créativité étonnamment populaires sont nées en Provence sur les décombres de la société d'ordre, telles les chansons provençales de V. Gelu à Marseille (1837-1855) et ses 'Notes biographiques' écrites en français (rééditées en partie à la fin XXe siècle), tel Le marquis des Saffras, roman du saint-simonien J. de la Madelène (1849) réédité plusieurs fois. Femmes et hommes se réfèrant au 'vrai', chez lesquels la totalité de l'être est engagée dans le sillage de Saint-Simon, n'inventent-ils pas le politique moderne à l'encontre des codes et des chartes fustigés par Cl. Démar (1833)? Le saint-simonisme n'a-t-il pas été la matrice de la sociologie avec la découverte du rapport à l'autre, dégagée du moralisme étouffant du 'Me siècle (S. Zweig), peut-être articulée à la naissance du féminisme? N'a-t-il pas généré une nouvelle manière de penser que la Ille République aurait tenté d'annihiler (imposition du positivisme comme philosophie centrale) et les prémices de la découverte freudienne?"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This paper asks: How can Spinoza help us to better understand digital capitalism? The article engages critically and constructively with the philosophies of Spinoza, Marx, Hegel, and Antonio Negri in order to combine elements from their works. It focuses on a particular aspect of digital capitalism, namely the antagonism between digital labour and digital capital. Spinoza did not directly analyse class relations. Nonetheless, his philosophy can help us to indirectly analyse contemporary capitalism. This paper undertakes an analysis of digital (...) capitalism by taking Spinoza’s concepts of power as potentia and potestas as a starting point. Antonio Negri has stressed the dialectic of potentia and potestas as part of the analysis of class and capitalism. This paper connects Spinoza to Marx’s and Negri’s analyses of capitalism and the working class. It analyses digital capitalism’s antagonisms between digital labour and digital capital, digital commodities and digital commons, and the networked digital productive forces and the digital relations of production as the antagonism between digital potentia and digital potestas. (shrink)

It is typically held that Sartre is a thinker of transcendence, inasmuch as he retains a subject–predicate structure via intentional consciousness and ruptures an otherwise insular domain through his dialectic of the self. Against such interpretations, this article argues that in following the progression of Sartre’s thought, we will come to see a deepening engagement with, and development of, immanence in the spirit of Deleuze. Specifically, Sartre steadily develops a dialectic in which consciousness, while relating to an ‘outside’, is (...) construed as also thoroughly embedded in that outside through the subject-body of the flesh and relations of desire. From this comes a conceptualisation of the in-itself and for-itself as simulacra or topological variations of a more primordial intertwining or fabric of univocal Being. In this sense, we are immediately taken away from the subject of social contract theory, insofar as this presumes an asocial self, and the notion of identity as the sine qua non of politics, insofar as this presumes the terrain of an inexplicable transcendent Other. This brings with it a take on politics that prefigures and is concomitant with Deleuzian micropolitics, while also serving to complement it through the retention of the ego as a practical function. (shrink)

The “practice turn” in philosophy of science has strengthened the connections between philosophy and scientific practice. Apart from reinvigorating philosophy of science, this also increases the relevance of philosophical research for science, society, and science education. In this paper, we reflect on our extensive experience with teaching mandatory philosophy of science courses to science students from a range of programs at University of Copenhagen. We highlight some of the lessons we have learned in making philosophy (...) of science “fit for teaching” outside of philosophy circles by taking selected cases from the students’ own field as the starting point. We argue for adapting philosophy of science teaching to particular audiences of science students, and discuss the benefits of drawing on research within science education to inform curriculum and course design. This involves reconsidering teaching resources, assumptions about students, intended learning outcomes, and teaching formats. We also argue that to make philosophy of science relevant and engaging to science students, it is important to consider their potential career trajectories. By anticipating future contexts and situations in which methodological, conceptual, and ethical questions could be relevant, philosophy of science can demonstrate its value in the education of science students. (shrink)

