Individuals convicted of crimes are often subject to numerous restrictions — on housing, employment, the vote, public assistance, and other goods — well after they have completed their sentences, and in some cases permanently. The question of whether — and if so, when — ex-offender restrictions are morally permissible has received surprisingly little philosophical scrutiny. This article first examines the significance of completing punishment, of paying one's debt to society, and contends that when offenders' debts are paid, they should be (...) restored to full standing as citizens. Thus all ex-offender restrictions are presumptively unjustified. Nonconsequentialist defences of these restrictions are ultimately unsuccessful in defeating the presumption against them. In a limited range of cases, consequentialist considerations — namely, of risk reduction — may be sufficient to override the presumptive case against these restrictions. The article concludes by suggesting a number of criteria for assessing whether particular restrictive measures are permissible on grounds of risk reduction. (shrink)

This essay explores the nihilistic coincidence of the ascetic ideal and Nietzsche’s localization of science in the conceptual world of anarchic socialismas Nietzsche indicts the uncritical convictions of modern science by way of a critique of the causa sui, questioning both religion and the enlightenment as well asboth free and unfree will and condemning the “poor philology” enshrined in the language of the “laws” of nature. Reviewing the history of philosophical nihilismin the context of Nietzsche’s “tragic knowledge” along with political (...) readings of nihilism, willing nothing rather than not willing at all, today’s this-worldly and very planetary nihilism includes the virtual loci of technological desire (literally willing nothing) as well as the perpetual and consequently pointless threat of nuclear annihilation and the routine or ordinary annihilation of plant and animal life as of inorganic nature. (shrink)

The article aims at demonstrating that in attributing the creatio ex nihilo to both Plato and Aristotle as their unanimous philosophical conviction the Treatise on the Harmony between the Two Sages deeply depends upon the Neoplatonic reading of those two philosophers. The main obstacles for such a view in the works of the two sages are Plato's assumption of a precosmic chaos in the Timaeus and Aristotle's denial of any efficient causality to the unmoved mover in the Metaphysics. Both of (...) these points had been, however, done away with by the Neoplatonist commentators already, especially by Ammonius in his lost treatise on efficient and final causality in Aristotle the use of which in the Harmony is shown by a comparison with Simplicius. Christian and Muslim readers just had to transfer those arguments and hermeneutical techniques into an anti-eternalist context in order to make the two philosophers agree with one of the basic tenents of their face, a hermeneutical technique considerably different from the one employed by al-Fārābī in his exposition of Plato's and Aristotle's philosophy which is compared to the Harmony in a briefly sketched concluding section.L'article vise à montrer que le Traité sur l'harmonie des deux sages, en attribuant la creatio ex nihilo à Platon et Aristote comme conviction philosophique commune, dépend profondément de la lecture néoplatonicienne de ces deux philosophes. Les obstacles principaux à une telle attribution dans les œuvres des deux sages sont, dans le Timée de Platon, l'affirmation d'un chaos précosmique et, dans la Métaphysique d'Aristote, la négation d'une causalité efficiente du premier moteur immobile. L'interprétation néoplatonicienne avait toutefois éliminé chacune de ces affirmations de la doctrine des deux maîtres, comme le montre en particulier le traité d'Ammonius sur la causalité finale et efficiente chez Aristote. Or, on peut montrer, par une comparaison avec Simplicius, que l’Harmonie faisait usage de ce traité. Les philosophes chrétiens et musulmans avaient ainsi la possibilité d'employer les mêmes arguments et méthodes herméneutiques pour établir une concordance entre les deux principales autorités philosophiques d'une part et une de leurs plus importantes convictions religieuses d'autre part – une herméneutique qui diffère considérablement de la méthode appliquée par al-Fārābī dans sa propre exposition des philosophies de Platon et d'Aristote, comme le montre, dans la conclusion de l'article, la brève comparaison avec l’Harmonie.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.CREATIO EX NIHILO – A GENUINELY PHILOSOPHICAL INSIGHT DERIVED FROM PLATO AND ARISTOTLE? SOME NOTES ON THE TREATISE ON THE HARMONY BETWEEN THE TWO SAGESVolume 22, Issue 1Benjamin Gleede DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0957423911000117Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. CREATIO EX NIHILO – A GENUINELY PHILOSOPHICAL INSIGHT DERIVED FROM PLATO AND ARISTOTLE? SOME NOTES ON THE TREATISE ON THE HARMONY BETWEEN THE TWO SAGESVolume 22, Issue 1Benjamin Gleede DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0957423911000117Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. CREATIO EX NIHILO – A GENUINELY PHILOSOPHICAL INSIGHT DERIVED FROM PLATO AND ARISTOTLE? SOME NOTES ON THE TREATISE ON THE HARMONY BETWEEN THE TWO SAGESVolume 22, Issue 1Benjamin Gleede DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0957423911000117Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 53, Issue 2-4, pp 353 - 371 While agreeing with Professor D’Ors’ thesis that the notion of logical consequence cannot be exhaustively characterized, I depart from Professor d’Ors’ conclusion that the very notion of good consequence is primitive and can only be identified with the set of acceptable rules of inference, and from his conviction that modal notions such as necessity and impossibility are equivocal and gain such clarity as they have by their interaction with rules of (...) inference. Inspired by this picture, Professor d’Ors undertook an examination of a number of medieval attempts to analyze the notion of consequence and tried to show how certain developments in the medieval history of logic made sense in the light of debate over such analyses. This paper examines a small fragment of Professor d’Ors programme and its relation to some aspects of Jean Buridan’s account of the consequence relation. (shrink)

Automated decision making for sentencing is the use of a software algorithm to analyse a convicted offender’s case and deliver a sentence. This chapter reviews the moral arguments for and against employing automated decision making for sentencing and finds that its use is in principle morally permissible. Specifically, it argues that well-designed automated decision making for sentencing will better approximate the just sentence than human sentencers. Moreover, it dismisses common concerns about transparency, privacy and bias as unpersuasive or inapplicable. The (...) chapter also notes that moral disagreement about theories of just sentencing are plausibly resolved by applying the principle of maximising expected moral choiceworthiness, and that automated decision making is better suited to the resulting ensemble model. Finally, the chapter considers the challenge posed by penal populism. The dispiriting conclusion is that although it is in theory morally desirable to use automated decision-making for criminal sentencing, it may well be the case that we ought not to try. (shrink)

The evidence suggests that employers discriminate against ex-offenders in the labour market. The problem is potentially serious as it involves a substantial proportion of the population, especially the male population. Since research has shown that most people with prior convictions stop offending by their late 20s or early 30s, the validity of selection based on criminal record remains questionable. This paper examines the need for legal protection of ex-offenders by limiting employers' access to, and use of, information on criminal background. (...) The rights and interests of the various parties involved, employers, ex-offenders, and the general public, are discussed. Approaches to the legal protection of ex-offenders in Australia are reviewed and legislative changes proposed. (shrink)

Many oppose the use of profile evidence against defendants at trial, even when the statistical correlations are reliable and the jury is free from prejudice. The literature has struggled to justify this opposition. We argue that admitting profile evidence is objectionable because it violates what we call “equal protection”—that is, a right of innocent defendants not to be exposed to higher ex ante risks of mistaken conviction compared to other innocent defendants facing similar charges. We also show why admitting other (...) forms of evidence, such as eyewitness, trace, and motive evidence, does not violate equal protection. (shrink)

