Was sind wir? Wie immer man sich zu dieser Frage stellt, eines scheint offenkundig: Wir sind Tiere, genauer gesagt: menschliche Tiere, Mitglieder der Art Homo sapiens. Dabei mag es überraschen, daß viele Philosophen diese vermeintlich banale Tatsache abstreiten. Plato, Augustinus, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant und Hegel, um nur einige herausragende zu nennen, waren alle der Meinung, wir seien keine Tiere. Es mag zwar sein, daß unsere Körper Tiere sind. Doch sind wir nicht mit unseren Körpern gleichzusetzen. Wir sind etwas (...) anderes als Tiere. Kaum anderer Meinung sind Denker nicht-westlicher Traditionen. Und rund neun von zehn Philosophen, die heutzutage über Probleme der personalen Identität nachdenken, vertreten Ansichten, die ausschließen, daß wir Tiere sind. (shrink)

A very clear and powerfully argued defence of a most important and surprisingly neglected view."--Derek Parfit, All Souls College, Oxford. "If Dr. Olson is right, we are living animals and what goes on in our minds is wholly irrelevant to questions about our persistence through time....[Should] transform philosophical thinking about personal identity."--Peter van Inwagen, University of Notre Dame.

Jonas Olson presents a critical survey of moral error theory, the view that there are no moral facts and so all moral claims are false. Part I explores the historical context of the debate; Part II assesses J. L. Mackie's famous arguments; Part III defends error theory against challenges and considers its implications for our moral thinking.

Most philosophers writing about personal identity in recent years claim that what it takes for us to persist through time is a matter of psychology. In this groundbreaking new book, Eric Olson argues that such approaches face daunting problems, and he defends in their place a radically non-psychological account of personal identity. He defines human beings as biological organisms, and claims that no psychological relation is either sufficient or necessary for an organism to persist. Olson rejects several famous (...) thought-experiments dealing with personal identity. He argues, instead, that one could survive the destruction of all of one's psychological contents and capabilities as long as the human organism remains alive--as long as its vital functions, such as breathing, circulation, and metabolism, continue. (shrink)

Hegel and the Spirit explores the meaning of Hegel's grand philosophical category, the category of Geist, by way of what Alan Olson terms a pneumatological thesis. Hegel's philosophy of spirit, according to Olson, is a speculative pneumatology that completes what Adolf von Harnack once called the "orphan doctrine" in Christian theology--the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Olson argues that Hegel's development of philosophy as pneumatology originates out of a deep appreciation of Luther's dialectical understanding of Spirit and (...) that Hegel's doctrine of Spirit is thus deeply interfused with the values of Würtemberg Pietism. Olson further maintains that Hegel's Enzyklopdie is the post-Enlightenment philosophical equivalent of a Trinitätslehre and that his Rechtsphilosophie is an ecclesiology. Thus Hegel and the Spirit demonstrates the truth of Karl Barth's observation that Hegel is the potential Aquinas of Protestantism. Exploring Hegel's philosophy of spirit in historical, cultural, and personal religious context, the book identifies Hegel's relationship with Hölderlin and his response to Hölderlin's madness as key elements in the philosopher's religious and philosophical development, especially with respect to the meaning of transcendence and dialectic. (shrink)

ἔγωγε νὴ τοὺς κονδύλους, οὓς πολλὰ δὴ ᾽πὶ πολλοῖςἠνεσχόμην ἐκ παιδίου, μαχαιρίδων τε πληγάς.

