In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Verum-factum and Practical Wisdom in the Early Writings of Giambattista VicoRobert C. MinerAs several contemporary writers have noted, Giambattista Vico defends the idea of practical knowledge, a type of knowledge that cannot be fully expressed by propositions and defies reductions to method. 1 The defense of practical knowledge, against Descartes and the rise of objectifying science, is most clearly articulated in a group of Vico’s early writings: the oration (...) De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709), the metaphysical book De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710), and two rejoinders (Prima and Seconda risposte) to critics of the De antiquissima. In these texts Vico criticizes Cartesian method in terms that remind us of Aristotle, or at least the Aristotle of the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. “If you were to import the geometrical method into practical life, you would do no more than exhaust yourself in becoming a rational lunatic” (A 7.5). 2This comment and many others like it seem to suggest that Vico is an “Aristotelian,” but any simple classification is problematic. In the same text in which Vico defends the Aristotelian topos he also announces that “the true and the made are convertible” (verum et factum convertuntur). The emphasis on the [End Page 53] role of “making” in truth seems incompatible with the Aristotelian idea of phronesis, whose knowledge is associated with praxis and cannot be reduced to techne. It would be simpler if Vico distinguished between a realm in which the verum-factum principle applied and one in which prudentia was supreme. However, Vico not only situates mathematics and experimental science within the metaphysical framework governed by verum-factum, but also implies strong connections between making and ethics. The prominence Vico assigns to making in all areas of human endeavor gives him a distinctly modern appearance in the fashion of Bacon, Galileo, and Hobbes.This gives rise to both hermeneutical and philosophical problems. Is Vico simply hesitating between the old and new? Does he coherently balance an Aristotelian perspective with the “modern” emphasis on artifice? 3 Perhaps Vico is caught in the middle of the querelle des anciens et modernes, somewhat like John Dunn’s version of Locke, a “tragic figure” who cannot reconcile his epistemological discoveries with a noninstrumentalist view of practical reason. 4 The purpose of this essay is to provide a sympathetic interpretation of Vico’s early writings on prudentia and its links to both verum-factum and rhetoric.Vico contra Rule-based EthicsThe denial that ethics is well understood as a matter of following or justifying general rules has become a commonplace among contemporary Aris-totelians and Wittgensteinians. 5 Against the Enlightenment ambition to construct a universally valid moral science, recent virtue ethics has emphasized the irreducibly contingent aspects of human life, aspects which resist the clutches of “method.” Although Descartes wrote little about morals directly, his influence can be detected in the ethical writings of Hobbes, Kant, Mill, and Sidgwick. These examples of modern moral philosophy presuppose the correctness of the Cartesian diagnosis of ancient and medieval writing on virtue. In the Discourse on Method Descartes compares previous moral teaching to “the most proud and magnificent palaces built on nothing but sand or mud.” 6 Descartes himself did not provide a rational justification of ethics, but he has had no shortage of successors who have tried to complete his foundational project. Jusnaturalism, Kantian deontology, and utilitarianism, as different as they are from one another, share the desire to ground ethics in principles as universal and certain as [End Page 54] those of mathematics. Each of these variants of post-Cartesian ethics claim to have discovered and justified such a principle or set of principles. Maxims deduced from the principle, if not the principle itself, will arguably enable moral agents to discover the right course of action in a particular situation.Vico did not live to witness the most articulate expressions of a Cartesian approach to ethics, but he did apprehend the shift in focus from prudence to method. In the De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, an oration delivered at the University of Naples in 1708 and published the following year, Vico criticizes approaches that locate... (shrink)

Do not be put off by the cumbersome title of this book. Underneath a huge mass of erudition lies a simple yet powerful thesis. The thinkers of the high Middle Ages did not imagine themselves as contributors to metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, or any of the autonomous but interconnected “spheres of philosophical inquiry” that most post-Enlightenment historians of medieval philosophy take for granted. In very different ways, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham use the materials of philosophy to describe and illuminate the (...) movement of the human creature in via. The result may occasionally remind us of “doing philosophy,” but Inglis suggests that the similarities are mostly superficial. If we care about understanding medieval thought on its own terms, we will pay attention to the differences between the projects of modern philosophy and those of medieval theology—differences that are no less marked even when the latter self-consciously appropriates the insights of pagan philosophy. (shrink)

ExcerptAfter emigrating to the United States, Leo Strauss taught political philosophy for thirty years, first at the New School for Social Research in New York and then at the University of Chicago, before retiring at St. John's College. Richard Wolin observes that he “seems to have deeply mistrusted day-to-day politics—a very strange stance, to be sure, for someone who made his living teaching political philosophy.”1 But is it really so strange? What in his German Gymnasium education, or his participation (...) in the Zionist movement, would have prepared him for the peculiarities of day-to-day American politics? Strauss did not underestimate the…. (shrink)

Nishida Kitarō was the most significant and influential Japanese philosopher of the twentieth century. His work is pathbreaking in several respects: it established in Japan the creative discipline of philosophy as practiced in Europe and the Americas; it enriched that discipline by infusing Anglo European philosophy with Asian sources of thought; it provided a new basis for philosophical treatments of East Asian Buddhist thought; and it produced novel theories of self and world with rich implications for contemporary philosophizing. Nishida's work (...) is also frustrating for its repetitive and often obscure style, exceedingly abstract formulations, and detailed but frequently dead end investigations. Nishida once said of his work, “I have always been a miner of ore; I have never managed to refine it” (Nishida 1958, Preface). A concise presentation of his achievements therefore will require extensive selection, interpretation and clarification. (shrink)