While Garfinkel’s early work, captured in Studies in Ethnomethodology, has received a lot of attention and discussion, this has not been the case for his later work since the 1970s. In this paper, we critically examine the aims of Garfinkel’s later ethnomethodological studies of work programme and evaluate key ideas such as the ‘missing what’ in the sociology of work, ‘the unique adequacy requirements of methods’, and the notion of ‘hybrid studies’. We do so through a detailed engagement with (...) a study that has frequently been singled out as exemplary by Garfinkel for his studies of work programme, namely Livingston’s The Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics. We show how Livingston uses the proof of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem as a way to exhibit the work involved in understanding mathematical proofs. We then discuss how Livingston uses this example to introduce a distinction between the written ‘proof account’ and the associated ‘lived work’ of working through that proof, which we argue allows Livingston to provide a powerful critique of a formalist understanding of the objectivity of mathematics. We then discuss three aspects that we find problematic in Livingston’s and Garfinkel’s claims about Livingston’s study. Firstly, we question whether written proofs are best conceived of as descriptions or accounts. Secondly, we interrogate whether an ethnomethodological study could teach mathematicians how to make discoveries. Thirdly, we throw doubt on Garfinkel’s claim that Livingston’s results are results in mathematics. We conclude this paper with a discussion of how Livingston’s study Gödel’s proof highlights key tensions in Garfinkel’s later work. Firstly, we argue that there exists an ambiguity in Garfinkel’s treatment of texts as ‘incompetent’. Secondly, we show that Garfinkel’s attempt to extend his idea of classical studies from sociology to other professions and disciplines is problematic. Finally, we question Garfinkel’s proposals to reorient ethnomethodological studies away from sociological audiences and ask whether ethnomethodological studies promise the delivery of a ‘large prize’ or, rather, provide something like ‘helpful therapy’. (shrink)

Adorno’s intensive criticism of phenomenology is well known, his entire early period during the 1920s and 1930s being marked by various polemical engagements with Husserl. This engagement finds its peak during his work at his second dissertation project in Oxford, a dissertation that was supposed to systematicaly expose the antinomies of phenomenological thinking while particularly focusing on Husserl’s concept of “eidetic intuition” or “intuition of essences”. The present paper will take this criticism as its starting point in focusing on (...) two highly specific aspects of Adorno’s interpretation: the opposition between eidetic intuition and the traditional theories of abstraction and its relationship to genetic phenomenology. In light of this criticism I subsequently show: 1. that, in his later work, Adorno’s understanding of eidetic intuition undergoes a significant revaluation; 2. that he reappropriates key elements of the eidetic method in his own procedure of physiognomic analysis, and 3. that his account of physiognomics is relevant for addressing the aforementioned incongruities of phenomenological eidetics itself. (shrink)

The view to be defended in this paper is intended to be a novel and compelling model of instrumental practical reasoning, reasoning aimed at determining how to act in order to achieve a given end in a certain set of circumstances. On standard views of instrumental reasoning, the end in question is the object of a particular desire that the agent has, a desire which, when combined with the agent’s beliefs about what means are available to him or her in (...) order to satisfy that desire, can cause the formation of an independent desire or intention to engage in the relevant means. One of the main goals in what follows is to show that such views provide an inadequate understanding of instrumental practical reasoning when it comes to the practical lives of agents. We shall proceed as follows. After some background assumptions are outlined in the next section, two important and largely neglected challenges will be raised to any view of instrumental practical reasoning (hereafter IP reasoning) which only countenances the role of end-directed desires and means-end beliefs in the mental economy of agents. In my view, neither of these challenges can be met, or at least not in any straightforward way. Hence the remainder of the paper is devoted to articulating and defending a new approach to understanding the structure of instrumental practical reasoning. The heart of this positive view will involve the addition of a normative belief concerning the desirability of the agent’s end. (shrink)

This is the first collection of essays devoted to the thought of Anselm W. Müller. It brings to the attention of the English-speaking world an influential and highly regarded philosopher who has made important contributions to a wide range of philosophical debates. The volume begins with a biographical sketch of Müller. Arguably, Müller's most important contributions are to the philosophy of action and virtue ethics. The contributors, which include friends, colleagues, and former students, engage with different aspects of Müller's (...) thought in these areas. Subjects include his interpretation of Aristotle and Wittgenstein, the teleology of thought and action, the Aristotelian distinction between poiesis and praxis and its application to ethical upbringing, and the possibility of practical knowledge and practical truth. Teleological Structures in Human Life will be of interest to researches and advanced students working on virtue ethics, philosophy of action, and practical reasoning. (shrink)