The scholia to Wasps gloss τραχήλια variously as τὰ ἄκρα καὶ τὰ εὐτελῆ κρέα , τὰ ἀποβαλλόμενα τῶν ὄψων , ὀστράκιόν τι βραχὺ τελέως , and εὐτελὲς προσόψημα ἐν λοπαδίσκοις σκευαζόμενον . These might all be guesses, but the absence of the definite article in the original text shows that Bdelycleon's reference is to something more generic than ‘the backbones’ in the next verse. The ancient commentators were thus probably right not to interpret the word ‘bits of neck’, vel sim., (...) as if this were a diminutive of τράχηλος . Instead, these must be ‘tail-ends’ of food, scraps and leftovers of a sort that might be fed to a dog; compare Hippocrates, Epidemiae 7.62 , where βόεια τραχήλια are mentioned along with ham as part of the diet of a man recovering from illness. (shrink)

The Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) task force was assembled by the American Psychological Association (APA) to guide policy on the role of psychologists in interrogations at foreign detention centers for the purpose of U.S. national security. The task force met briefly in 2005, and its report was quickly accepted by the APA Board of Directors and deemed consistent with the APA Ethics Code by the APA Ethics Committee. This rapid acceptance was unusual for a number of reasons but (...) primarily because of the APA's long-standing tradition of taking great care in developing ethical policies that protected anyone who might be impacted by the work of psychologists. Many psychological and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as reputable journalists, believed the risk of harm associated with psychologist participation in interrogations at these detention centers was not adequately addressed by the report. The present critique analyzes the assumptions of the PENS report and its interpretations of the APA Ethics Code. We demonstrate that it presents only one (and not particularly representative) side of a complex set of ethical issues. We conclude with a discussion of more appropriate psychological contributions to national security and world peace that better respect and preserve human rights. (shrink)

When the activity depicted in a poem involves a succession of moments, it may take one of two possible forms: simple or complex. A simple activity is like a straight line; that is, it involves progression in a single direction, then in another. This changing of course, so to speak, is called a turning point or reversal. Every complex activity contains at least one such turning point; and it is possible to have a good many turning points if the action (...) is long enough, as in an epic like the Odyssey, which in fact is full of reversals, for Odysseus or his men or those whom they encounter are always getting into danger and then out of it, or else doing something and having to produce an opposite effect to the one intended; and of course all such things are reversals. . . . Generally speaking, we feel emotions more powerfully when they come upon us unexpectedly. Unexpected good fortune seems even better than it is, unexpected misfortune even worse, by comparison with what we had expected: consequently we respond with greater emotion. Since reversals always involve something of the unexpected, the complex form of activity offers more possibility of emotional power than the simple. The reversal must be unexpected if it is to be effective, and also...it must be probable; the complex activity must therefore always contain an apparent or on-the-surface probability, which founds our expectation, and the real probability, which defeats it. The real probability must be more probable than the apparent, for otherwise we should not accept it; and it must be hidden , for otherwise we should expect it as the more probable. Part I of a "Conspectus of Poetry" appeared in the Autumn 1977 issue of Critical Inquiry. Elder Olson's contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Poetic Process" and "On Value Judgments in the Arts". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.3 (2000) 291-293 [Access article in PDF] A Reply to Jessica Benjamin Lester C. Olson I am grateful to Jessica Benjamin for making the time to write a letter concerning her experiences in 1979 at "The Second Sex Conference," where Audre Lorde delivered her speech "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." The letter arrived on 4 March 2000, after I had sent (...) the final version of the essay on Lorde's speech to Philosophy and Rhetoric. Although the editor indicated that, despite the late date, it would be possible for me to revise the essay to account for Ms. Benjamin's statement, I instead asked the editor to publish the statement as a comment after the essay, because of the historical value of her firsthand experiences and understandings of the conference, and because her letter provides an opportunity to engage in a dialogue called for in the conclusion of my essay. In addition, the letter gives additional information about context, which impacts any interpretation of Lorde's speech. As such, it becomes an occasion to reflect on interpreting rhetorical texts in historical contexts.As a rhetorical critic, I have been working, periodically, on understanding the rhetoric of Lorde's speech for about three years now. During September 1997, I wrote to several scholar-activists who were well positioned to know about the audiences at the conference and whether there were audio or video recordings of the speech. I was anxious to secure a recording because I knew from my earlier experience in researching Lorde's other speeches that, at times, she revised the texts for printed versions of them. Except for archivists at New York University, nobody replied to my letters. In the meantime, I presented preliminary drafts of my interpretation of Lorde's speech at conferences of the National Communication Association--one paper analyzing the speech itself and a second on later critical commentaries on it. In addition, in undergraduate classes on rhetorical criticism, I used the speech as a sustained example during class discussions on doing rhetorical criticism. In addition to reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) because its publication was the basis for the entire [End Page 291] conference, I read some conference participants' later publications based on their conference papers. Having secured a formal acceptance of my essay, I decided to send a penultimate copy of it to the scholar-activists to whom I had written in 1997, hoping that it might elicit some replies. Two people sent letters during the last couple of months, one so brief that it would not have affected my interpretation of Lorde's speech. Ms. Benjamin's letter, however, mattered to me--both because of its historical importance in its own right and because of the ramifications it has for interpretations in the essay.My immediate response to the first paragraph of Ms. Benjamin's letter was defensiveness. It disturbed me to realize that Ms. Benjamin had experienced my essay as perpetuating the divisiveness and polarization at the time and as marginalizing her experiences. My intentions were not to continue a destructive practice, but rather to examine Lorde's rhetoric to identify pitfalls in coalition politics across multiple differences (both within and among social groups) to mitigate them to the extent possible. Subsequently, I realized that my own defensiveness exemplified one such pitfall. By asking the editor to publish Ms. Benjamin's letter, I could perhaps model a dialogue approach, which I had called for in the essay's conclusion; rectify in some measure the marginalization of Ms. Benjamin's account; and provide readers with additional information for their active reinterpreting of the speech, essay, and letter.Further, based upon Ms. Benjamin's letter, some aspects of the rhetorical context may merit attention in revising my essay. The comments about the organizer's efforts to include a range of social groups and about the resistance to those efforts deserve mention, because becoming audience members was already a rhetorical effect. If, as one black feminist suggested to Ms. Benjamin, "only white women" came to feminist... (shrink)