This little volume, by the Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of California is a splendid work. Lynn White, who considers himself a Christian and a humanist, has written an important book linking together cultural changes in the modern world with those events in earlier periods which precipitated the changes. His major thesis is that the alienation of the humanist from technology is unfortunate, and that a rapprochement between the two is possible if one (...) reads history accurately. Technology developed, White argues, in the fertile cultural and intellectual soul of the Christian middle ages. It was the Christian view of reality that allowed man to take nature seriously and to permit him to think in terms of measuring and analyzing it. The Christian saw the world as a manifestation of the working of the mind of God, and his science was an attempt to decipher God's thought by exploring the nature of his handiwork. The technological innovations of the Middle Ages were possible because of the Christian's conviction that God had given man power and dominion over all creation: "The men who worshiped the Virgin also developed water wheels to perform all kinds of tasks that previously had been done by hand." To medieval man, the machine came from God. What White seems to be saying is that the Christian view of reality is one which produces a full-blown humanism, one in which man is free to develop his natural capacities, in a world which has been created by God for man to enjoy and in which man can best fulfill himself as a human. "Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia's religions, not only established a dualism of man and nature but insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends."--W. A. J. (shrink)

“Sacra à Deo in corde discenda, natura ex natura.” Johann Christian Senckenberg's Observationes as a Medico-Theological Writing Method. In his early diaries, the pietist physician Johann Christian Senckenberg has taken down large amounts of observation data which mostly concentrated on his own body and soul. Earlier research has mistaken his diligent self-observation for hypochondria and unworldliness, especially since the author had never endeavoured to analyze and publish his work. The article shows that both his writing practice and his reluctance to (...) process and share its results are due to his deeply religious and firmly anti-rationalist conviction. The main purpose of his journal keeping was the attainment of religious self-knowledge and professional self-perfection. Scientific publications he considered to be hypothetical and dogmatic, be it in theology or medicine; moreover, their authors were often enough driven by their self-love and desire for fame. In his eyes, the only godly way of knowledge acquisition was the humble, diligent and minute study of divine creation according to the Hippocratic method. The most immediate and reliable way of achieving true wisdom, however, was the observation of God's work within one's own body and mind, which were subject to the effects of God's grace and punishment as well as to atmospheric, environmental and dietetic circumstances. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that mass incarceration belongs to a category of social status interventions by which the modern state either withholds the ordinary protections and benefits of the law from outlawed groups or subjects them to private punishment based on their mere membership in those groups. In the US these groups include immigrants and resident Latinos, the homeless, the poor and poor blacks, sex workers, and ex-convicts. Outlawry is a fundamentally anti-democratic practice that cannot be justified in terms (...) of deterrence and is incompatible with public safety. (shrink)

There was a significant monetary cost associated with establishing Catholicism in colonial Western Australia. The bishops and clergy funded the development of the local Catholic Church through donations from European benefactors, offerings from the congregation, and sponsorship from the Colonial and British Governments. As donations from Europe were variable and the resident Catholic population were largely poor, the government grants were the most reliable income for the Diocese of Perth. The government issued grants to support the establishment of congregations, schools, (...) and social welfare institutions. The development of congregations in new settlements was the Catholic Church's core ministry and the government issued stipends to Catholic chaplains to administer spiritual care to settlers and convicts in particular districts. Government grants were based on the census results and the Catholic Church was required to establish local church congregations and recruit clergy, and demonstrate an ability to contribute towards the maintenance of both. From 1852 to 1886, Bishops Joseph Serra, Rosendo Salvado and Martin Griver took charge of establishing congregations, managing clergy and lobbying the governors and other civil officials to fund colonial chaplaincies. The government also expected that the chaplains would promote moral and social order among the ex-convicts transported from Britain. (shrink)

Galileo's Philosophy of Science - or: Contra Feyerabend. In analyzing Galileo's methodology, philosophers of science were using, misusing, and abusing his ideas rather unashamedly to suit their own purposes. Like so many others before him, Paul Feyerabend had come to the conclusion that his methodological ideas might gain momentum by demonstrating their compatibility with those of Galileo. The reinterpretation of Galileo as a true, though disguised, anarchist, was considered by Feyerabend as the most forceful, and indeed conclusive, case against rationalism (...) in methodology which might be conceived in view of the privileged position ascribed to Galileo by both philosophers which might be conceived in view of the privileged position ascribed to Galileo by both philosophers and historians of science. The paper argues - against Feyerabend - that Galileo was not a methodological anarchist, neither in theory nor in practice. He had firm methodological convictions that remained basically the same throughout his entire career. In his view, essential and accidental causes of phenomena were not given by experience. Although mathematical and geometrical analysis was needed to discriminate between them, experience and experiment was considered by Galileo from his middle periode on as a means to identify among the set of explanations, demonstrable "ex suppositione" as being mathematically correct, those which could in addition be applied to reality. Thus, Galileo was neither an inductivist nor a naive falsificationist, nor a Copernican zealot adapting his methodology to the needs of his presumed fight for heliocentrism, come what be. Only after the reconstruction of mechanics was in a fairly advanced stage, and after his own telescopic observations had provided independent evidence in favor of the new astronomy, Galileo was in a position to appreciate the Copernican system as a most forceful ally in his fight for the recognition of his physical achievements. Through the end of his life, his view of the heliocentric system remained rather traditional in adhering firmly to the principles of epicyclic and circular motion, as far as the heavens were concerned. (shrink)

Employers’ access to and use of criminal records as a selection mechanism in the labor market makes it far more difficult for ex-offenders to find jobs, especially regular, well-paid jobs, than those without criminal convictions. The paper asks whether there is anything morally problematic about this practice. The aims of the paper are twofold. First, arguments based on premises of wrongful discrimination against the current, commonest use of criminal records are critically discussed. It is argued that employers do not necessarily (...) engage in morally wrongful discrimination against job applicants when they use criminal records in recruitment screening. But it is also argued that ex-offenders who apply for jobs are subject to what can be called “structural and morally wrongful discrimination” when laws allow employers to request (or directly access) a job applicant’s full criminal record. Second, preliminary proposals on how criminal records can be used by employers in a way that avoids wrongful structural discrimination of ex-offenders will be presented and critically assessed. I suggest that it should be lawful for an employer to access an applicant’s criminal records only where there is a relevant and special match or link between the crime on the records and the job being applied for and the crime is serious. This proposal is defended against two objections, one based on concerns about crime prevention and the other based on the employer’s interest in knowing whom not to hire. (shrink)

Who Must Presume Whom to Be Innocent of What? This paper explores the roles that the presumption of innocence (PoI) can play beyond the criminal trial, in other dealings that citizens may have with the criminal law and its officials. It grounds the PoI in a wider notion of the civic trust that citizens owe each other, and that the state owes its citizens: by attending to the roles that citizens may find themselves playing in relation to the criminal law (...) (such roles as suspect, defendant, convicted offender and ‘ex-offender’), we can see both how a PoI protects us, beyond the confines of the trial, against various kinds of coercion, and how that PoI is modified or qualified as we acquire certain roles. To develop and illustrate this argument, I pay particular attention to the roles of defendant (both during the trial and while awaiting trial) and of ‘ex-offender,’ and to the duties that such roles bring with them. (shrink)