Mark Siderits’ confluence approach to philosophy, first sketched in his landmark monograph, Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy (2003), is emblematic of what has arguably become the most influential way of engaging historically and culturally distant Buddhist thinkers and texts systematically and constructively. For nearly half a century, and rather fittingly for someone enthralled by Madhyamaka, Siderits has successfully charted a middle ground between the text-based, exegetical approach to Buddhist philosophy still dominant in many parts of Europe and (...) East Asia and the methods of contemporary Anglophone analytic philosophy. Indebted to both, yet unconstrained by either, the confluence approach represents Siderits’ unique brand of historically-informed systematic reflection, delivered in the characteristically forceful and tightly argued prose that defines his inimitable style. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage met en cause la dichotomie régnante « raison contre émotion », élément fondamental d'un prèt-à-penser qui règne sur les études d'argumentation et qu'on retrouve parfois dans les études du discours. Cette opposition fait obstacle à l'observation et à l'analyse du jeu des émotions parlées et écrites, et engage les études sur l'argumentation ordinaire dans l'impasse d'un langage « an-émotif », quasi pathologique. Mettant en jeu des valeurs qui expriment les intérèts et fondent l'identité des locuteurs, les situations argumentatives (...) sont profondément émotionnantes. Ce livre propose une approche holiste, et non psychologique, de l'émotion, vue non pas comme une Réponse passive à une situation Stimulus, mais comme une activité signifiante, formatant le discours et la situation de parole. Sous la notion de construction argumentative des émotions, il défend la thèse de l'inséparabilité des raisons et des émotions dans les discours argumentatifs ordinaires. (shrink)

Some moral theorists argue that being an innocent beneficiary of significant harms inflicted by others may be sufficient to ground special duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims, at least when it is impossible to extract compensation from those who perpetrated the harm. This idea has been applied to climate change in the form of the beneficiary-pays principle. Other philosophers, however, are quite sceptical about beneficiary pays. Our aim in this article is to examine their critiques. We conclude (...) that, while they have made important points, the principle remains worthy of further development and exploration. Our purpose in engaging with these critiques is constructive — we aim to formulate beneficiary pays in ways that would give it a plausible role in allocating the cost of addressing human-induced climate change, while acknowledging that some understandings of the principle would make it unsuitable for this purpose. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reading BayleJohn Christian LaursenThomas M. Lennon. Reading Bayle. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 202. Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $19.95.One of the more philosophically interesting things about Pierre Bayle is the difficulty of interpreting his work. A myriad of interpretations have been advanced, but "the whole is [still] a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery"—to apply David Hume's famous judgment about religion to Bayle's work. This (...) book proposes a Bakhtinian reading of Bayle's philosophical activity, which means that Bayle is understood as letting his interlocutors speak for themselves in an ongoing dialogue over which he does not have full control and in which no one "wins." Bakhtin thought that Dostoevsky was the first major author to do this, but Lennon shows that he was anticipated by Bayle.The discussion is broken up into sections on Bayle's views of integrity, authority, toleration, idolatry, and providence. Integrity turns out to be largely a matter of honesty and fairness in dialogue, and at times it sounds like Bayle is prefiguring Habermas and discourse ethics or recent Anglo-American theories of deliberative democracy.Bayle's view of authority emerges from his analysis of the fact/law (fait/droit) distinction. [End Page 278] This was part of larger debates among Jansenists, Jesuits, and other philosophers such as Arnauld and Malebranche. Here, Lennon's intimate knowledge of seventeenth-century philosophy is put to good use. He shows that in Bayle's hands the distinction cannot hold up, as questions of fact and law are always mutually dependent and each can undermine the other. The upshot is that in the absence of truths of fact or law, dialogue is all that we have. That is good, because history cannot be used as a tool of oppression or homogenization if dialogue must go on forever.Some of the claims about Bayle that are advanced here are debatable. That Bayle "treated everyone with dignity" (44) is simply not true of his treatment of millenarians and others that he thought were fanatics. Rather than extending "toleration almost without limit" (74), he was downright intolerant of such folks. Lennon suggests that Bayle may not have fully thought through the question of the conscientious persecutor (85n.). It would have been appropriate to mention Bayle's reflections on this matter in his last work, the Réponse aux questions d'un provincial.The book contains valuable accounts of aspects of Bayle's debates with Pierre Jurieu, in which it often emerges that there was no great gulf of principle between the two arch-enemies. Disagreements with Ruth Whelan and Elisabeth Labrousse add to the interest of Lennon's discussion.Idolatry is one of Bayle's chief targets, and he finds it above all in the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Lennon nicely shows how this amounts to Spinozism, which in turn explains Bayle's hostility to both Spinoza and Rome. Both stifle Bakhtinian dialogue.One very interesting section of the book is on lotteries, which have important theological and philosophical significance. Often-forgotten authors like Barbeyrac, Ricotier, and Leti are discussed on this issue. Insights here include the observation that "it is hard to imagine Bayle praying" (146). Indeed it is. Mention of work by I. Hont, T. Hochstrasser, and others on Barbeyrac would have made Lennon's case stronger.One major conclusion is that Bayle's notion of providence and the problem of evil comes down to dialogue as well: evil emerges because God prefers to engage in open-ended dialogue with his creatures, which allows evil even if that is not God's intention (167). On this reading, we have a Kantian Bayle: autonomy is Bayle's most cherished value (182).Lennon's final evaluation of Bayle's fideism is that it is philosophically unsatisfactory. Blind and nonrational reliance on Scripture is, to say the least, undermined by Bayle's inability to establish that God is its author or to found his own beliefs in any way other than education. But if anybody still thinks that Pierre Bayle was merely a compiler and not a philosopher in his own right, this book and a lot of the other recent... (shrink)