From the time of Locke, discussions of personal identity have often ignored the question of our basic metaphysical nature: whether we human people are biological organisms, spatial or temporal parts of organisms, bundles of perceptions, or what have you. The result of this neglect has been centuries of wild proposals and clashing intuitions. What Are We? is the first general study of this important question. It beings by explaining what the question means and how it differs from others, such as (...) questions of personal identity and the mind-body problem. It then examines in some depth the main possible accounts of our metaphysical nature, detailing both their theoretical virtues and the often grave difficulties they face. The book does not endorse any particular account of what we are, but argues that the matter turns on more general issues in the ontology of material things. If composition is universal--if any material things whatever make up something bigger--then we are temporal parts of organisms. If things never compose anything bigger, so that there are only mereological simples, then we too are simples--perhaps the immaterial substances of Descartes--or else we do not exist at all (a view Olson takes very seriously). The intermediate view that some things compose bigger things and others do not leads almost inevitably to the conclusion that we are organisms. So we can discover what we are by working out when composition occurs. (shrink)

Based on the author's award-winning and hugely popular undergraduate course at the University of Texas, this book explores these questions and the fundamentally sociological processes which underlie the quest for morality and justice in ...

According to the manuscripts of On the Crown, Demosthenes mockingly claims that, as the youthful Aeschines led processions in his mother's mystery-cult celebrations, he was hailed by various old women as ἔξαρχος καὶ προηγεμὼν καὶ κιττοφόρος καὶ λικνοφόρος καὶ τοιαῦθ’. Τhese are clearly special titles—Aeschines is not just one celebrant among many but a leading figure in the train of worshippers—and recent editors accordingly note that κιττοφόρος seems weak and follow Albert Rubens in printing instead κιστοφόρος, which Harpocration reports was (...) read by some authorities here. κιστοφόρος appears to be supported by ΣF2 18.260 ὁ φέρων τὰς κίστας, which is easily taken to confirm that Demosthenes meant that Aeschines stood out in the crowd of celebrants inter alia because he carried containers within which must have been sacred implements of some sort. (shrink)