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, osteoporosis is described as a major public health problem of pandemic proportions, affecting millions of people, and women in particular, around the globe. This situation is frequently described as a result of an aging population, but it is also a consequence of a substantial transformation of the medical understanding and definition of osteoporosis in the latter half of the twentieth century. In this article, the authors trace the transformation of a biologically based understanding (...) of the condition involving a few patients, to the current statistically based definition of osteoporosis from which only a few remain untouched. At the center of this development is the measurement of bone mineral density through densitometrics, combining the use of imaging techniques and statistical epidemiology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 99-119 [Access article in PDF] Animism and Empiricism: Copernican Physics and the Origins of William Gilbert's Experimental Method John Henry In the second year of this journal's run, way back in 1941, appeared Edgar Zilsel's classic and still widely cited paper on The Origins of William Gilbert's Experimental Method. 1 Focusing on Gilbert's De magnete of 1600, undoubtedly a seminal (...) text in the history of the experimental method, 2 Zilsel argued that Gilbert borrowed his methodology from elite craftsmen, artisans, and other manual workers involved in mining, smelting, smithing, compass making, navigation, sailing, and other activities which involved working with iron or with magnets. 3 On its appearance the paper contributed to a growing and still continuing debate in the history of science about the relative importance of scholars and craftsmen in the origins of modern science. Although Zilsel's general thesis has been critically evaluated in terms of that wider debate, 4 his very specific claims about the [End Page 99] role of elite craftsmen in providing Gilbert with a ready-made experimental method, have never been properly considered. This paper attempts to reassess Zilsel's claims about the origin of Gilbert's experimental method and, in so doing, to arrive at a richer understanding of what Gilbert was trying to do in De magnete and to suggest an alternative source for his experimentalism.The first thing to note about Zilsel's argument is that it had two strands. 5 One of these pointed to actual experimental techniques used by Gilbert and showed that they can all be found in earlier writings on magnets. To be more specific, the techniques in question are to be found either in the thirteenth-century "Letter on the Magnet" written by Petrus Pergrinus or Pierre de Maricourt, first published in 1558, or in The Newe Attractive, a work on the magnetic compass written by a retired mariner, Robert Norman, first published in 1581 but reprinted three times before 1600. 6 The second strand did not involve experiments at all, with one notable exception, but simply implied or suggested that Gilbert's experimental techniques must have been inspired by miners and foundrymen, or navigators and instrument makers. The problem here, as others have objected, 7 is that it is by no means clear that elite craftsmen were engaged in performing experiments in anything like the sense of the word required for the argument to cut any ice. For Zilsel, however, "we cannot doubt that many of [the miners and foundrymen of the period], stimulated to improvements by economic competition, were wont to try new techniques and to observe natural processes." 8 A few sentences later we are told that it is "obvious" that "among such manual labourers there were experimentalists, though experimentalists with practical aims only and without theoretical knowledge." 9 [End Page 100]The philosopher of science at this point might legitimately want to suggest that an experiment is not an experiment unless it is testing a theory, but we do not have to enter into such arguable niceties. 10 We can see that there is something profoundly tendentious in Zilsel's claims simply by reading on. At this point Zilsel mentioned the only experiment specifically referred to in this strand of his argumentation. Quoting Gilbert, Zilsel showed that Gilbert himself must have descended into a mine in order, as Zilsel says, "to verify the hypothesis" that the polarity of a magnet derives from the polarity of the earth: We had a twenty pounds' heavy loadstone dug and hauled out after having first observed and marked its ends in its vein. Then we put the stone in a wooden tub on water, so that it could turn freely. Immediately the surface which had looked to the North in the mine turned itself to the North on the water. 11Zilsel did not make the absurd claim that Gilbert must have seen miners doing this kind of experiment, but he did all he could to... (shrink)

The 2016 Republican Party platform is unabashed in its rejection of environmental principles and its embrace of extractive labor. Its ‘Natural Resources’ section reads: ‘[w]e are the party of America's growers, producers, farmers, ranchers, foresters, miners, commercial fishermen, and all those who bring from the earth the crops, minerals, energy, and the bounties of our seas.’ What is interesting about this statement is its selective view of productive labor. Not all who bring from the earth are equally valued within the (...) American conservative worldview. What accounts for the outsized role of white male workers in the discourses of American conservatives? (shrink)

The Philippines sits atop vast mineral deposits estimated to be worth around 47 trillion Philippine Pesos. Yet, mining in the Philippines has a mixed track record as far as its impact on human and economic development is concerned. This paper tries to draw lessons from the Marcopper Mine in Marinduque, Philippines, using a framework—what we call a “mining and human development causality chain”—to begin to think through how extractive industries can contribute to inclusive growth. Essentially, there is a chain of (...) inputs and events that—when properly executed by various stakeholders—could lead to very strong economic and human development outcomes not just for the communities directly affected by the mine but also the country as a whole. Too often, this chain is easily broken by governance. Using a critical analysis of the Marinduque mining disaster, we illustrate how breaking this chain can completely reverse mining’s potential to assist in human development. (shrink)

Abstract: I argue that Orientalism continues to construct Arabs as subjects that cannot suffer violence, particularly the violence of torture. Beginning with Edward Said’s observation that Orientalists constructed ‘Arabs’ in the nineteenth -century as inorganic, metallic, and mineralized beings, I trace these themes through various sites in and around Guantanamo Bay. One finds the tropes of Orientalism in the Bybee memo as well as in the diary of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Through these three distinct but related moments, one finds that (...) Orientalism continues to produce Arabs as inorganic entities beyond death and thereby immune to violence and specifically the violence of torture. Insofar as imperialism has co-opted the language of non-violence by constructing its enemies as inviolable, one must recognize the Orientalized Arab as a receptor of limitless ‘non - violent’ hostilities. (shrink)

This paper applies an eight-step model of crisis management to the Gulf Oil disaster and discusses potential legal liabilities for BP. The eight steps are: ascertaining the facts, portraying the problem, allocating responsibility, responding to critics, adopting new policies, implementing new procedures, utilizing political/legal tactics, and costs in money and credibility. While crisis management responses often fall into either uniformly positive or uniformly negative patterns and outcomes, the BP case falls into a more complex pattern, where the company did some (...) things well and other things poorly, with BP making its worst mistakes in the pre-crisis stage. After examining BP’s response, the longer version of this paper examines the regulatory role and the application of the capture theory to the Minerals Management Service of the Department of Interior. That section and associated references are available upon request to the author. (shrink)

Re-examination of the manuscript of John Farey's unpublished mineral survey of south-east Sutherland, together with his published opinions on the significance of fossils from the Brora Coalfield and his interpretation of the stratigraphy of that coalfield, leaves no doubt that, contrary to the accepted view, Farey did not recognise the Mesozoic age of the Brora Coalfield but thought of it as Carboniferous. Farey was a Smithian geologist, and the difficulty he had in interpreting unfamiliar evidence from Brora illustrates the (...) difficulties experienced by bio-stratigraphers in the 1810s when fossil ranges were imperfectly understood. Evidence is presented which suggests that the first geologist to recognise the Mesozoic age of the Brora beds may have been John MacCulloch. (shrink)