This introduction explains the main contributions of On Taking Offence, summarises its overall argument, and outlines how the comments in this symposium engage with, and challenge, different parts of the argument.

This volume brings together a range of influential essays by distinguished philosophers and political theorists on the issue of global justice. Global justice concerns the search for ethical norms that should govern interactions between people, states, corporations and other agents acting in the global arena, as well as the design of social institutions that link them together. The volume includes articles that engage with major theoretical questions such as the applicability of the ideals of social and economic equality to the (...) global sphere, the degree of justified partiality to compatriots, and the nature and extent of the responsibilities of the affluent to address global poverty and other hardships abroad. It also features articles that bring the theoretical insights of global justice thinkers to bear on matters of practical concern to contemporary societies, such policies associated with immigration, international trade, and climate change. -/- Contents: Introduction; Part I Standards of Global Justice: (i) Assistance-Based Responsibilities to the Global Poor: Famine, affluence and mortality, Peter Singer; We don't owe them a thing! A tough-minded but soft-hearted view of aid to the faraway needy, Jan Narveson; Does distance matter morally to the duty to rescue? Frances Myrna Kamm. (ii) Contribution-Based Responsibilities to the Global Poor: 'Assisting' the global poor, Thomas Pogge; Should we stop thinking about poverty in terms of helping the poor?, Alan Patten; Poverty and the moral significance of contribution, Gerhard Øverland. (iii)Cosmopolitans, Global Egalitarians, and its Critics: The one and the many faces of cosmopolitanism, Catherine Lu; Cosmopolitan justice and equalizing opportunities, Simon Caney; The problem of global justice, Thomas Nagel; Against global egalitarianism, David Miller; Egalitarian challenges to global egalitarianism: a critique, Christian Barry and Laura Valentini. Part II Pressing Global Socioeconomic Issues: (i) Governing the Flow of People: Immigration and freedom of association, Christopher Wellman; Democratic theory and border coercion: no right to unilaterally control your own borders, Arash Abizadeh; Justice in migration: a closed borders utopia?, Lea Ypi. (ii) Climate Change: Global environment and international inequality, Henry Shue; Valuing policies in response to climate change: some ethical issues, John Broome; Saved by disaster? Abrupt climate change, political inertia, and the possibility of an intergenerational arms race, Stephen M. Gardiner; Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change, Elinor Ostrom. (iii) International Trade: Responsibility and global labor justice, Iris Marion Young; Property rights and the resource curse, Leif Wenar; Fairness in trade I: obligations arising from trading and the pauper-labor argument, Mathias Risse; Name index. -/- See: www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calctitle=1&pageSubject=483&sort=pubdate&forthcoming=1&title_i d=9958&edition_id=13385. (shrink)