Are there moral facts? According to moral nihilism, the answer is no. Some moral nihilists are moral error theorists, who think that moral judgements purport to refer to moral facts, but since there are no moral facts, moral judgements are uniformly false or untrue. Terence Cuneo has recently raised an original and potentially very serious objection to moral error theory. According to Cuneo’s ‘normative theory of speech’, normative facts, some of which are moral facts, are crucially involved in explanations of (...) how it is that we are able to perform illocutionary speech acts, such as asserting, promising, and commanding. Many versions of moral error theory reject not only moral facts, but also normative facts of the kind Cuneo takes to be among the prerequisites of our abilities to perform illocutionary speech acts. If Cuneo’s argument is successful, then, moral error theory has the unsettling implication that we do not speak, and possibly that we cannot speak. I shall argue, however, that the argument ultimately fails, chiefly because its core premise fails to establish that illocutionary speech acts are normative in the first place. (shrink)

Clear-eyed and foundational, Roger Olson's The Essentials of Christian Thought outlines the most basic, necessary principles of a Christian outlook on the world---principles without which no thinking can properly be viewed as Christian.

Personal identity deals with questions about ourselves qua people (or persons). Many of these questions are familiar ones that occur to everyone at some time: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Discussions of personal identity go right back to the origins of Western philosophy, and most major figures have had something to say about it. (There is also a rich literature on personal identity in Eastern philosophy, which I am not competent (...) to discuss. Collins 1982 is a good source.). (shrink)

This article discusses connections between grounded action, leverage points, and paradigm transformation and transcendence. Part one provides background on Meadows' (1999) approach to leverage points as well as the concept of paradigms. Part two argues that grounded action is inherently suited for leverage points analysis and paradigm-based interventions. Part three offers an example of individual paradigm transformation in the educational context vis-à-vis Olson's (2006) grounded theory of driven succeeding. The article concludes with considerations of how the application of grounded (...) action in one classroom might leverage system-wide paradigm transformation. (shrink)

Medical advances prolong life. They also sometimes prolong suffering. Should we protect life or alleviate suffering? This dilemma formed the foundation for a powerful right-to-die movement and a counterbalancing concern over an emerging culture of death. What are the qualities of a life worth living? Where are the boundaries of tolerable suffering? This book is based on a hugely popular undergraduate course taught at the University of Texas, and is ideal for those interested in the social construction of social worth, (...) social problems, and social movements. This book is part of a larger text, Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Decides?, http://www.routledge.com/9780415892476/. (shrink)

We argue that dominant white cultural views and public health co-produce race as a technology that charts the path of viral transmission away from the white bodies to form a trajectory for an otherwise aimless disease. This epistemological project is one enmeshed in popular culture, medical practice, and biopolitics. COVID-19 and the related Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement work together to make visible the narrative technologies. This project contributes to understanding race and public health as co-constituted in ways that shape (...) imaginative possibilities, material and agential realties, and health outcomes in light of COVID-19. Our argument is novel in naming race a technology of American public health and taking up Coeckelbergh and Reijers’ call for a normative theory of narrative technology. We extend Coeckelbergh and Reijers’ narrative technologies to include race, a narrative artifact, co-produced by biology, public health, and individual actors. (shrink)

Following the lead of Nietzsche, several post-modern philosophers challenge the Western notion of rationality and its representational model of thought and embrace the Dionysian element in Nietzsche's philosophy, which can take the form of embracing madness (Foucault), desire (Deleuze and Guattari), or carnival (Kristeva). This paper will place Radhakrishnan into the context of a hermeneutical dialogue with these figures from post-modern philosophy, and it will attempt to address the issue of the post-modem attack on rationality by these post-modern philosophers by (...) comparing their concept of rationality with that espoused by Radhakrishnan. It will also be demonstrated that for Radhakrishnan reason supplies conceptual clarity, is subordinate to intuition, and justifies the validity of intuition which transcends reason. It will be argued that Radhakrishnan agrees with the post-modernist that reason is not universal, but he does not share their radical scepticism as his philosophy seeks wholeness, unity, order, and rationality in conjunction with intuition in contrast to the choice of these post-modernist for diversity, difference, and chaos, and madness. (shrink)