It is a widely supported claim that liberal democratic institutions should treat citizens with equal respect. I neither dispute nor champion this claim, but investigate how it could be fulfilled. I do this by asking, as a sort of litmus test, how liberal democratic institutions should treat with respect citizens holding minority convictions, and thereby dissenting from a deliberative output. The first step of my argument consists in clarifying the sense in which liberal democracies have a primary concern for the (...) respectful treatment of citizens qua self-legislating persons. Taking the second step, I address critically the common tendency in the literature to concentrate on what I have termed the ex ante legem phase, focusing solely on the structure of institutionalized decision-making processes. I submit, rather, that the principle of equal respect for persons demands more of liberal democratic institutions to enhance citizens' chances to give voice to their consciences and influence, on that ground, the formulation of the rules to which they should conform. Fulfilling this commitment requires democratic theorizing to go beyond the ex ante legem phase and regard forms of ex post legem contestation as an extension of citizens' right to political participation. Against this backdrop, I take the third and last step and argue that a promising way forward consists in the adoption of an ex post legem version of conscientious exemptionism, granting citizens a conditional moral right to request exemptions on the grounds of conscience from certain controversial legal and political provisions. (shrink)

International criminal law (ICL) is an achievement, but at the same time a challenge to the traditional conception of the principle of legality (_lex praevia_, _scripta_, and _stricta_ – Sect. 1). International criminal tribunals have often based conviction for international crimes on unwritten norms the existence and scope of which they have failed to substantiate. In so doing, they have evaded the objection that they were applying _ex post facto_ criminal laws. This approach, the relaxation of the concept of law (...) by including norms whose existence is doubtful, has apparently served to maintain a concept of strict legality, but it is unsatisfying (Sect. 2). In my opinion, the strict principle of legality that has linked its absolute validity to the positivity of law is not the correct premise. It makes sense to state that positivity and validity do not necessarily go hand in hand (Sect. 3). Applied to ICL, this means that it is neither necessary nor convincing to “conceal” supra-positive law as positive law, as some decisions of the international criminal tribunals do. For this reason, I consider that Radbruch’s formula, consisting in admitting that there are supra-positive limits which positive law must respect in order to be valid, is well-founded (Sect. 4). The path taken by this significant philosopher of law is methodologically convincing, and it squarely faces the problem of the value of positive law. Nevertheless, if we admit Radbruch’s formula and thereby the limited value of positive law (if we claim that the validity of the law depends on it respecting supra-positive minimums of justice), we must also face the problem of the definition of supra-positive values, the epistemological difficulties of having access to them (Sect. 5), and the question of the scope and enforceability of supra-positive law (Sect. 6). In summary, this article aims to explain why Radbruch’s formula offers a convincing conceptual basis for international criminal legality and, in doing so, aims to contribute to the discussion about the foundations of ICL. (shrink)

Regardless of unpredictable and contingent geopolitical events such as last year’s surprising rejection of the European Constitution in France and the Netherlands, this coming year will certainly witness a large surge in patriotism. The Winter Olympics in February, and the World Cup in the summer, both promise to whip national sentiments into a fever pitch. One other thing is certain, though: journals of philosophy and ethics will continue to debate the virtues of cosmopolitanism, as this number of Ethical Perspectives does (...) through its contributions below.Why is this? Why do philosophers and academics hold on to this idea of cosmopolitanism, an idea utterly lacking in the convictions of the general public? Is it perhaps because the first cosmopolitans were in fact philosophers? The first to identify himself as a cosmopolitan was Diogenes the Cynic, and Plato’s dialogues paint many of the Sophists in cosmopolitan hues. Although people generally support the idea of internationalism as far as it promotes trade, travel, and football tournaments, once it begins to meddle in internal affairs, as it does with outsourcing and transnational constitutions, they tend to fall back upon the patria. They killed Socrates for corrupting the youth of Athens, not the youth of the world.Whether it is the service and manufacturing industries of Asia and India ‘stealing’ American jobs, or widespread fears of Brussels’ legendary bureaucrats, the non-academic public consistently turns from its tepid embrace of cosmopolitanism to patriotism whenever threatened. Are we too quick to label this as self-interest or even selfishness? Or is there something else at work in the debate between cosmopolitanism and patriotism? Some approaches to cosmopolitanism are certainly guilty of an absolute removal of difference, of wishing away the nation state, of replacing it with an international body based on purely universal principles, and of wiping away the competencies of nations on many levels. The call for the world state can come across as an appeal for an anodyne and internationalist homogeneity based on a clinical morality that, for all its sensitivity, runs roughshod over the well-engrained cultural, legal, and social beliefs of many peoples.Clearly, this is what many Europeans fear, and to a large degree, Americans as well in their dislike for the International Court of Justice. Even the economic hegemony of outsourcing removes national power, and replaces it with pure economic rationality.Our contributors below do not advocate these reductions, although some may point to them. Key to each contribution below is sensitivity to the world as it is, to its need for difference even in the face of an ever-increasing globalisation that sometimes is connected with cosmopolitanism. Yet, every proponent of cosmopolitanism must sketch how it is possible in practice. Of course, an obvious problem is how to dwell consequently as a cosmopolitan. Not many contemporary cosmopolitans would be prepared to follow Diogenes’ commitment to rootlessness: living in exile after having been included in a forgery conviction aimed at his father, the ascetic Diogenes called a barrel his home. Such was his drive to live a levelled life that he cast away his only bowl upon seeing a poor peasant boy drinking from cupped hands. Today’s cosmopolitan leads a much more prosaic life, and hence the problem with cosmopolitanism begins as something mundane. Does not a cosmopolitan still pay national taxes? Does not a cosmopolitan still need a national passport and second country visas? But, the questions quickly turn ontological: how can one shed oneself of one’s nationality, of one’s belonging, as if it is just an accident of one’s own constitution, instead of as an important property of one’s own constitution? In other words, belonging is important: a citizen of the world still values citizenship. Clearly, the absolute cosmopolitan reduction is an absurdity: one is always rooted, in some sense. Even cosmopolitanism is rooted in a specific Western mindset, and is no self-evident preference of human existence.As Rudi Visker’s contribution so clearly shows through an investigation of the narcissism of minor differences, these questions revolve around the question of confrontation with alterity. What I am, in no small way plays off what I am not. I cannot be everything, if I am something. Freud’s analysis of minor differences reveals that members of a group identify with that group on the basis these minor differences. What is self-evident to a particular culture marks that culture off from another culture, a culture that by definition does not share the same set of the self-evident. To be a foreigner, as any ex-patriot can attest, is to stand outside of the self-evident, whether this means interpreting gestures, understanding commercial practices, or, as Freud would have it, staying on the correct side of national taboos. There is thus a dialectic of inner and outer, a dialectic which refuses a reduction of one to the other. As Visker puts it, recognising the stranger within oneself is quite different than recognising the stranger outside of oneself, and to confuse these as being the same is not only to misunderstand the very issue at stake, it is also a dangerous trivialisation of difference.But clearly, there is something viable and laudable in the idea of cosmopolitanism, since it stresses the universal moral community of humanity. Cosmopolitanism is an attempt to see all human subjects as subject to the same moral law. Indeed, the sort of federation to which cosmopolitanism leads, at least in a modified Kantian expression as Bert van Roermund tells us, even gives us good grounds to recognise the legitimacy and moral equivalence of states. Importantly, the international legal order does not draw its power from any supranational force, but from the choice of independent national actors to recognise it. Hence, this cosmopolitan order depends on nationhood, and good standing within this order depends on the degree to which a country decides to participate. Again, the universal here depends on well-rooted particularity, a particularity able to choose for the universal.What do we do, then, with outlaw nations, those nations that are hostile to the choice for the universal? Through a clear reading of Hegel, Paul Cobben proposes that the metric for a state’s legality is the measure to which it permits the moral freedom of its citizens to bloom. A free person requires a free legal order; only in such can a person obtain the full measure of human rights due. States that do not permit this blooming are illegitimate; they contradict the nature of the human person, and citizens dwelling under the yoke of these have the right to ask for outside assistance in removing this illegitimate power above them. However, for this plea to be met, two conditions must obtain: the oppressed people must have the wherewithal to form a political order after the removal of the illegitimate state, and the action must be grounded in the principles and support of a legal community, which in essence would be a world federation of states. In fact, it is morally incumbent upon all legal states to aim at such a world federation, upon pain of contradiction.Our duty to others does not end with the politically oppressed; the economically oppressed also lay a moral claim upon us. So, as Toon Vandevelde asks in his contribution, what about the global poor? The poor are hungry and in need of shelter and a future, but to address these issues at the level of rights is in a way heartless: what good does it do to legislate that everyone has the right to food, when this right can never be called upon, or enforced, in any meaningful sense? Moreover, approaches that demand non-prioritised generosity not only ignore the fundamental economic fact of scarcity, they also run the risk of creating the moral hazard of dependence on charity. The true cosmopolitan approach is the recognition of our common humanity and of our concomitant duty to help others as far as this help does not endanger us. This duty is compounded by the marginalisation of the poor through globalisation, a globalisation that they did not ask for. The extent of our help is indeterminate, but its direction is clear: it must aim to integrate those poor who wish it within our international systems, and so to ease their own transitions from poverty.Both Gil Anidjar and Maria Bonnafous-Boucher continue this theme of economy, but each from a highly specific viewpoint. Indeed, their contributions are perhaps somewhat darker, delving into an aspect of the unspoken underneath the choice for the universal. Anidjar begins with the relation between religion and economy within the interplay of Judaism and Christianity, whereas Bonnafous-Boucher focuses on the development of political economy through a Foucaultian lens. Although highly distinct contributions, both share the insight that the economy is now the central theme of our power structures, and that economy, isolated from questions of morality or justice, must likewise play a decisive role within the structure of cosmopolitanism, or, at minimum, the political unity of peoples. For, national government long ago ceded to a promiscuous mix of governance, and religion to economy. This nexus enthrones governance as an economic rationale stripped of all other trappings, and inscribes any possible cosmopolitanism within a framework of an aggressive capitalism, a kind of economic theology, a kind of hegemony in which state boundaries are essentially liquefied. Capital, after all, knows no boundaries. (shrink)