The article conveys the portrait of a man for whom understanding was a matter of the highest spiritual intimacy, a man who continuously disregarded his possible engagement in the public life as a philosopher, finally a man whom we find, in the twilight of his life, concerned with the intricate tension between the “muteness” of philosophy (as being able “only” to double life by means of rational discourse) and religion. Alexandru Dragomir’s portrait is portrayed in comparison to another (...) important Romanian philosopher, Constantin Noica. The comparison is not accidental, since they both come to represent two paradigmatic ways of making philosophy: traditional ontology (centered around Descartes – Kant – Hegel) vs. modern phenomenology (centered around Husserl – Heidegger). (shrink)

The article conveys the portrait of a man for whom understanding was a matter of the highest spiritual intimacy, a man who continuously disregarded his possible engagement in the public life as a philosopher, finally a man whom we find, in the twilight of his life, concerned with the intricate tension between the “muteness” of philosophy (as being able “only” to double life by means of rational discourse) and religion. Alexandru Dragomir’s portrait is portrayed in comparison to another (...) important Romanian philosopher, Constantin Noica. The comparison is not accidental, since they both come to represent two paradigmatic ways of making philosophy: traditional ontology (centered around Descartes – Kant – Hegel) vs. modern phenomenology (centered around Husserl – Heidegger). (shrink)

Kristján Kristjánsson's new book is the first detailed treatment of positive psychology from a philosophical perspective (at least as far as I am aware). Kristjánsson has been an active contributor to a number of debates in recent years at the intersection of moral philosophy, psychology, and education, and brings his vast familiarity with the relevant literature to bear in engaging with this movement. The result is a book that raises a number of good questions and concerns about positive psychology, (...) but in a way that is sympathetic to the movement and aimed at ultimately supporting and refining the work that these psychologists are doing. (shrink)

The First World War was both an historical and a philosophical event. Philosophers engaged in what Kurt Flasch aptly called "the spiritual mobilization" of philosophy. Max Scheler was particularly important among these "war philosophers", given that he was the one who penned some of the most influential philosophical writings of the First World War, among them Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg. As I aim to show, Max Scheler's war writings were crucial for Jan Patočka's interpretation of (...) the First World War in the sixth of his Heretical Essays. However, the importance of Scheler's war writings goes far beyond the First World War for Patočka, since they offer Patočka a far-reaching interpretation of the 'excessive' character of the 20 th century. As I will show through the example of Max Scheler, the German war philosophers succumbed to a dangerously romantic conception of "force" – and it is this ominous force, which Patočka takes to lie at the root of the increasingly excessive character of the 20 th and 21 st centuries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Does It Mean to "Speak Truth to Power"?Christian UhlPolitical Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and Co-Prosperity. By Christopher S. Goto-Jones. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp. 192.Ever since the end of the "Great East Asian War" in Japan a debate has been smoldering over the contamination of philosophy by politics. This debate was sparked by a series of writings through which the "father (...) of Japanese philosophy," Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945), and some thinkers affiliated with him—the so-called Kyoto School—became involved in the politics connected with the war to establish a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." The debate over Nishida and the Kyoto School has repeatedly been overshadowed by the debate over Heidegger. Aside from the strategic considerations of those engaged in the prosecution of the Kyoto School, one reason for the "Heidegger factor"1 may have something to do with the fact that philosophical parallels can indeed be drawn between Nishida and Heidegger, and that there are also direct links between Nishida and some of his disciples who studied in Germany. Questions concerning Heidegger's political engagement are still explosive, even twenty years after Farias' attempt to prove Heidegger's entanglement with National Socialism. The publication of Emmanuel Faye's book Heidegger—L'introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie has fired up the debate in French philosophical circles.2 And in the debate concerning Nishida and the Kyoto School there is also recent news: the publication of Christopher S. Goto-Jones' ambitious study Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and Co Prosperity."Every inquiry," Heidegger says, "is a seeking [Suchen]. Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought for."3 Goto-Jones' inquiry seeks to explain the nature of Nishida's political engagement in the 1930s and 1940s, and his inquiry is guided by the conviction that Nishida should be exonerated from the charges regarding his alleged complicity with a Japanese wartime regime that was at least militarist if not "fascist." However, the declared intention of Goto-Jones' study is not just another exoneration of Nishida. Goto-Jones contends that Nishida, influenced "particularly [by] Kant" (p. 7), has left behind a still relevant political philosophy that, as some other authors have argued,4 is not only not tainted by any form of narrow-minded nationalism but also provides a philosophical framework for a theory of a globalizing, multicentered, intercultural world:Hence, for Nishida, the nation should not be a rigid institutional structure or an artificially... constructed culture, but rather a moral personality formed through the mutual self-determination [End Page 469] determination of its constituents and in a dynamic relationship with other nations. International relations should be characterized by the development of greater levels of unity, as nations creatively interact with each other, producing public goods and increasing the similarities in their personalities, thus decreasing the salience of their national boundaries. In this model, nationalism, like egoism, becomes a nonsense.(p. 134 n)This political model is what Goto-Jones seeks to recover in Nishida, and this recovery is "what is really intended" (Heidegger) by his book.5Nishida's political philosophy needs to be recovered, because it is buried under false accusations and misunderstandings, produced primarily by Nishida's detractors, whose criticism, as Goto-Jones suggests, is in most cases at best based on a rough selection of citations, torn out of the coherence of their original context. Nishida's defenders, on the other hand, have attempted to safeguard the philosopher against the arguments of his critics by simply calling him a "liberal," a seemingly agreeable but in fact rather misleading label. Furthermore, Nishida's defenders have based their arguments only on biographical material, diary entries, letters, and so on. While the apologists "are right to observe a contradiction between... [Nishida's] private condemnation of the regime and his apparent public complicity, this is not in itself enough to conclude that his public writings meant the opposite of what they seem to say" (p. 4).In fact, this conclusion by Nishida's apologists does raise certain questions. Why did Nishida never give vent to his divergent opinions? Should he not rather have remained... (shrink)