This research engages with the problem of company–community conflict in mining. The inequitable distributions of risks, impacts, and benefits are key drivers of resource conflicts and are likely to remain at the forefront of mining-related research and advocacy. Procedural and interactional forms of justice therefore lie at the very heart of some of the real and ongoing challenges in mining, including: intractable local-level conflict; emerging global norms and performance standards; and ever-increasing expectations for the industry to translate high-level corporate social (...) responsibility policy into on-the-ground practice. This research focuses on the “process” aspects of resource conflicts through an examination of existing grievance-handling procedures at six mining operations where company–community conflict was present. In their current form, and on their own, the six mechanisms were found to be insufficient in their capacity to advance justice. The authors argue that if the overall objective of global norms is that companies construct and perform grievance handling in ways that strongly preference just practices, then “mechanisms-in-practice” must be better understood and constructively critiqued along all justice dimensions. (shrink)

This discussion note attempts to show that, pace Niko Kolodny and John MacFarlane, the Miners case intuitively speaks in favor of subjectivism. I argue that properly understood the intuitively correct judgements concerning the case are compatible with subjectivism. My argument is based, among other things, on a comparison between the Minders case and other cases as well as on considerations of blameworthiness.

In the last twenty years or so there has been a renewed interest in Pliny the Elder, once an immensely popular author whose reputation began to suffer after Renaissance scholars challenged the accuracy of his work. The recent interest has been interdisciplinary, producing contributions from classical scholars, historians, scientists, and technologists, sometimes working as a team. What “interdisciplinary” has meant in practice is a collaboration rather than a blend of disciplines. What you see in Pliny is what your training makes (...) obvious.John Healy's book is a robust defense, indeed promulgation, of the thesis that Pliny practiced “science.” This thesis implies not only that science was a recognizable, and recognized, activity in antiquity but that “science” can tell us more clearly than any other rubric what Pliny was up to. Science can certainly tell us about Pliny's natural world, because it was very much like our own, but it does not tell us anything about Pliny's enterprise. We may feel a sense of intellectual satisfaction in knowing the formula for the acetic acid in vinegar and the chemical equation that represents its attack on calcareous rocks, but Pliny's story is about something else.In this study Healy, a distinguished classical scholar, has taken aboard a lot of science. He provides us with valuable information about the suitability of the Latin language for the development of technical terms and about its borrowings from Greek and other languages. After Healy the classicist considers Pliny as a writer and describes his life, sources, mode of work, language, and style, Healy the scientist addresses the topic of ancient science. Chapter 10 lays down the program, taken from a modern classification of fields of research. Healy takes the ten subdivisions of the “natural sciences, technologies and engineering” as a structure for his investigation into Pliny and for the format of the book. He thus looks at Pliny's thought in relation to chemistry, physics, earth sciences, engineering , applied sciences, biology, and agriculture. A footnote tells us that he has omitted any reference to medicine, pharmacology, and astronomy—a pity, as these subjects, with their own identities and practitioners, come closer to science than most of what either Pliny or Healy discusses. In the style of a modern scientific textbook, Healy's text is broken down into numerous subsections to accommodate modern categories. The chapters on minerals and gems are alphabetical lists.The combination of classical learning and scientific knowledge looks formidable and is certainly unusual. But the book is more an exercise in applying science to classical studies than an example of science illuminating history. The confidence his scientific material gives Healy leads to a certain historical insensitivity. I declare an interest here, for he badly misreads what I have argued about “science” in antiquity. His rigid use of modern—our—categories inevitably leads to instances in which he finds Pliny confusing them or failing to separate them. Our categories take on a life of their own in this exposition: the section on “electricity,” for example, is largely independent of Pliny. Its subsection 12.2.1c is on piezoelectricity, of which “neither Pliny, nor other ancient authorities, appear to have been aware.” Gravity has to be there, because it is part of modern physics, but Pliny does not mention it.There is no reason why classical scholars and scientists should not be interested in Pliny and find each other's disciplines enlightening. But the claim that Pliny was, as Healy says, making “contributions” to our science is a historical one and relates to Pliny's purposes. No amount of modern mathematical or chemical formulas will tell us what was in Pliny's mind, and he was fairly clear, after all, on his purposes in writing the Natural History. It's back to “Science in Antiquity?” again. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:John Buridan, Quaestiones super libros "De generatione et corruptione" Aristotelis: A Critical Edition with an IntroductionPeter G. SobolMichiel Streijger, Paul J. J. M. Bakker, and Johannes M. M. H. Thijssen, editors. John Buridan, Quaestiones super libros "De generatione et corruptione" Aristotelis : A Critical Edition with an Introduction. History of Science and Medicine Library, 17. Medieval and Early Modern Science, 14. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2010. Pp. ix (...) + 269. Cloth, $141.00.To readers of these pages, John Buridan needs no introduction. A popular and influential teacher in his own time, he came early to the attention of historians of medieval intellectual history who, for the most part, have rested content to read his works in manuscripts and early printed editions. So it is a happy occasion to welcome a new critical edition of a work by Buridan, especially one that expands our access to Buridan's thought beyond his logic, physics, and cosmology.In the introduction, the editors recount the manuscript traditions of Buridan's literal commentary on De generatione et corruptione and the more complex tradition of the Quaestiones, which is the work edited here. The editors discovered two versions of the Quaestiones and chose to work with the version represented by the greater number of manuscripts. They provide detailed evidence from shared accidents among the manuscripts of this version to support their stemma codicum. Using the stemma, they selected a base manuscript and two others, each representing a distinct branch, for collation. The text itself is accompanied by an apparatus criticus and an apparatus fontium.In De generatione et corruptione, Aristotle tried to improve upon the inadequate efforts of his predecessors to explain growth and change in the terrestrial realm. After dismissing atomism and theories relying on a single or several persisting elements, he offered his own theory, in which four primary qualities inhere in prime matter to form four elements, which in turn combine to form mineral, vegetable, and animal bodies. But, as they tried to work out the consequences of his theory, Aristotle's Arabic and Latin commentators discovered several problems, one of which became perhaps the most widely discussed problem in medieval philosophy: how to reconcile the idea that the properties of compound substances derive from the proportion of their constituent elements with the idea that those properties derive from the compound's substantial form. This problem becomes even more difficult when the compound in question is a living body, especially when the living body is human. The problem was addressed by philosophers in commentaries on various works of Aristotle, by theologians in commentaries on the Sentences, and even by physicians. Some historians, such as Anneliese Meier, have seen this as a conflict between the Aristotelian theory of matter and Aristotelian metaphysics, with the metaphysicians insisting that a thing is what it is because of its substantial form, and the natural scientists insisting that a thing it what it is because of what it is made of. For several centuries this problem provoked many unsatisfactory solutions, remaining intractable right up to the time that natural philosophers began to abandon the Aristotelian worldview; indeed, its intractability may have contributed to their willingness to look elsewhere for a coherent theory of matter.Given the importance of this problem in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century commentaries on De generatione, this edition may frustrate readers who expect pedagogy along with philology. Readers will find where in the text the three manuscripts have column breaks, but will find no explanatory notes. The introduction surveys Buridan's life and ponders the sequence of events through which a medieval quaestiones commentary made [End Page 140] its way from the master in his lecture hall to the copyist's pen, but it offers no overview of the subject matter treated in the commentary itself.Buridan dealt with the problem of the elements in the longest question of his commentary, the twenty-second question of book 1, "Whether the substantial forms of elements remain in a mixed body." He found that incompatible consequences followed whether a mixed body's qualities arose from its constituent elements or from its substantial form. How, for example, could fire and water persist in a compound... (shrink)