This article speaks in praise of the dignity of creatures. Arguing for a foundation of the nascent doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in the Psalms and inter‐testamental scriptures, Soskice points to the distinctiveness of the Jewish and Christian understanding of the Creator God, and its revolutionary entrance into the bloodstream of western metaphysics. She argues for a qualification on the over‐emphasis, when speaking of the historical origins of the doctrine, on the creation of matter. Wider principles of divine freedom and (...) transcendence are at work as can be seen in the writings of Philo of Alexandria. The conviction that God is Being itself and the source of all being is the legacy not of ‘Greek philosophy’ simpliciter, as is often invoked by way of curt dismissal, but the product of Jewish and Christian middle‐platonic readings of the Book of Exodus. It is this elaboration of creatio ex nihilo which underscores the Christian theology of participation in which creatures are not diminished but made gloriously and truly themselves. (shrink)

In this volume, we present a collection of writings each offering their own novel perspective with respect to question of realism. No doubt it has gathered much attention of recent philosophical debates; and one of its characteristic aspects, among those it has had a most notable impact, has been in blurring the more the rigid way of thinking the traditional demarcations between "continental" and "analytic" philosophy. This volume, then, offers a contribution to some of the many discussions on realism not (...) only in the spirit that there is still much more to be said on the matter, but also in the recognition that a renewal of the discussion is necessary and should bypass old divisions. This is not to say that this volume departs entirely from any "old" sort of realism, or uncritically treats its object of study as creatable ex nihilo. Far from that, it moves from a broadly shared conviction that, if we are to re-position realism and see its present or future as not yet set into stone--that is, a way in which reality "must be" more than just be--a certain historicism cannot be left out of the picture of realism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AsphyxiationsSteven Connor (bio)Recent events and sociorhetorical expatiations upon them have reaffirmed breathing as the ideal form of free and unimpeded life, that struggles against the throttlings of oppression. The root meaning of oppression, from the past participle of Latin opprimere, is to press, crush or bear down upon, and the word oppression has commonly been used to signify the feeling of the difficulty of breathing, through some constriction or (...) pressure, as in the nocturnal attentions of the nightmare, the spirit imagined as settling suffocatingly on the chest of the sleeper. As a mare that rides rather than being ridden, the spirit is often imagined as a female succubus, though in Fuseli's 1781 painting the mare is accompanied by a simian incubus who squats on the chest of a female sleeper, prompting these lines from Erasmus Darwin:So on his Nightmare through the evening fogFlits the squab Fiend o'er fen, and lake, and bog;Seeks some love-wilder'd maid with sleep oppress'd,Alights, and grinning sits upon her breast.(Darwin 2.16)'Pressing' meant the forcing of somebody into some condition or service, typically the army or navy. In oppressive weather, the clouds may seem to 'lower', or the humid air to cramp and confine the body.We think of breathing as opening or release, of a piece with open windows and unbounded spaces. Human beings have brewed up fantasies for centuries of more complete modes of breathing that would overcome the constriction represented by the respiratory apparatus, exhorting themselves and each other to breathe more deeply, suffusing, not just the lungs, but the diaphragm, the head, and other items of phantasmal physiology. Indeed, the factitiously hollow spaces of the body–the head that we seek to keep 'clear'–are the proof of the belief in the strange principle of vital vacuity, the idea that we exist most fully in empty spaces of innerness, bodily enclosures evacuated of body. Without this sense of the animating function of the breath, the body suffers the inanition of a "want of living [End Page 74] breath in its lungs, which are full of gases but empty of spirit" (Wilkinson 78). In being taken in and given out, breath seems to commute between what Wittgenstein calls "two kinds of worlds, worlds built of different materials." The fact that "the mental world in fact is liable to be imagined as gaseous, or rather, aethereal," seems to Wittgenstein to be related to "the queer role which the gaseous and the aethereal play in philosophy,–when we perceive that a substantive is not used as what in general we should call the name of an object, and when therefore we can't help saying to ourselves that it is the name of an aethereal object" (Wittgenstein 47). The conception of the soul as an afflatus, or a special kind of magic gas, which has been common among so many different peoples, suggests just this kind of aethereal object-that-is-not-one. It embodies the conviction that we are most essentially present as ourselves where we are closest to being nothing, in an out-of-body kind of body.We breathe out–phew, originally in the seventeenth century a violent expression of disgust or emancipatory emptying, as we might nowadays plosively and purifyingly say poo–when we 'ex-press', as we say, our sense of being, as we also say, 'relieved,' from re + levare, to lift up, implying a lightening, or levitation, that approaches in imagination the condition of air itself. To ventilate is to levitate. To be relieved is to dream of remission from the clinging pressure of your own embodiment, as though you could simply emit or expel your own weight. To inhale is to prepare for stress and struggle: to exhale is to relax, to sigh into satisfaction, converting becoming momentarily to being. Exhalation is therefore the decorporizing of the body, or the corporealization of the incorporeal. But though human beings exalt imaginary emptying, as the purifying expulsion of what is evil, infective, invasive, persecutory, expiration is also death. Speech is the expressive sound formed from the impressing of exhaled breath, the dissolving openness of air given imaginary... (shrink)