David Fabricius, a Reformed pastor in Ostfriesland, was highly regarded by Kepler as an exceptional observer, second only to Tycho Brahe. From 1596 to 1609, Fabricius engaged in extensive correspondence, exchanging numerous letters with Brahe and subsequently with Kepler. These communications also provided values for direct observations on meridian altitudes of planets and stars, as well as elongations between a planet and a star or between two stars. We provide a detailed summary of Fabricius’s observations and compare them with the (...) prediction of twenty-first-century models. The analysis indicates that under specific conditions, his observations exhibit sub-arcminute deviations in relation to those calculated from modern theories. Our findings preliminarily indicate that Fabricius’ astronomical observational abilities were comparable to, an occasionally superior to, those of Brahe himself. We provide machine-readable tables of his observations. (shrink)

This essay asks why Chinese and North Vietnamese agricultural scientists in the 1950s and 1960s willingly adopted the Soviet agricultural sciences represented not only by agronomists Ivan Michurin and Trofim Lysenko but soil scientist Vasili Williams. The answer, I argue, is that they were fascinated by the promise of Soviet agrobiology that I conceptualize as a combination of dialectical materialism and voluntarist productivism: if one masters the interconnectivity between plants, microbes, organic and inorganic materials, and soil, one can overcome the (...) given biological and environmental limits, manipulate and optimize the material flow, and ceaselessly maximize agricultural production. Engaging the historiographical debate about Lysenkoism—which has mostly paid attention to the Euro-American cases, genetic controversies, and geopolitical specificities of each locale—as a global phenomenon, I shed fresh light on the understudied Chinese and North Vietnamese cases, the intersection between Lysenko’s theories and Williamsian soil science, and epistemic commonality across national differences. (shrink)

Dans son numéro 5, Clio avait, par la voix de Michelle Perrot, rendu un bref hommage à Georges Duby, qui s'était engagé aux côtés de la revue depuis sa fondation en acceptant de faire partie de son comité scientifique. « Pourquoi, comment le grand historien du Moyen Âge a-t-il fait de ce thème un des axes majeurs de son enseignement et de sa recherche est une réflexion qu'il nous faudra ouvrir », écrivait alors Michelle Perrot. Ce dossier, Clio l'ouvre aujourd'hui. (...) Non pas que l'intér.. (shrink)