Niko Kolodny and John MacFarlane claim that a situation involving some trapped miners involves a deontic paradox the resolution of which requires rejecting the logical law of modus ponens. I show that the appearance of paradox results from confusion and that the miners case supplies no cogent reason for impugning modus ponens.

How do we transmit or distribute knowledge, as distinct from generating or producing it? In this book John Greco examines the interpersonal relations and social structures which enable and inhibit the sharing of knowledge within and across epistemic communities. Drawing on resources from moral theory, the philosophy of language, action theory and the cognitive sciences, he considers the role of interpersonal trust in transmitting knowledge, and argues that sharing knowledge involves a kind of shared agency similar to giving a (...) gift or passing a ball. He also explains why transmitting knowledge is easy in some social contexts, such as those involving friendship or caregiving, but impossible in contexts characterized by suspicion and competition rather than by trust and cooperation. His book explores phenomena that have been undertheorized by traditional epistemology, and throws new light on existing problems in social epistemology and the epistemology of testimony. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ImagesAdrien BugariAdrien Bugari is a graduate of the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design (ESAD, Reims, France). In 2007, his work was exhibited at the Salon du Meuble de Paris and the Salon d’Art et de Design Contemporain de Montrouge (France). In 2008, he worked with the Italian designer Martino Gamper and continued his studies at the École Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne (ECAL, Switzerland), receiving a degree in 2009. (...) His work, Round Box, appeared at the Milan Salon du Design in 2008. While his early work focuses almost exclusively on objects and their functionality, Bugari’s practice engages with contemporary art in general and design in particular. His drawings—most often done with felt tip marker or pencil—are concerned with space and matter. Bugari lives and works in Paris.www.adrienbugari.comCristalThe series, Cristal—comprising fifteen drawings on recycled paper—was completed during a stay in Ithaca, New York, in 2011.Cristal is a specimen study inspired by a reading of A Field Guide and Introduction to the Geology and Chemistry of Rocks and Minerals by Charles Sorrell. Minimally sketched, the structures are set off by white oil pastel. The substance of each drawing is produced by the contrast between the rigid outlines of each facet and the brilliance of the white pastel. The light materiality of the sketches creates a delicate effect: the transparency covers the drawn lines without minimizing their imperfections. The structure—as nothing more than the relation between parts—naturally implies a point of view. It calls into question the necessity of form and the way that differences and similarities are established. It plays with resemblances, or, les airs de famille. It asks what in the drawing is regular or continuous and what is not. And it wonders where to begin. The series, Cristal, is also a magnetic proximity, a minimalist rhythm: it creates the possibility of successive metamorphoses, until there is nothing left to say.It is no doubt possible to interpret Cristal as a geometric abstraction. I prefer to define it as a moment rather than a concept. Viewed in that light, Cristal can be said to have endured for the season of one Ithaca winter. [End Page 1] Click for larger view View full resolutionIMAGE: Adrien Bugari, CRISTAL 14Felt tip marker and oil pastel on recycled paper, 65 × 48 cm.Courtesy the artist[End Page 2]Copyright © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

The longstanding interest in business ethics has been given renewed emphasis by high profile scandals in the world of business and finance. At the same time, many economists--dissatisfied with the discipline's emphasis on self-interest and individualism and by the asocial nature of much economic theory--have sought to englarge the scope of economics by looking at ethical questions. In Ethics and Economic Affairs a group of interdisciplinary scholars provide contributions on international interest in this aspect of socio-economics and economic-psychology. The book (...) is divided into four parts. The first looks at Business Ethics and Management. Part Two enlivens the debate with empirical data. The third part examines the implications for economic theory and asks if the integration of ethics in the economy is possible or if they are fundamentally different systems. Part Four introduces perspectives from other disciplines, sets economics within its wider context and looks to the future. The editors have brought together a group of contributors from nine different countries and a broad range of disciplines, including: Norman E. Bowie, Monroe Burk, Amitai Etzioni, Richard H. Guerette, Ralph E. Miner, Lynne M. Rosansky, N. Craig Smith, Roberts Stallaerts, Philip Stone and John Tomer. (shrink)

This chapter reviews a number of related problems in the epistemology of testimony, and suggests some dilemmas for any theory of knowledge that tries to solve them. Here a common theme emerges: It can seem that any theory must make testimonial knowledge either too hard or too easy, and that therefore no adequate account of testimonial knowledge is possible. The chapter then puts forward a proposal for making progress. Specifically, an important function of the concept of knowledge is to govern (...) the acquisition and distribution of quality information within an epistemic community. Testimonial exchanges paradigmatically serve in the distribution role, but sometimes serve in the acquisition role. The resulting position, it is argued, explains why testimonial knowledge is sometimes easy to get, and sometimes much harder. (shrink)