Aristophanes' Peace is preserved in ten manuscripts, the oldest and most complete of which are the tenth-century Ravennas 429 and the eleventh-century Venetus Marcianus 474 . A third manuscript, Venetus Marcianus 475 , is almost certainly a direct copy of V and can therefore be eliminated. The seven remaining manuscripts of the play, along with the Aldine edition of 1498, share numerous variant readings, as well as lacunae at 948–1011 and 1076b, and can accordingly be described as a family. As (...) I will argue in detail below, the stemmatic relationship among the members of this family can be most economically represented as shown in Figure 1. (shrink)

In this issue, Morain and Largent (2023) raise a pressing issue arising in the context of embedded research—the nature and extent of investigator duties to patient-participants when the line betwee...

The Standard View of personal identity says that someone who exists now can exist at another time only if there is continuity of her mental contents or capacities. But no person is psychologically continuous with a fetus, for a fetus, at least early in its career, has no mental features at all. So the Standard View entails that no person was ever a fetus--contrary to the popular assumption that an unthinking fetus is a potential person. It is also mysterious what (...) does ordinarily happen to a human fetus, if it does not come to be a person. Although an extremely complex variant of the Standard View may allow one to persist without psychological continuity before one becomes a person but not afterwards, a far simpler solution is to accept a radically non-psychological account of our identity. (shrink)

The author presents a discussion of existentialistic themes as they are found in sartrean literature and scholarly writings. (staff).

My aim in this essay is largely defensive. I aim to discuss some problems for moral error theory and to offer plausible solutions. A full positive defense of moral error theory would require substantial investigations of rival metaethical views, but that is beyond the scope of this essay. I will, however, try to motivate moral error theory and to clarify its commitments. Moral error theorists typically accept two claims – one conceptual and one ontological – about moral facts. The conceptual (...) claim is that moral facts are or entail facts about categorical reasons (and correspondingly that moral claims are or entail claims about categorical reasons); the ontological claim is that there are no categorical reasons – and consequently no moral facts – in reality. I accept this version of moral error theory and I try to unpack what it amounts to in Section 2.1 In the course of doing so I consider two preliminary objections: that moral error theory is (probably) false because its implications are intuitively unacceptable (what I call the Moorean objection) and that the general motivation for moral error theory is self-undermining in that it rests on a hidden appeal to norms. The above characterization seems to entail the standard formulation of moral error theory, according to which first-order moral claims are uniformly false. Critics have argued that the standard formulation is incoherent since – by the law of excluded middle – the negation of a false claim is true. Hence if ‘Torture is wrong’ is false, ‘Torture is not wrong’ is true. Contrary to what moral error theorists contend, then, moral error theory seems to carry first-order moral implications that by the theory’s own lights are uniformly false. In Section 3 I suggest a formulation that is consistent with the standard formulation of moral error theory, free of first-order moral implications, and subject to no logical difficulties. In Section 4 I consider and rebut Stephen Finlay’s recent attack on moral error theory. According to Finlay the conceptual claim is false because all moral claims – and indeed all normative claims – are, or should be understood as, relativized to some moral standard or system of ends. Moral error theorists thus attribute to ordinary speakers an error that simply isn’t there. I argue that Finlay’s view has some very implausible implications and that it does not avoid commitment to various forms of error theory. This becomes especially clear when we focus on fundamental moral claims. In Section 5 I consider the worry that error theorists’ rejection of categorical reasons proves too much; in particular, the worry that error theorists’ qualms about categorical reasons apply equally to claims about hypothetical reasons, that is, claims to the effect that there is reason to take the means to one’s ends. In my view error theorists such as Mackie and Joyce have failed to pay due consideration to this problem. What the challenge establishes, I submit, is that error theorists cannot just take for granted that hypothetical reasons are metaphysically unproblematic; they must offer an account of hypothetical reasons that shows that they are. I argue that the only plausible account available to error theorists is one according to which claims about hypothetical reasons reduce to non-normative claims about relations between means and ends. (shrink)