Ancient cynicism was a moralistic school of ascetic and anti-materialistic gadflies and critics. Modern cynicism is generally understood as amoral, selfish, and manipulative. This article explores the change in meaning that led from one to the other, and what each kind of cynicism could mean for contemporary life. It is very unlikely that most people would ever adopt the values and ways of the ancient cynics, but there may still be something to be gained from the few who might engage (...) in this mode of life: possibly more environmentalism, and if nothing else, more humor in our lives. Modern cynicism may have little of positive value to contribute to life and politics, although at least it undermines the self-righteous moralists. In any case, it is worth understanding in order to cope with it. Along the way, we learn that since Diogenes of Sinope a wide variety of thinkers from Socrates, Machiavelli, and Spinoza through Rousseau and Nietzsche to Wittgenstein have been credited with cynicism. That suggests that it may be more important to our intellectual life than many of us realize. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a lesser-known aspect of Husserl’s theory of action, namely his understanding of “involuntary behavior,” as developed especially in the recently published manuscripts gathered in Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. Specifically, I follow the arguments leading Husserl in these manuscripts to make the peculiar claim that all involuntary behaviors can be appropriated and converted into voluntary action. In reflecting upon this argument I point out the merits of Husserl’s engagement with involuntary acts, which considerably reshape his (...) practical philosophy, but I also highlight some of its important limitations, which originate in a structural shortcoming of Husserl’s theory in general, namely his presupposition of a rigorous parallelism between cognition, emotion, and action. By showing how this ultimately leads to a reductive and phenomenologically inaccurate view of practical experience, I conclude by pointing to some possible ways to overcome these limitations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 125-126 [Access article in PDF] Sextus Empiricus. Against the Grammarians (Adversos Mathematicos I). Introduction, Commentary, and Translation by D. L. Blank. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. lvi + 436. Cloth, $105.00. Sesto Empirico. Contro gli astrologi. Introduction, Commentary, and Translation by Emidio Spinelli. Naples: Bibliopolis, 2000. Pp. 230. Paper, L. 70.000. No historian of philosophy should be retailing the (...) old canards that the Hellenistic philosopher Sextus Empiricus was silly, wholly confused, or merely a compiler and not a philosopher in his own right. These translations and commentaries, along with the recent work of Richard Bett, James Hankinson, and others, should bury those notions forever.Against the Grammarians is the first and Against the Astrologers is the fifth volume of Sextus's six-volume Against the Teachers of the technai or professional arts and sciences (grammar, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astrology, and music). Sextus is not against all forms of the study of these matters; in fact, one of the skeptic's "rules for living" is that he will engage in an art (techne) to make a living (Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I.24). But he is against the claims of each of them to special technical expertise. He prefers the unpretentious experience of everyday life—living by the phenomena; non-expert, practical forms of grammar, astronomy, music—to fancy theories about the nature of things.Against the Grammarians is Sextus's critique of the interpreters of poetry and prose—today's English professors and historians. Philosophers will be amused by his deconstruction of various sorts of lit crit arrogance and rashness that are still with us. Regrettably, some of us are not immune from the same critiques.Against the Astrologers is Sextus's critique of the Chaldean soothsayers. He is not against the observation of celestial phenomena for agricultural or navigational purposes. His critiques of the astrologers for lack of empirical evidence and promotion of superstition make him sound like a proto-scientist.One originality of Sextus's work was his combination of a dogmatic Epicurean critique of the grammatologists and astrologers with a skeptical aporetic critique. Precisely because he does not hesitate to make use of the arguments of others, some interpreters have decided that Sextus was unoriginal and derivative. But Blank and Spinelli both show that he recombines these arguments in ways that no one else had done. That is one of the ways of being original in philosophy. The upshot is that he is our earliest source of quite a number of critiques of grammarians and astrologers.The use of dogmatic arguments raises the problem of whether Sextus engages in so-called "negative dogmatism" in these volumes. Right at the beginning of Against the Astrologers, Sextus accuses them of violating "right reason." What right does a skeptic have to invoke such a standard? Some have felt that at this stage Sextus was a dogmatic skeptic, invoking one set of truths to tear down another. But that is not necessary. Blank and Spinelli explain this well with a combination of points. One, we can see the dogmatic and Epicurean attacks as clearing the ground for the following skeptical equipollence of arguments. Two, we can follow Jonathan Barnes in assuming that each claim that something has been demolished assumes the counterargument that it has been proven, so that the implied upshot is equipollence. Three, "right reason" can be the sort of unpretentious practical reasoning and living in accord with the appearances that the skeptics often claimed to live by.Spinelli and Blank provide many useful improvements over the previous English translations of these texts by Bury and the Italian translations by Russo. Blank rightly relies on Spinelli's 1995 translation and commentary on Sextus's Against the Ethicists and Spinelli rightly relies on Blank for a number of points. Spinelli supplies the Greek on facing pages of the translation; Blank does not. Spinelli also supplies five Greek zodiac charts and a beautiful print of a fifteenth-century zodiac.Neither Blank nor Spinelli unduly lionizes Sextus. They admit that... (shrink)