L'interet qu'accorde la philosophie moderne et contemporaine au probleme d'autrui est souvent, et a juste titre, considere comme l'une de ses principales caracteristiques. Peut-on neanmoins croire que cette question de l'intersubjectivite ou de l'interpersonnalite, telle que la poserent Fichte ou Husserl, soit une pure invention ex nihilo de l'epoque contemporaine? Ou bien l'historien de la philosophie, s'il se veut philosophe, ne doit-il pas au contraire postuler l'existence d'une continuite de la reflexion philosophique, et discerner par la comment une question qui (...) se presente comme radicalement neuve manifeste en fait la resurgence d'une meditation et d'un probleme plus anciens? Que les systemes et les reponses changent mais que les questions et les problemes auxquels ils repondent demeurent, telle est la conviction premiere qui anime cet essai. Ainsi, loin que le probleme des rapports avec autrui ait ete absent de la philosophie antique, l'auteur montre dans ce livre comment cette interrogation fut longtemps presente chez les Grecs, sous l'aspect d'une reflexion sur la nature et les conditions de la philia. Cette analyse du theme de l'amitie, indissociable chez les Grecs de leur metaphysique et de leur morale, revele ainsi une pensee du rapport entre les consciences qui, faisant eclater les oppositions factices issues du dualisme classique entre raison et sentiment ou encore entre amour de soi et amour d'autrui, permet d'elaborer une representation plus unitive, plus dynamique aussi, du moi lui-meme. (shrink)

ZUSAMMENFASSUNGViele Christen tragen Bedenken, die Aussage »geboren von der Jungfrau Maria« zu bekennen. Dabei ist es – diesem Essay zufolge – nicht primär das biologische Wunder, sondern sind es vielmehr dessen Ausdeutungen, die problematisch sind. Es gibt weder fundamentaltheologische noch christologische Glaubenssätze, die durch das »natus ex Maria virgine« angemessen zur Sprache gebracht werden. Wohl aber steht die Rede von der Jungfrauengeburt für zwei ethische Einsichten, nämlich erstens Respekt vor der Privatsphäre Marias und zweitens Begrenzung einer religiösen Deutungssucht. Daher steht (...) sie mit gutem Grund im Bekenntnis der Kirche.SUMMARYMany Christians have reservations in confessing the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. This essay argues that the interpretations of the virgin birth are the problematic elements and not the biological miracle. Although there are neither theological fundamentals nor christological creeds dependent upon natus ex Maria virgine, it nevertheless has two valuable ethical meanings: first it claims respect for the privacy of Mary, and secondly it restricts the religious desire to find meaning in every inherited conviction. Therefore, the creed remains for good reasons in the doctrine of the church. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS JOHN F. CROSBY, III Franciscan University of Steubenville Steubenville, Ohio I PROPOSE TO explore the idea that persons do not exist as replaceable specimens of or as mere instances of an ideal or type, but rather exist in some sense for their own sakes, each existing as incommunicably his or her own.1 I undertake this study in the conviction that the incommunicability of persons (...) is profoundly characteristic for them precisely as persons, and has a major role to play in any philosophy of the person. And there is an entirely different reason which attracts me to this subject. I think that most of what I have to say here can find acceptance across a broad spectrum of philosophical positions. At a time when thinkers are increasingly suspicious of universally valid truth about man, when many of them think that a vision of man is proper only to some tradition and valid only within that tradition and not beyond it, one can offer a salutary challenge to one's contemporaries by showing a centrally important truth about persons which, as I say, can be accepted by philosophers coming from the most various points of view. Suppose that you were to minimalize the death of someone by saying that at least the human species did not die with him or her, as if the immortality of the species more than compensated for the mortality of this individual : everyone understands that you would thereby radically depersonalize the deceased. Or suppose that you were grieving over the death of someone dear to you, and a friend tried to comfort you with the thought that the 1 My thanks to Josef Seifert, William Frank, Damian Fedoryka, and Katryna Fedoryka for their comments on earlier drafts of this study. The text of this article forms Chapter Two of my book, Essay on Personal Selfhood, which is close to completion. 403 404 JOHN F. CROSBY, III particular excellences of the deceased, which awakened your love, also exist in other human beings who are still living, as if you could continue to love in them what you had loved in the deceased. Again, everyone understands that if you treat people having excellences as if they were replaceable specimens of those excellences, then you lose your grip on them as persons. But why is this? Why is personhood driven out of human beings as soon as their species-membership, or their particular excellences, are thought to predominate in them? What is that incommunicability of each person which is obscured as soon as persons are thought to be only specimens? One commonly thinks that this aspect of personal selfhood has been recognized only in modern thought; in fact it was recognized already by St. Thomas Aquinas. Creatura autem rationalis divinae providentiae substat sicut secundum se gubernata et provisa, non solum propter speciem, ut aliae corruptibiles creaturae : quia individuum quod gubernatur solum propter speciem, non gubernatur propter seipsum; creatura autem rationalis propter seipsam gubernatur, ut ex dictis manifestum est. Sic igitur solae rationales creaturae directionem a Deo ad suos actus accipiunt non solum propter speciem, sed secundum individuum.2 Notice that Aquinas teaches here the metaphysical ultimacy of personal incommunicability; it exists even before God in the sense 2 " Now, a rational creature exists under divine providence as a being governed and provided for in himself, and not simply for the sake of his species, as is the case with other corruptible creatures. For the individual that is governed only for the sake of the species is not governed for its own sake, but the rational creature is governed for his own sake, as is clear from what we have said (ch. 112). And so, only rational creatures receive direction from God in their acts, not only for the species, but for the individual." Summa Contra Gentiles, III, ch. 113 (Bourke translation). By the way, Chapters 111-114 of Book III seem to me to constitute the most " personalist " passage' in the entire corpus of St. Thomas. The modern reader sees to his amazement that St. Thomas here has already made his own the Kantian idea that each person in a sense exists for his... (shrink)