"Despite a dramatic rise in average income in the last 40 years, people are no happier. Since the millennium personal well-being has recently shot up the political and educational agendas, with schools in the UK even including "Personal Well-being" as a curriculum topic in its own right.This book takes teachers, student teachers and parents step by step through the many facets of well-being, pausing at each step to look at the educational implications for teachers and parents trying to make our (...) children's lives more meaningful. With his renowned talent for distilling the most complex of philosophical arguments into accessible laymen's terms, John White addresses the moral maze of well-being through three distinct parts:Part 1 describes the remarkable growth of interest in children's well-being in the UK since 2000, and suggests that a philosophical look at the concept of well-being is essential, so that teachers and parents can avoid confusion and misunderstanding.Part 2 takes the reader step by step through the intricacies of the concept in a deliberately accessible way with each chapter containing a substantial section showing how the new ideas just introduced can be taken up in education, especially in schools.Part 3 is about the future of education for well-being, pulling together, expanding on home as well as school, discussing the main aims and emphases of an education focussed on personal well-being. The author also looks at how school's traditional practices will have to change, given the new focus on well-beingAs well as looking at educational implications of all these questions step by step, the book concludes with an extensive practical guide for families and schools wanting to realise the new well-being agenda.This short, engaging book takes the reader with little or no background in philosophy into these issues. It is of special interest to teachers and parents, since they are now at the sharp end of the culture change we are now experiencing"-- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In a wide-ranging, provocative anatomy of modern society and its origins, novelist and historian John Ralston Saul explores the reason for our deepening sense of crisis and confusion. Throughout the Western world we talk endlessly of individual freedom, yet Saul shows that there has never before been such pressure for conformity. Our business leaders describe themselves as capitalists, yet most are corporate employees and financial speculators. We are obsessed with competition, yet the single largest item of international trade is (...) a subsidized market in armaments. We call our governments democracies, yet few of us participate in politics. We complain about "invasive government," yet our legal, educational, financial, social, cultural and legislative systems are breaking down. While most observers view these problems separately, Saul demonstrates that they are largely manifestations of our blind faith in the value of reason. Over the last 400 years, our "rational elites" have gradually instituted reforms in every phase of social life. But Saul shows that they have also been responsible for most of the difficulties and violence of the same period. This paradox arises from a simple truth which our elites deny: far from being a moral force, reason is no more than an administrative method. Their denial has helped to turn the modern West into a vast, incomprehensible, directionless machine, run by process-minded experts - "Voltaire's bastards"--Whose cult of scientific management is bereft of both sense and morality. Whether in politics, art, business, the military, entertainment, science, finance, academia or journalism, these experts share the same outlook and methods. The result, Saul maintains, is a civilization of immense technological power whose peoples increasingly dwell in a world of illusion. Already known to millions of readers as the author of novels which portray the overwhelming effects of this power on the modern individual by weaving together international finance, the oil and arms business, guerrilla warfare, drug traffic, and the world of art, here Saul lays aside the mask of fiction to speak in his own voice. Only by withdrawing from our addiction to "solutions," he argues, reclaiming the citizens' right to question and participate in public life, and recovering a common sense capacity for intelligent panic, can we find a way out of our permanent crisis. (shrink)

As adults we have little difficulty thinking of ourselves as mental beings extended in time. Even though our conscious thoughts and experiences are constantly changing, we think of ourselves as the same self throughout these variations in mental content. Indeed, it is so natural for adults to think this way that it was not until the 18th century—at least in Western thought—that the issue of how we come to acquire such a concept of an identical but constantly changing self was (...) first recognized as a problem that required an explanation. Philosophical discussion of this issue was initiated when John Locke (1694/1975) proposed a notion of personal identity and selfhood based on consciousness: For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ‘tis that, that makes every one to be, what he calls self; and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal Identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational Being: And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the Identity of that Person; it is the same self now it was then; and ‘tis by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that Action was done. (p. 335) According to this view, we are the same self insofar as we can consciously accept as our own not only those mental and physical acts that we perform now but also those acts done in the past, that we can.. (shrink)

In this awaited follow up to his book _Faithful Reason_, the well-known philosopher and Catholic thinker John Haldane brings his unrivalled insight to bear on questions of the existence of God and the nature and destiny of the human soul. His arguments weave elements drawn from philosophy of mind, epistemology and aesthetics, together with recurrent features of human experience to create a structure that simultaneously frames and supports ideas such as that the cosmos is a creation, human beings transcend (...) their material composition, and that human fulfilment lies beyond death. As in many of his other writings this volume blends themes from Aquinas with insights drawn from analytical philosophy and further establishes John Haldane as the leading 'analytical thomist'. (shrink)

John Passmore was a renowned Australian empirical philosopher and historian of ideas. In this book, which was originally published in 1952, Passmore's intention was to disentangle certain main themes in Hume's philosophy and to show how they relate to Hume's main philosophic purpose. Rather than offering a detailed commentary, the text provides an account based on specificity and critical scholarship, seeking to complement the other more comprehensive works on Hume's philosophy that had become available around the same time. This (...) book will be of value to anyone with an interest in perspectives on Hume and Passmore's philosophical approach. (shrink)