According to T.M. Scanlon's buck-passing account of value, to be valuable is not to possess intrinsic value as a simple and unanalysable property, but rather to have other properties that provide reasons to take up an attitude in favour of their owner or against it. The 'wrong kind of reasons' objection to this view is that we may have reasons to respond for or against something without this having any bearing on its value. The challenge is to explain why such (...) reasons are of the wrong kind. This is what I set out to do, after illustrating the objection more thoroughly. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.3 (2000) 259-285 [Access article in PDF] The Personal, the Political, and Others: Audre Lorde Denouncing "The Second Sex Conference" 1 Lester C. Olsen Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference--those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older--know that (...) survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.--Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider 112Fifty years ago, in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir's book entitled The Second Sex was published in France. She did not consider herself a philosopher because, to her, a philosopher was "someone who has built a great system" (Simons and Benjamin 1979, 338). Her book, nonetheless, became a milestone in feminist philosophy, for it synthesizes elements of existentialism, phenomenology, and socialism in an account of women's situation in society. Central to this account is Beauvoir's concentration upon representations of "self" and "other." For example, Beauvoir affirmed, "The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality--that of the Self and the Other. This duality was not originally attached to the division of the sexes; it was not dependent upon any empirical facts" (1993, xl). In an interview, Beauvoir stressed, "I believe that the Other is not simply an idealist relationship, it is a materialist relationship" (Simons and Benjamin 1979, 345). To develop her analysis, Beauvoir drew upon another binary, "master" and "slave." However, she concentrated on how women, as a category, had been subordinated as men's "other."Twenty years ago, in 1979, Audre Lorde delivered her best-known speech, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," at an international conference held in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of [End Page 259] Beauvoir's book. According to conference organizer Jessica Benjamin and reporter Lilly Rivlin, writing together in Ms. magazine, "[M]ore than 800 women from all over the world gathered at a conference on feminist theory, 'The Second Sex--Thirty Years Later,' sponsored by the New York Institute for the Humanities" (1980, 48). Like most of the conference participants, Lorde was a woman, a feminist, a socialist, a public intellectual, and an activist scholar. Lorde may have participated in the conference as a "consultant," a poet at a public reading, and a speaker at a plenary session 2 because her feminist philosophy is of resonance to Beauvoir's. Both women rejected biology as the basis for women's situation, believing instead that material conditions are most fundamental. Both commented upon the power of symbolism, especially myths about others, in perpetuating social inequalities and failing to differentiate categories for others. Both saw the relationship between "self" and "other" as a vital and creative tension.To understand this tension, Beauvoir drew explicitly on Hegel's ideas as they were treated in Sartre's oeuvre (Lloyd 1983). In contrast, Lorde may have drawn upon conceptions of double consciousness among black public intellectuals in the United States (Henderson 1989, 17-21). Unlike Beauvoir, Lorde was a lesbian, a mother, and a black woman for whom Beauvoir's analogies between the status of women and the status of "Negroes" were problematic. Confronting the conference participants on the last day, during the last panel entitled "The Personal and the Political," Lorde condemned the conference for its limited range of speakers, its substance, its very structure. Lorde examined the ramifications of failing to include others as equals. For in failing to do so, the conference had employed the same tools of oppression over others that the participants deplored in the politics of patriarchy. Lorde challenged the conference participants, who presumably understood that Beauvoir had represented woman as... (shrink)