Dwayne Giles shot and killed Brenda Avie, his ex-girlfriend, and claimed self-defense. At trial, to rebut Giles's testimony that she was the aggressor, prosecutors introduced statements that Avie had made three weeks before the shooting to a police officer responding to a report of domestic violence. Crying while she spoke, Avie told the officer that Giles had choked, punched, and threatened to kill her. After he was convicted of murder, Giles claimed that the admission of Avie's hearsay statement was a (...) violation of the Confrontation Clause. The state responded that the defendant had forfeited his right to confront Avie by killing her. In the last week of its last Term, the United States Supreme Court considered these arguments in California v. Giles. The case was decided in the wake of Crawford v. Washington and Davis v. Washington, which together transformed the Confrontation Clause and, as a consequence, the prosecution of domestic violence. Giles, which generated five opinions and exposed a Court deeply ambivalent about the reinterpreted confrontation right, has done little to impose order on this chaos. This Essay, which will be published in Lewis and Clark's symposium issue on Giles, contemplates the future of domestic violence prosecution in a period of uncertainty. My analysis endeavors to guide lower courts in the task of application and to map a course for the evolution of prosecutorial approaches to battering. I conclude that Giles represents a significant opportunity for those concerned about the constraints Crawford and Davis had seemed to place on the prosecution of domestic violence. For the first time, the Court has identified "the domestic violence context" as a relevant construct, thereby compelling lower courts to grapple with the particularities of violence between intimates. This is a remarkable shift in relatively short order, and it allows us to glimpse the possibility of a jurisprudence informed by the realities of battering. (shrink)

This article considers Utopia’s unethical practices alongside The City of God’s understanding of the earthly polity’s relationship to eschatology. In Augustine’s view, within the earthly city every person could potentially become a friend of the heavenly city in time, and the existing political situation must always be rendered partial and incomplete against the telos of eternity. These convictions stand in conspicuous contrast with Utopia. The Utopian system is in important ways founded on institutionalized practices which not only exclude non-Utopians (or (...) ex-Utopians), but also habituate them to vice. Examining Utopia alongside The City of God illuminates how this ethical problem in Utopia is not just a matter of individual practices or institutions, but rather derives from a more fundamental metaphysical and theological outlook. Not only is Utopia invested in a Utopian/non-utopian distinction; more significantly, this distinction has a tacit eschatological role, since Utopian thinking implies that degradation of one’s capacity for virtue decreases one’s potential to be saved. (shrink)

In March of 1980, just a month before Sartre's death, _Le Nouvel Observateur_ published a series of interviews, the last ever given, between the blind and debilitated philosopher and his young assistant, Benny Levy. Readers were scandalized and denounced the interviews as distorted, inauthentic, even fraudulent. They seemed to portray a Sartre who had abandoned his leftist convictions and rejected his most intimate friends, including Simone de Beauvoir. This man had cast aside his own fundamental beliefs in the primacy of (...) individual consciousness, the inevitability of violence, and Marxism, embracing instead a messianic Judaism. No, Sartre's supporters argued, it was his interlocutor, the ex-radical, the orthodox, ultra-right-wing activist who had twisted the words and thought of an ailing Sartre to his own ends. Or had he? Shortly before his death, Sartre confirmed the authenticity of the interviews and their puzzling content. Over the past fifteen years, it has become the task of Sartre scholars to unravel and understand them. Presented in this fresh, meticulous translation, the interviews are framed by two provocative essays from Benny Levy himself, accompanied by a comprehensive introduction from noted Sartre authority Ronald Aronson. Placing the interviews in proper biographical and philosophical perspective, Aronson demonstrates that the thought of both Sartre and Levy reveals multiple intentions that taken together nevertheless confirm and add to Sartre's overall philosophy. This absorbing volume at last contextualizes and elucidates the final thoughts of a brilliant and influential mind. Jean-Paul Sartre was offered, but declined, the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. His many works of fiction, drama, and philosophy include the monumental study of Flaubert, _The Family Idiot_, and _The Freud Scenario_, both published in translation by the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

According to James Van Cleve, the principle with which Kant is concerned in the first analogy follows from the view that existence statements are properly made only with quantifiers and have to be expressible in the form ‘∃ xFx’. This thesis is extremely surprising and of great potential importance. It rests on the conviction that two more basic principles can be derived from the relevant view about existence statements. The first of these more basic principles is that there can be (...) no coming to exist ex nihilo or ceasing to exist in nihilo; the second is that there cannot be a series of modes not grounded in an ultimate subject. This paper outlines the relevant view about existence statements, traces the argument provided by Van Cleve in support of his thesis, and concludes that the argument rests on adubious assumption that ‘Everything exists’ either means or entails ‘Everything always exists’. (shrink)

This paper studies the three kinds of conservativeness in a jury decision-making structure: the voting rule, the threshold of reasonable doubt, and the legal information system. In a model of simultaneous voting, Feddersen and Pesendorfer (The American Political Science Review, 92(1), 23-35, 1998) argue that the unanimity rule is the worst-performing voting rule because voters with strategic behaviour mitigate the bias brought about by the voting rule. If this bias can be offset by an opposing (less conservative) bias in the (...) legal information system, we would be able to restore the rationality of informative voting. The new informative equilibrium is strictly better than the original strategic equilibrium in terms of ex post error probability. When a strategic equilibrium survives, we can lower the probability of convicted defendant being innocent by making the information system more informative or by forming a jury with a higher (more conservative) threshold of reasonable doubt. (shrink)

L'interet qu'accorde la philosophie moderne et contemporaine au probleme d'autrui est souvent, et a juste titre, considere comme l'une de ses principales caracteristiques. Peut-on neanmoins croire que cette question de l'intersubjectivite ou de l'interpersonnalite, telle que la poserent Fichte ou Husserl, soit une pure invention ex nihilo de l'epoque contemporaine? Ou bien l'historien de la philosophie, s'il se veut philosophe, ne doit-il pas au contraire postuler l'existence d'une continuite de la reflexion philosophique, et discerner par la comment une question qui (...) se presente comme radicalement neuve manifeste en fait la resurgence d'une meditation et d'un probleme plus anciens? Que les systemes et les reponses changent mais que les questions et les problemes auxquels ils repondent demeurent, telle est la conviction premiere qui anime cet essai. Ainsi, loin que le probleme des rapports avec autrui ait ete absent de la philosophie antique, l'auteur montre dans ce livre comment cette interrogation fut longtemps presente chez les Grecs, sous l'aspect d'une reflexion sur la nature et les conditions de la philia. Cette analyse du theme de l'amitie, indissociable chez les Grecs de leur metaphysique et de leur morale, revele ainsi une pensee du rapport entre les consciences qui, faisant eclater les oppositions factices issues du dualisme classique entre raison et sentiment ou encore entre amour de soi et amour d'autrui, permet d'elaborer une representation plus unitive, plus dynamique aussi, du moi lui-meme. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Horatius: The Man and the HourKenneth J. ReckfordTrimalchio’s projected monumentum in Petronius’ Satyricon will include, among other ill-assorted designs, a sundial: horologium in medio, ut quisquis horas inspiciet, velit nolit, nomen meum legat (71). Horace too, I argue, connects his name with the passing hours: more subtly and modestly than Trimalchio, but also more significantly, in a recurrent play of sounds and words.That Roman poets and orators exploited puns (...) on names, especially cognomina, is well known; but although scholars have noted scattered name-puns in Horace’s poetry (some of which will be mentioned here), the important play on Horatius/hora has been ignored, and any argument seeking to restore it to general consciousness must rely on probabilities: somewhat subjective ones, to be sure, yet which carry a certain cumulative conviction. I begin by discussing Satires 2.6, where Horace is most clearly involved in the horae, and then proceed through a wide range of hora references, most notably in Odes 4.6. A code on Vergilius/ver will provide a friendly parallel. I hope in all this to suggest that Horace plays on his own redende Name not just for occasional fun, but as a way of asserting, and sometimes exploring, his personal identity beneath the shifting personae of his life and craft.Hora Quota Est? (Satires 2.6.44)The question hora quota est? is given as an example of small talk, safely “entrusted” to Horace’s “leaky ear”:septimus octavo propior iam fugerit annus ex quo Maecenas me coepit habere suorum in numero, dumtaxat ad hoc, quem tollere raeda vellet iter faciens et cui concredere nugas hoc genus, “hora quota est? Thraex est Gallina Syro par? matutina parum cautos iam frigora mordent”: et quae rimosa bene deponuntur in aure. per totum hoc tempus subiectior in diem et horam invidiae noster....(40–48) [End Page 583]As if he were giving a public interview, Horace carefully and humorously delimits his relationship with Maecenas. He is an occasional, amusing companion, not a privileged insider. In Satires 1.6 he had distinguished his personal and social acceptance within Maecenas’ circle, where true merit is honored, from those political ambitions from which—in the blind, prejudiced world of Roman politics—a freedman’s son must normally be barred. In Satires 2.6 he goes further. He is not (he alleges) really intimate with Maecenas, certainly not to the point of sharing inside information about, e.g., the Dacian threat or plans to resettle veterans in Southern Italy or Sicily. He is nothing like the confidential friend described by Ennius, “with whom he [the great man] often and gladly shares his table, his conversation, and the giving and taking of advice about his affairs” (rerumque suarum consilium) and “to whom he would speak out confidently” (audacter) about great things or small, good things or bad, all “vomited forth” carelessly, yet “safely deposited” (evomeret... tutoque locaret), and “with whom [he would share] many pleasures.” 1We may suspect that Horace played the role of just such a confidential friend to Maecenas, and played it well. 2 We may also suspect that while he regaled that first audience of insiders with the comic narrative of his daily frustrations in Rome, he was also reassuring Maecenas—to everyone’s amusement, as with the earlier “Journey to Brundisium”—that he did not have, precisely, a leaky ear. One resulting and more than simply dramatic irony is that today’s reader must identify with those importunate street people who were teased, baffled, and insulted by Horace’s silence. I want, however, to argue here for a second irony involving the offhand question hora quota est? which may mean a good deal more to Horace, Maecenas, and ourselves than first appears [End Page 584] on the surface—much as Falstaff’s opening question to the Prince, “Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?” proves fatally relevant to the affairs of Hal and Hotspur, Falstaff and the King, in Henry IV, Part 1. 3“What time is it?” The Romans did not wear watches. Their sense of time, even with sundials, was very inexact by modern standards. Because they had hours (roughly... (shrink)