Here we focus on two questions: What is the proper semantics for deontic modal expressions in English? And what is the connection between true deontic modal statements and normative reasons? Our contribution towards thinking about the first, which makes up the bulk of our paper, considers a representative sample of recent challenges to a Kratzer-style formal semantics for modal expressions, as well as the rival views—Fabrizio Cariani’s contrastivism, John MacFarlane’s relativism, and Mark Schroeder’s ambiguity theory—those challenges are thought to (...) motivate. These include the Professor Procrastinate challenge to Inheritance (the principle that ‘If ought p and p entails q, then ought q), as well as Parfit’s miners puzzle regarding information-sensitive deontic modals. Here we argue that a Kratzer-style view is able to meet all of the challenges we’ll consider. In addition, we’ll identify challenges for each of those rival views. Our overall conclusion is that a Kratzer-style semantics remains the one to beat. With this assumption in place, we then ask how we should understand the relationship between true deontic modal statements and normative reasons. Should, for example, we hold that the truth of such a statement entails the existence of a normative reason for some agent to comply? Here we argue that, in many cases, acceptance of Kratzer’s semantics for deontic modals leaves open for substantive normative theorizing the question of whether an agent has a normative reason to comply with what she ought to do. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Medical Tourism:Crossing Borders to Access Health CareHarriet Hutson Gray (bio) and Susan Cartier Poland (bio)Traveling abroad for one's health has a long history for the upper social classes who sought spas, mineral baths, innovative therapies, and the fair climate of the Mediterranean as destinations to improve their health. The newest trend in the first decade of the twenty-first century has the middle class traveling from developed countries to those (...) with emerging economies to avoid treatment delays, prohibitive costs for life-saving procedures, or simply high costs for elective surgery. Others leave to have access to assisted suicide in countries that have legalized it: Belgium, The Netherlands, and Switzerland. This new era of globalization in health care has arrived without the benefit of international standards, government oversight, or ethical and legal review.Howard Staab, a self-employed carpenter from North Carolina, flew to India for his medically necessary heart surgery, scheduled a side trip to the Taj Mahal, and returned home to work in North Carolina. He spent a total of less than $10,000, instead of the $200,000 required from the local hospital (I, Milstein and Smith 2006).At first blush, the outsourcing of medical care to India seems to be a particular solution for a particular problem. However, the particularity of Mr. Staab is not unique. His experience is emblematic of those patients in the United States with a medical need for major and elective procedures, but who also must bear the total cost of these procedures. These middle-class, under-insured Americans go abroad.In tandem with increasingly aggressive marketing campaigns, American hospitals and companies have begun to leverage their connections in Asia to grow the medical tourism business into a major economic force. What are the consequences of this?Several authors point to the effect on the host country's population, particularly the poor, to be pushed farther down the queue to receive adequate, affordable care. Resources are applied to the foreign trade instead of building the local [End Page 193] medical infrastructure. Another potential problem is the obligation of the home-country physician to provide follow-up care. What are the legal ramifications when the procedure was illegal to begin with? Are there opportunities for redress for medical errors?These factors may be converging into a "perfect storm" for health care in the U.S., in which the potential participation of the major insurance companies in promoting offshore care will be the tipping point in the precarious structure that represents the economic currents in health care. Third-party administrators and self-funded employers may be on the cutting edge in 2009 by providing incentives to employees to travel overseas for care.I. Economic ConsiderationsConnell, John. Medical Tourism: Sea, Sun, Sand and... Surgery. Tourism Management 27: 1093–1100, 2006.As evidence of the interest of traditional tour operators in this newer twist on the industry, the author explores medical tourism as an element of the growth of world tourism. In promoting medical tourism, he urges consideration of such issues as the privatization of health care, the foundational role of technology, and uneven access to health resources.Dunn, Philip. Medical Tourism Takes Flight. H and HN: Hospitals and Health Networks: 40–44, November 2007.Writing for U.S. health care executives, Dunn emphasizes that the reality of medical tourism competes with the local medical center for patients and their insurance dollars in a significant way. He examines the possibility that U.S. insurance plans soon may offer to pay for what is currently a cash only business and that the economic impact to the local medical center could be significant or even devastating.Frontiers of Health Services Management [Selected Articles] 24 (2), Winter 2007.In "Managing Healthcare Services in the Global Marketplace" (pp. 3–18), Bruce J. Fried and Dean M. Harris consider legal, ethical, and financial implications of the international workforce. In "Globalization of Health Care" (pp. 19–30), Lynn Schroth and Ruthy Khawahja point out that the transfer of comprehensive management expertise and intellectual property from U.S. medical centers to international sites is driving the success of collaboration between U.S. and foreign health care centers. In "Is... (shrink)

Very few biographies of Kant exist. The Neo-Kantian movement renewed interest in his life. During the last half of the 19th century, John Henry Wilbrandt Stuckenberg provided an eminently readable biography of Kant, as seen from a sympathetic, yet detached viewpoint.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 28.2 (2004) 393-405 [Access article in PDF] Decency and Its Discontents Richard Freadman La Trobe University In The Beginning of the Journey, Diana Trilling makes this rather shocking claim about her husband, Lionel: "In the dark recesses of his heart where unhappiness was so often his companion, he was contemptuous of everything in his life that was dedicated to seriousness and responsibility."1 Lionel had been dead (...) almost 20 years when a near blind Diana dictated this comment in her controversial auto/biography in the early 1990s. Of course he was revered for—among other things—precisely his qualities of intellectual "seriousness and responsibility." But Diana argued that Lionel had in effect settled for such sober virtues because for temperamental and other reasons he could not live the life he really craved—the life of a swashbuckling novelist, with all its recklessness, its refusal of compromise, even its moral waywardness. When Hemingway died Lionel wrote in his notebook: "who would suppose how much he haunted me? How much he existed in my mind—as a reproach? He was the only writer of our time I envied" (Beginning, p. 371). Lionel's critical discussions of Hemingway's fiction are judicious and qualified.2 He admired the uncompromising short story writer who was "passionately and aggressively concerned with truth" (SLS, p. 127), but found the work of the self-conscious "legend" (p. 125), writing in the first-person, ponderous and disappointing. It was not the prose that Lionel so wanted to emulate. It was the life; in particular, its power to release and nurture creativity. Diana continues: "It was to decency that Lionel felt he had sacrificed his hope of being a writer of fiction—conscience had not made a coward of him, it had made him a critic" (Beginning, p. 372). [End Page 393]Decency—how often we use the word. How seldom we ask what we mean by it. Usually it functions as a sort of guarantor term, like the caged canary in the coal mine. If the canary lives, the miners are judged to have fair air to breathe; if a person possesses certain qualities, or a society provides certain requisite conditions, we say the person is "decent," or that this is a "decent society." Yet remarkably few virtue ethicists have countenanced the possibility that decency might be counted among the virtues; that it might be the subject of substantive intellectual reflection; that we might investigate its relation to other virtues, its internal structure, its characteristic patterns and possibilities of existential investment. As John Kekes, one of the very few philosophers to have paid the notion serious philosophical attention, says: "Decency is generally admitted to be a good thing, but is not generally supposed to be particularly important."3In this short essay I attempt two linked undertakings: first, to offer a characterization of Decency—the term henceforth accorded a capital "D" to indicate its status as a moral virtue; second, to read aspects of Lionel Trilling's life and work, and Diana's late assessment of him, in the light of Decency, as I understand the term. I "Decent" seems to refer to a "state," a sort of moral condition a person is "in," and to a resultant orientation towards others. The "state" is one of modesty, even humility. The ego doesn't loom large or get in the way. The orientation is one of solicitude towards others. Decent people of this kind genuinely care about, feel for others. Unless they are given good reason to behave otherwise, their disposition towards others tends to be respectful; they bring to most situations an assumption that the other person is worthy, deserves to be taken seriously. Decency of this kind tends to be associated with receptiveness, relatedness, a patient openness to others, though it need not be passive.The word "decent" derives from the Latin, deceré—to become, to be fitting. It's been used in English since about the 1530s. From that period to the early twentieth century "decent" has generally indicated that something is fitting, appropriate, with respect to social rank... (shrink)