Do members of democratic societies have a moral right that others not actively prevent them from engaging in wrongdoing? Many political theorists think that they do. “It is a feature of democratic government,” Michael Walzer writes, “that the people have a right to act wrongly—in much the same way that they have a right to act stupidly”. Of course, advocates of a democratic right to do wrong may believe that the scope of this right is limited. A majority in a (...) democratic society, for example, may not have a moral right against being prevented from enslaving or arbitrarily disenfranchising a minority, or if it were to launch a wrongful aggressive war against another society. But many join Walzer in asserting that it would be wrong in principle to intervene to prevent some wrongs that democratic societies would inflict. This thesis, which we call the democratic right to do wrong thesis (DRTDWT), can be formulated as follows: DRTDWT – For democratic societies A and agents B, there is a class of wrongful policies and institutions X, such that if A chooses to implement members of this class pursuant to democratic procedures, B has a duty not to actively intervene to prevent the implementation of X. Our goal in this essay is to show that the DRTDWT should be rejected. (shrink)

Best known for his groundbreaking and influential work in Buddhist philosophy, Mark Siderits is the pioneer of “fusion” or “confluence philosophy", a boldly systematic approach to doing philosophy premised on the idea that rational reconstruction of positions in one tradition in light of another can sometimes help address perennial problems and often lead to new and valuable insights. -/- Exemplifying the many virtues of the confluence approach, this collection of essays covers all core areas of Buddhist (...) class='Hi'>philosophy, as well as topics and disputes in contemporary Western philosophy relevant to its study. They consider in particular the ways in which questions concerning personal identity figure in debates about agency, cognition, causality, ontological foundations, foundational truths, and moral cultivation. Most of these essays engage Siderits’ work directly, building on his pathbreaking ideas and interpretations. Many deal with issues that have become a common staple in philosophical engagements with traditions outside the West. Their variety and breadth bear testimony to the legacy of Siderits’ impact in shaping the contemporary conversation in Buddhist philosophy and its reverberations in mainstream philosophy, giving readers a clear sense of the remarkable scope of his work. (shrink)

Memphis, Tennessee is the Blackest city with a Philosophy for/with Children (P4/WC) program in the United States, making it a unique site of engagement for practitioners. The city faces deeply historically rooted structural problems that continue to manifest themselves, in housing, food security, hate crimes, police brutality, workplace inequality, and segregation; all of which are present in our classrooms where we practice P4C. In this chapter, we illustrate some of the challenges we have faced while practicing P4/WC in (...) Memphis, and the ways in which these obstacles have transformed the practice and mission of the Philosophical Horizons (PH) outreach program. We have found that many of the methods and assumptions of traditional P4C can sometimes be harmful or alienating to some of our students if not properly reformed. We here outline the history of our program Philosophical Horizons (PH) and discuss some of the obstacles we have faced teaching in our specific context. We further provide a discussion of why the typical methods and assumptions of P4C do not serve us well in the context of Memphis. Additionally, we describe our own approach to philosophy for/with children and our primary mission within the city as an anti-racist practice. Finally, we discuss two case studies that exemplify some of the dynamics that we outline in this chapter. (shrink)