In recent years there has been great attention paid to the so-called Italian theory in the field of political philosophy. This definition has brought to the fore Italian thinking, but at the same time also covers many reflections of the past several decades, by creating a category easily disclosable but also restricted to a few authors and topics. To this regard, I want to highlight the philosophical work of Ubaldo Fadini, professor of philosophy at the University of Florence, who for (...) many years has been dedicated to the German and French philosophical tradition, crossing different disciplines and combining aesthetic and ethical issues to frame the subjectivity and the institutions into the post-Fordist era. -/- Since his work is multi-faceted and broad, I would suggest first reading Il desiderio in America (The desire in America) for his ‘achipelago-politics’. Fadini addresses the issue of desire in Deleuze with an approach that escapes the opportunity and claim to be an interpretive key from which to see everything systemically. His work wisely touches on several authors and issues, from Kafka to Melville, Spinoza and Nietzsche, and many others, addressing the dynamics of a desire, debt, conscience, responsibility and law. These are, therefore, multiple inputs to desiring, which does not hide the dotted plurality of the brothers in the world, beyond the tight grip of the Oedipal triangle, i.e. the father-mother-child relationship. It follows a not only a psychological issue but also a political one, thus it regards the delineation of a field of forces in which ‘who’ acts – and speaks – is not only the person (a term which in Latin refers to theatrical mask, but well-defined identity fictitious necessary to enter the scene and carry on a story), but the scene itself, produced by relations not illuminated by the light of the show. The plural world of the brothers is the American one, in which the Oedipal relationship with the father-homeland is cut in the name of equality, contrary to colonial subjection (of which Fanon has also shown the psychic character revealing the mechanism of the colonized that internalized the oedipal function of the dominus. Fanon, in fact, has linked the production of subjectivity employee with the apparatus of colonial subordination). -/- To this aside to Deleuzian thought, Fadini adds another, but productively connects to the first: from the cut with the father was not born the son (as in Hegelian-Lacanian interpretation or dialectical-psychoanalytic who wants the definition of the son from by the conflict with his father), but the brothers, the concrete manifold in which the father is not necessary but is placed from time to time in the decision-making function of the uncertainty, in the mobile uncertainty of the brothers in their organization. That this is happening is not a scandal. That this would represent a danger, as Fadini states, is a necessary point to be aware. Maybe, the problem arises when this function is preached the need: no, the fathers are not necessary. And even mothers. We reiterate: it is a political issue around which affirms or denies the legal capacity of the many in favor of the one. The one may be different persons: those who came before, the old, the wise, the priest who runs the border between the world and underworld with the rules applied on the swinging from one place to another, the legislature, the owner. The reason why the scope of the one is so problematic is mainly related to the mechanism he establishes so to ex-istere. It is a mechanism for fault-liability-debt, such as a pyramid which is based on a ‘primary’ concept, namely that of the absence. The paternal function certainly sums up everything in a person: the father is the legislator, he was there before, is older, closer to the world of the dead, but even in that of the living, owns the world, provides rules – even interpretation – to be applied to the fluctuations of life. A really great invention, no doubt about it, higher than that of basileus-priest, more functional, yes, more functional. -/- As in The Wizard of Oz, a narrative that is served in an American election campaign and, as Graeber reminds us, explains the necessity of the idea of debt so to found the new relationship between money and gold, the legislator is microscopic compared to the effects of the conviction that is produced on a large scale, not only on his community but also on the foreigners who come to him in search of completeness. The vacuum is once again an instrument of domination, nothing else. Lack of confidence, of course. Lack of confidence in the ability of the brothers. In the story of The Wizard of Oz, the wizard was well-intentioned and therefore the trick is revealed, however, he reaffirms his role by giving foreigners a certificate of completion that settles the existential debt. Lack of confidence and perhaps even the reading of fairy tales. We don’t need ‘real’ narrations but concrete tales, and, as Fadini says, archipelagos and pirates and cartographers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: HOMOGENEOUS OR HETEROGENEOUS DEVELOPMENT? BRIAN T. MULLADY, 0.P. Holy Apostles College and Seminary Cromwell, Connecticut 0 NE OF THE most difficult questions to confront those who hold for a natural-law conception of Catholic moral teaching which does not change with the development of the times is the area of the freedom of religion in the political order. The traditional teaching on this subject is expressed in many (...) places. The most difficult locus for anyone who wants to defend the traditional opinion is found in The Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX. In this document, the following canons are explicitly enumerated : 77. In this age of ours it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all other cults whatsoever. 78. Hence in certain regions of Catholic name, it has been laudably sanctioned by law that men immigrating there be allowed to have public exercises of any form of worship of their own. 79. For it is false that the civil liberty of every cult, and likewise, the full power granted to all of manifesting openly and publicly any kind of opinions and ideas, more easily leads to the corruption of the morals and minds of the people, and to the spread of the evil of indifferentism.1 1 " 77. Aestate hac nostra non amplius expedit, religionem catholicam haberi tamquam unicam status religionem, ceteris quibuscumque cultibus exclusus. 78. Hine laudabiliter in quibusdam catholici nominis regionibus lege cautum est, ut hominibus illuc immigrantibus liceat publicum proprii cuiusque cultus exercitium habere. 79. Enimvero falsum est, civilem cuiusque cultus libertatem, itemque plenam potestatem omnibus attributam quaslibet opiniones cogitationesque palam publiceque manifestandi conducere ad populorum mores animosque facilius corrumpendos ac indifferentismi pestem propagandam." Denizinger -Schonmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum, n. 1777-1779 (2977-2979), hereafter refered to as DS. 93 94 BRIAN T. MULLADY, O.P. In this text, freedom of religion is clearly condemned. Yet one finds about one hundred years later the issue of religious freedom discussed by Vatican II. Here the conclusion reached seems quite different. The Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. Freedom of this kind means that all men should be immune from coercion on the part of individuals, social groups and every human power so that, within due limits, nobody is forced to act against his convictions in religious matters in private or in public, alone or in associations with others. The Council further declares that the right to religious freedom is based on the very dignity of the human person as known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself. This right of the human person to religious freedom must be given such recognition in the constitutional order of society as will make it a civil right.2 These two documents seem to represent a significant change in the teaching of the church. Beyond the obvious change in attitude towards religious freedom, many moral theologians also see another change : the very language of the decree signals a departure from the traditional basis of the law of nature by a reference to the dignity of the human person. One example will suffice: It may also be a growing dissatisfaction with the traditional concept of ' nature ' which has contributed in recent years to the focus of moral attention moving from ' human nature ' to ' human person ' 2 " Haec Vaticana Synodus declarat personam humanam ius habere ad libertatem religiosam. Huiusmodi libertas in eo consistit, quod omnes homines debent immunes esse a coercitione ex parte sive singulorum sive coetuum socialium et cuiusvis potestatis humanae, et ita quidem ut in re religiosa neque aliquis cogatur ad agendum contra suam conscientiam neque impediatur, quominus iuxta suam conscientiam agat privatim et publice, vel solus vel aliis consociatus, intra debitos limites. Insuper declarat ius ad libertatem religiosam esse revera fundatum in ipsa dignitate personae humanae, qualis et verbo Dei revelato et ipsa ratione congnoscitur. Hoc ius personae humanae ad libertatem religiosam in iuridica societatis ordinatione ita est agnoscendum, ut ius civile evadat." Vatican II, Declaratio de Libertate Religiosa: Dignitatis Humanae, n. 2. Translations are taken from Vatican Council II, The Conciliar and Post Conciliar... (shrink)