THE PREVALENCE TODAY of "semiotics" as the preferred linguistic form for designating the study of signs in its various aspects already conceals a history, a story of the ways in which, layer by layer, the temporal achievement we call human understanding builds, through public discourse, ever new levels of common acceptance each of which presents itself as, if not self-evident, at least the common wisdom. Overcoming such present-mindedness is not the least of the tasks faced by the awakening of semiotic (...) consciousness. (shrink)

I set out the factors which tempt people into reading Ernst Mach's book The Analysis of Sensations as putting forward either a version of phenomenalism or a version of neutral monism, and then assess the strengths and weaknesses of these two readings. I present an ‘internal’ view of that text, showing that it by no means mandates the phenomenalist reading, and that a case for something more like the neutral monist reading can be made from within that book, indeed largely (...) from within its famous first chapter. (shrink)

Our love of art, writes John Barrow, is the end product of millions of years of evolution. How we react to a beautiful painting or symphony draws upon instincts laid down long before humans existed. Now, in this enhanced edition of the highly popular The Artful Universe, Barrow further explores the close ties between our aesthetic appreciation and the basic nature of the Universe. Barrow argues that the laws of the Universe have imprinted themselves upon our thoughts and actions (...) in subtle and unexpected ways. Why do we like certain types of art or music? What games and puzzles do we find challenging? Why do so many myths and legends have common elements? In this eclectic and entertaining survey, Barrow answers these questions and more as he explains how the landscape of the Universe has influenced the development of philosophy and mythology, and how millions of years of evolutionary history have fashioned our attraction to certain patterns of sound and color. Barrow casts the story of human creativity and thought in a fascinating light, considering such diverse topics as our instinct for language, the origins and uses of color in nature, why we divide time into intervals as we do, the sources of our appreciation of landscape painting, and whether computer-generated fractal art is really art. Drawing on a wide variety of examples, from the theological questions raised by St. Augustine and C.S. Lewis to the relationship between the pure math of Pythagoras and the music of the Beatles, The Artful Universe Expanded covers new ground and enters a wide-ranging debate about the meaning and significance of the links between art and science. (shrink)

From the end of the Enlightenment to the middle of the twentieth century philosophy took fascinating and controversial paths whose relevance to contemporary post-modernist thought is becoming increasingly clear. This volume traces the English-language side of the period, while also taking into account those continental thinkers who deeply influenced twentieth-century English-language philosophy. The story begins with Reid, Coleridge, and Bentham - who set the agenda for much that followed - and continues with a portrait of the nineteenth century's greatest British (...) philosopher, John Stuart Mill. It then surveys the cross-currents of thought at the end of the century, including American pragmatism, a movement never more influential than now. Finally, it assesses two phases of what John Skorupski calls `analytic modernism' - the revolution against the idealism of Moore and Russell, and the Viennese sequel whose project was to show that philosophy consists of pseudo-problems. (shrink)

The imagination—Einbildung—as its German makes clear is the faculty of formation. But this formative activity in various ways through the history of its concept has been intimately related to the concept of common sense, whether understood as the sense that gathers, orders, and makes coherent the various sense, or as the sensibility of the community. This contribution seeks to unfold that history of the concept of the creative or productive imagination while also tracing the parallel history of the concept of (...) common sense (sensus communis) and their relationship that begins with their inception in Aristotle, a connection that has been retained implicitly in one way or another, intentionally or not, at different times—but also often forgotten—in their history and that seems again to manifest with the recent conceptions of the social imaginary. I will trace this history in the Western philosophical tradition while also making use of a couple of Japanese philosophers who take part in this intellectual history. We shall follow the history of the imagination from Aristotle through Kant’s epistemology in his first Critique—when its productive function becomes positively, rather than negatively, evaluated—and on to the post-Kantians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Post-Kantians like Schelling and Heidegger ontologize that productivity of the imagination beyond the epistemic sphere and, in a parallel fashion, broaden its significance beyond the individual and onto the collective. Common sense also has a long and parallel history within the West that involves a variety of meanings starting with the Aristotelian faculty for integrating the various senses (as koinē aisthēsis) that was closely associated with the imagination (phantasia), and ending with two contrasting notions of a communal or social sensibility (as sensus communis)—the vulgar “commonplace” notion of common sense as habituated custom and the healthy sense of common sense as prudential, contextual, ethical judgment. Both senses of common sense together with the faculty of the imagination are found in Kant’s third Critique but the imagination’s creativity expressed in genius comes into tension with the latter communal sense of common sense (Gemeinsinn) that attempts to order and fetter that creativity with the judgment of taste. The contemporary notion of the social imaginary, for example, in Castoriadis, certainly recalls the close connection between the imagination and common sense in Aristotle but also seems to encompass both the vulgar and the healthy senses of common sense along with their tension in Kant. Although Kant wanted to argue for a transcendental basis of common sense as such that would fit with his theory of the imagination from the first Critique, the imagination itself has been broadened in the third Critique, making way for post-Kantian developments, such as in its ontologization, expanding it beyond the merely epistemic as noted above. At the same time this also broadens the significance of the faculty beyond the cognizing mind of the individual and onto the social sphere to unfold what was implicit in Kant’s third Critique. In Japan Miki Kiyoshi develops that ontology of the imagination even though he still affirms its transcendental status. Nonetheless he explicates its formative creativity as involving the human collective producing not only ideal forms for thought but also institutions and technics of human culture. Likewise, Castoriadis understands the creativity of the imagination in socio-collective terms. But in addition, he underscores—in contrast to Miki—its temporal contingency or historicity and non-transcendental status. At the same time, the tension between unbounded creativity and communal responsibility found in Kant’s third Critique—together with the form-formlessness dynamic found in Miki—in a certain sense reappears in Castoriadis’ theory of the social imaginary and the creative imagination. We might say that in general the notion of Gemeinsinn in Kant in that sense provides a bridge between the idea of a creative or productive imagination and the idea of the social imaginary, while harking back to the original relationship between koinē aisthēsis and phantasia in Aristotle. This connection is implicitly assumed, perhaps unintentionally, by many of the relevant thinkers who discuss either concept. It is made explicit in contemporary Japanese philosopher Nakamura Yūjirō’s discussions of common sense, but can also be extracted out of Hannah Arendt’s discussions of the imagination, judgment, and sensus communis. Conceptually the two converge in Castoriadis’ and Ricoeur’s notions of the social imagination/imaginary. I thus plan to trace the parallel history of these two concepts (imagination and common sense). This is a chapter in the book 'Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions' edited by Suzi Adams and Jeremy Smith. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action by Rhiannon FirthJohn-Erik HanssonRhiannon Firth. Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action. London: Pluto Press, 2022. Paperback, 243 pp. ISBN 9780745340463The COVID-19 pandemic and the unfolding climate crisis, with the multiplication of unprecedented weather events, have shown how urgent it is to reflect on our responses to disaster. Following up on themes she first broached in Coronavirus, Class, and Mutual Aid (...) in the United Kingdom, Rhiannon Firth throws a fresh, anarchist, and utopian light on disaster relief in Disaster Anarchy.1 In this work, Firth seeks to “consider how [anarchist] social movements’ impressive efforts in mutual aid might contribute to a radical and revolutionary reconceptualisation of disasters and the processes of relief and recovery efforts” (19). To do so, she begins by surveying the dominant approaches to disaster relief (chapters 2 and 3) before offering a comprehensive anarchist theoretical critique of these perspectives (chapter 4). Firth then fleshes out her anarchist theory of disaster and community response through two empirical case studies of grassroots relief efforts. In chapter 5 she looks into the Occupy Sandy movement, a New York area community-based response to the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy’s passage in October 2012 in the United States. The final chapter is then dedicated to the COVID-19 Mutual Aid Groups that emerged in the United Kingdom during the pandemic.In building her argument, Firth mobilizes anarchist (and more broadly radical) theory and interviews with participants in both movements. She engages with how activists motivated and understood their participation in mutual aid groups, perceived disaster and relief organizing, sought to solve practical and political problems, and reflected on their experiences. The empirical sections of Disaster Anarchy are thus reminiscent of investigations into the anarchist connections and orientations of contemporary social movements, such as Occupy Wall Street.2 However, Firth’s is a work [End Page 606] of political theory. Her interviews were not conducted simply to describe and analyze the anarchist components of disaster relief social movements. Echoing Uri Gordon, she proposes to take the “worldviews of activists seriously as sources of theoretical knowledge,” leading us to rethink both anarchism and the politics of disaster as a whole (16).3 There lies a key part of the originality of Firth’s contribution to both anarchist theory and to the study of disaster relief. The utopian core of Disaster Anarchy also shines through this movement-based theoretical elaboration of an anarchist challenge to the dominant theories and practices of disaster relief. By examining mutual aid groups in critical dialogue with anarchist theory, Firth raises the possibility of more egalitarian and democratic “utopian alternatives to the status quo,” though, as she reminds us, they always run the risk of being co-opted (20).To set the scene for the desirability of anarchist approaches to disaster relief, Disaster Anarchy opens with Firth’s dissatisfaction with what she identifies as the two main sets of approaches to disaster studies. The first represents “the dominant neoliberal paradigm of disaster politics” and falls under the umbrella of “Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR)” (21). Firth contends that, despite some internal variety, all DRR approaches share the three same basic assumptions. First, DRR considers disasters to be “ruptures in the normal functioning of society.” They become a “management problem” that must be dealt with using the tools of political governance to restore order and ensure “systemic stability” (39–40). This can be done both directly through state institutions, and through civil society-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that cooperate with state institutions. DRR then evaluates responses using the categories of “efficiency and cost-effectiveness,” leaving aside “the affects and human impacts of disasters” (40). Second, DRR tends to flatten out differences between disasters, and in the ways in which individuals and groups respond to them. Disaster becomes abstract, and authorities can design sets of responses taken to be effective regardless of local contexts and demands. DRR approaches are therefore particularly congenial to the growth of large governmental “specialised agencies like DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency]” that produce knowledge and practices linked to the vertical “management of disaster” (41). Finally... (shrink)

From the AI point of view, consciousness must be regarded as a collection of interacting processes rather than the unitary object of much philosophical speculation. We ask what kinds of propositions and other entities need to be designed for consciousness to be useful to an animal or a machine. We thereby assert that human consciousness is useful to human functioning and not just and epiphenomenon. Zombies in the sense of Todd Moody's article are merely the victims of Moody's prejudices. To (...) behave like humans, zombies will need what Moody might call pseudo-consciousness, but useful pseudo-consciousness will share all the observable qualities of human consciousness including what the zombie will be able to report. Robots will require a pseudo-consciousness with many of the intellectual qualities of human consciousness but will function successfully with few if any human emotional conscious qualities if that is how we choose to build them. (shrink)

This article explores the ethical questions that arise from any theorisation on the destruction of historical monuments. Considering the fact that historical monuments do not directly inflict physical harm on people, the loss of life does not seem to be an issue. From a philosophical perspective, I argue that even though there might be no direct physical danger inflicted on individuals when a historical monument is destroyed, there are some ethical questions which require attention when dealing with the contexts. To (...) buttress my point, I argue that historical monuments might have negative or positive impact on society, and they represent narratives that must be engage rather than erased. I will present a general view on how the destruction of historical monuments has been perceived before narrowing down to the destruction of Cecil John Rhodes’ in South Africa. I will conclude that, on historical grounds, the destruction of historical monument is wrong. (shrink)