The late Hector-Neri Castañeda, the Mahlon Powell Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University, and founding editor of Noûs, has deeply influenced current analytic philosophy with diverse contributions, including guise theory, the theory of indicators and quasi-indicators, and the proposition/practition theory. This volume collects 15 papers--for the most part previously unpublished--in ontology, philosophy of language, cognitive science, and related areas by ex-students of Professor Castañeda, most of whom are now well-known researchers or even distinguished scholars. The authors share the conviction that (...) Castañeda's work must continue to be explored and that his philosophical methodology must continue to be applied in an effort to further illuminate all the issues that he so deeply investigated. The topics covered by the contributions include intensional contexts, possible worlds, quasi-indicators, guise theory, property theory, Russell's substitutional theory of propositions, event theory, the adverbial theory of mental attitudes, existentialist ontology, and Plato's, Leibniz's, Kant's, and Peirce's ontologies. An introduction by the editors relates all these themes to Castañeda's philosophical interests and methodology. (shrink)

Conviction Narrative Theory (CNT) is a theory of choice underradical uncertainty– situations where outcomes cannot be enumerated and probabilities cannot be assigned. Whereas most theories of choice assume that people rely on (potentially biased) probabilistic judgments, such theories cannot account for adaptive decision-making when probabilities cannot be assigned. CNT proposes that people usenarratives– structured representations of causal, temporal, analogical, and valence relationships – rather than probabilities, as the currency of thought that unifies our sense-making and decision-making faculties. According to CNT, (...) narratives arise from the interplay between individual cognition and the social environment, with reasoners adopting a narrative that feels “right” to explain the available data; using that narrative to imagine plausible futures; and affectively evaluating those imagined futures to make a choice. Evidence from many areas of the cognitive, behavioral, and social sciences supports this basic model, including lab experiments, interview studies, and econometric analyses. We identify 12 propositions to explain how the mental representations (narratives) interact with four inter-related processes (explanation, simulation, affective evaluation, and communication), examining the theoretical and empirical basis for each. We conclude by discussing how CNT can provide a common vocabulary for researchers studying everyday choices across areas of the decision sciences. (shrink)

The concept of ‘pareto superiority’ plays a central role in ethics, economics, and law. Pareto superiority is sometimes taken as a relation between outcomes, and sometimes as a relation between actions—even where the outcomes of the actions are uncertain. Whether one action is classed as (ex ante) pareto superior to another depends on the prospects under the actions for each person concerned. I argue that a person’s prospects (in this context) can depend on how that person is designated. Without any (...) constraints on acceptable designators, then, the concept of pareto superiority is ill defined and gives inconsistent results. I consider various ways of completing the definition and draw out some surprising implications. (shrink)

A short paper presented before the Fellows of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions during the academic year 1969-70, with an Introductory Note written nearly 50 years later. The paper describes the author's enduring personal philosophical precept; it is also an implicit encomium to individuals whose psychology establishes a dependable bridge between their rational convictions and their conduct.

It is well known that there is a conflict between three intuitive principles for the evaluation of risky prospects in distributional contexts, Ex-Post Egalitarianism, Ex-Ante Pareto and Dominance. In this paper, I return to Peter Diamond’s suggestion that we reject Dominance as a principle of rationality in distributional contexts and present a new argument in support of this position. The argument is based on an observation regarding the right way for a distributor to weigh reasons for actions. In some cases, (...) I argue, reasons for action that are grounded in the interests of one of the patients ought to be disregarded by the distributor. These cases share the following property: it is in the patient’s overall interest that the distributor disregards them. I show that Dominance does not permit distributors to disregard such reasons and use this observation to argue against the claim that Dominance is a principle of rationality in distributional contexts. (shrink)

Ex 5,22-6.1 presents Moses appealing to the Lord and God's answer to the prophet. Moses' prayer is configured as a cry of despair stemming from a bewilderment of his vocation as a promoter of liberty, subdued by human conditions. The prophet of failure is paradoxical, since it reveals both as a personal and divine failure. For these reasons, Moses has faith put to the test. His reaction shown by a fiery prayer and full of fervor. God responds with the renewal (...) of the promise of liberation. (shrink)

One of the most interesting aspects of Leibniz's philosophy is the distinction between "art" and "nature"; the core of this matter is the possibility (or even the impossibility) of distinguishing as clearly as possible between two ontological domains: on one hand the products of technique (such as "artificial machines"), on the other hand all the beings that can be defined as natural ("natural machines"). The question raised in this paper is if it is possibile to build ontological criteria which can (...) be clear enough to distinguish between the products of nature and those of technique in the field of the "res" that they are. (shrink)