It is sometimes argued that virtue ethics is incapable of 'telling us what to do'. I explore what this could mean, and come to the conclusion that virtue ethics does enable this, in the only sense in which it is something which we would reasonably want in an ethical theory.

This 2001 translation makes one of the most important texts in ancient philosophy available to modern readers. Cicero is increasingly being appreciated as an intelligent and well-educated amateur philosopher, and in this work he presents the major ethical theories of his time in a way designed to get the reader philosophically engaged in the important debates. Raphael Woolf's translation does justice to Cicero's argumentative vigour as well as to the philosophical ideas involved, while Julia Annas's introduction and notes provide (...) a clear and accessible explanation of the philosophical context of the work. This edition will appeal to all readers interested in this central text in ancient philosophy and the history of ethics. (shrink)

This is the text of the Lindley Lecture for 2015 given by Julia Annas, an American philosopher.

Bradley develops some theory of the linear opinion pool, in apparent contradiction to results of Dawid et al.. We investigate the sources of these contradictions, and in particular identify a mathematical error in Bradley that invalidates his main result.

There are many sorts of day-to-day choices that are such that, if enough people were to choose one way rather than another, serious harm could be avoided or reduced, and yet it does not seem that any one such choice will itself make a difference. Consider, for example, how our collective consumer choices have various serious environmental and social consequences, and yet for many products, it is doubtful that one purchase more or less will itself make a difference to these (...) outcomes. How are we to understand what each of us ought to do in these sorts of contexts? This paper further advances and illuminates a thesis that I have argued for elsewhere: that a purely ‘non-instrumental’ approach to this question is not satisfactory. A necessary and central part of understanding how to think about an individual choice in these contexts is showing that it does matter for instrumental reasons - for reasons having to do with its ability to have an influence on the outcome. Once a core instrumental solution is found, other moral considerations can build on top. I argue for this by way of an examination of a new non-instrumental approach advanced by Wieland and van Oeveren: a participation-based approach. I also identify what I think is the main source of resistance to my thesis: a mistaken conflation of two different problems. (shrink)

This paper examines the ancient appeal to nature in ethics to support the account of the final end in life offered by the various schools from aristotle onwards. various modern objections against the appeal to nature are examined and found not to hold. as a result certain features of the ancient position emerge: the appeal to human nature is not an attempt to end ethical argument by appeal to undisputed fact; nor does it depend on a metaphysics which we can (...) no longer accept; nor is it meant to map out a specific way of life or set of ethical rules. it amounts to something like an appeal to moral psychology to set guidelines for a realistic ethical theory. a proper understanding of the ancient appeal to nature reveals the limits to some modern metaethical assumptions, and also the extent to which there may be more continuity between ancient ethics and some modern ethical thinking than is often assumed. (shrink)

The essays in this volume convince me of something which, until now was only a hypothesis of mine. Academic discourse, and perhaps American university discourse in particular, possesses an extraordinary ability to absorb, digest, and neutralize all of the key, radical or dramatic moments of thought, particularly, a fortiori, of contemporary though. Marxism in the United States, though marginalized, remains deafly dominant and exercises a fascination that we have not seen in Europe since the Russian Proletkult of the 1930s. Post-Heideggerian (...) "deconstructivism" though esoteric, is welcomed in the United States as an antidote to analytic philosophy or, rather, as a way to valorize, through contrast, that philosophy. Only one theoretical breakthrough seems consistently to mobilize resistances, rejections and deafness: psychoanalysis—not as the "plague" allowed by Freud to implant itself in America as a "commerce in couches" but rather as that which, with Freud and after him, has led the psychoanalytic decentering of the speaking subject to the very foundations of language. It is this latter direction that I will be exploring here, with no other hope than to awaken the resistances and, perhaps, the attention of a concerned few, after the event .For I have the impression that the "professionalism" discussed throughout the "Politics of Interpretation" conference is never as strong as when professionals denounce it. In fact, the same preanalytic rationality unites them all, "conservatives" and "revolutionaries"—in all cases, jealous guardians of their academic "chairs" whose very existence, I am sure, is thrown into question and put into jeopardy by psychoanalytic discourse. I would therefore schematically summarize what is to follow in this way:1. There are political implications inherent in the act of interpretation itself, whatever meaning that interpretation bestows. What is the meaning, interest, and benefit of the interpretive position itself, a position from which I wish to give meaning to an enigma? To give a political meaning to something is perhaps only the ultimate consequence to he epistemological attitude which consists, simply, of the desire to give meaning. This attitude is not innocent but, rather, is rooted in the speaking subjects' need to reassure himself of his image and his identity faced with an object. Political interpretation is thus the apogee of the obsessive quest for A Meaning.2. The psychoanalytic intervention within Western knowledge has a fundamentally deceptive effect. Psychoanalysis, critical and dissolvent cuts through political illusions, fantasies, and beliefs to the extent that they consist in providing only one meaning, an uncriticizable ultimate Meaning, to human behavior. If such a situation can lead to despair within the polis, we must not forget that it is also a source of lucidity and ethics. The psychoanalytic intervention is, from this point of view, a counterweight, an antidote, to political discourse which, without it, is free to become our modern religion: the final explanation.3. The political interpretations of our century have produced two powerful and totalitarian results: fascism and Stalinism. Parallel to the socioeconomic reasons for these phenomena, there exists as well, another, more intrinsic reason: the simple desire to give a meaning to explain, to provide the answer, to interpret. In that context I will briefly discuss Louis Ferdinand Céline's texts insofar as the ideological interpretations given by him are an example of political delirium in avant-garde writing.Julia Kristeva,professor of linguistics at the University of Paris VII and a regular visiting professor at Columbia University, is the author of Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art and About Chinese Women.Margaret Waller, a doctoral candidate in French at Columbia University, is currently translating Kristeva's Revolution du langage poétique. (shrink)

Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST), an influential life-span theory, suggests that older adults prefer persuasive messages that appeal to emotionally-meaningful goals over messages that appeal to knowledge-related goals, whereas younger adults do not show this preference. A mixed-factorial experiment was conducted to test whether older adults (≥65 years) differ from younger adults (25–45 years) in their preference for emotionally-meaningful appeals over knowledge-related appeals, when appeals are clearly developed in line with SST. For older adults we found the expected preference for emotionally-meaningful (...) appeals for cancer centers but not for grocery stores and travel organizations. As expected, in most cases, younger adults did not show a preference. Implications for SST-based communication research and for practice are discussed. (shrink)

Do we have a unified pre-theoretical concept of _morality_? This paper makes a start on the larger argument that we do not, by countering criticisms of virtue ethics on the ground that it does not adequately capture such a pre-theoretical concept. One criticism is discussed and met, namely that the reasons on which virtuous people act fail to have the special force of _moral_ reasons.

M and N, the last two books of the Metaphysics, are Aristotle's only sustained venture into the philosophy of mathematics. In them, he criticizes Plato's theories and suggests alternatives of his own. This commentary concentrates on the continuing philosophical interest of these books rather than on scholarly controversies, and will provide a clear introduction for students, including those without Greek, to an unjustly neglected part of Aristotle's work. This paperback edition replaces the outstandingly successful hardback. 'Dr Annas's translation is clear, (...) readable, and accurate...an enjoyable volume, stimulating both as intellectual history and as philosophical argument.' Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

Sextus’s arguments against ethical theories are shorter and more general than those he brings against the other two parts of ancient philosophy, logic and physics. Until recently this part of his work, in Outlines of Pyrrhonism III and Adversus Mathematicos XI has been comparatively neglected. Now, as well as the splendidly scholarly book by Emidio Spinelli, Sesto Empirico: Contro Gli Etici we have Richard Bett’s translation with commentary in the Clarendon Later Ancient Philosophers series. Both books make Sextus’s sometimes elusive (...) work far more available and usable to the modern reader. (shrink)

This article investigates how the oral tradition practices of griôs in the Northeast of Brazil can be used as sources of information. This is an exploratory study based on bibliographic and documentary techniques, which used semi-structured interviews as a data collection tool. The data was analyzed using pragmatic language analysis. Through the interviews, we identified oral tradition as a source of information that, taken as an object of study, requires a decolonial approach. We observed a variety of oral tradition practices (...) from the interviewees that are sources of information, namely: storytelling, games, dance, musicality and martial arts. The conclusion is that Griô oral tradition practices can be used as sources of information in which the local history and culture of a community are the informational genesis, based on interactions between people. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 12-22 [Access article in PDF] Art of a Child with Autism:Drawing Systems and Proto Mathematics Julia Kellman Sung, a five year old girl with autism, was enrolled by her mother in the university Saturday art program with the hope that Sung's favorite church school teacher, a graduate student in art education, would be able to tutor her daughter during the weekly (...) classes. Though hesitant because of her inexperience with autistic children and because of Sung's frequently angry tantrums on Sundays and the little girl's inability to speak, the young teacher, nonetheless, agreed to the plan. Her concerns proved unfounded, for Sung was able to work in the midst of the churning mass of noisy pre-K classmates without any signs of the fury that drove her to screaming, biting fits in church school. Additionally, and to everyone's delight, Sung's ability to develop as an image-maker was itself confirmed within the first few weeks of art class, dispelling any remaining doubts of her art aptitude or the value of art classes for the little girl.Additional questions and considerations arose about Sung and her art during the classes. How might one understand Sung's changing imagery? What might such explanations and images suggest about Sung herself and her activities? What might her art indicate about her similarity to other children and their art making? The possible answers to these and related queriespresented themselves during the semester, suggesting new avenues for inquiry surrounding both the wordless little girl and her Saturday morning creations.What follows is the story of Sung and her graphic development as it unfolded during the art class. Further, it is an attempt to uncover what Sung's drawings suggest about methods that are useful in the examination of the art of an autistic child. Documentation was carried out with a 35 mm. camera and color copier throughout the semester. Ethnographic methods including participant observation and interviews were employed to gather contextual data. Alfred Schutz's phenomenological sociology allowed for [End Page 12] consideration of nonverbal and verbal social interactions and behaviors. 1 A search of the literature of early mathematical development and drawing systems provided the underpinnings for early insights and later hypotheses. Here is Sung's story. Sung Sung, thick black hair swung forward to hide her face, lies prone in the middle of the busy classroom oblivious to the surging, chattering children around her, so intent is she on the sketchbook in which she draws. Next to her left elbow teeters a stack of a half dozen boxes of thick craypas from which she snatches colors, never looking at the hue she grabs. Her drawing behavior has a pattern; it looks like this. Shuffle through the identical boxes. Choose a box. Open it. Snatch out a bright waxy craypa. Hold it close to the eyes. Sniff it. Lick it. If the craypa passes muster, scribble with it in rich heavy lines — banana-like arcs, large solid dots the size of cherries, rectangular patches, and a variety of forms that come and go from one drawing to the next, like heat lightening on a summer evening. Her less frequent forms include: an enclosed yellow irregular shape with a dark dot in the middle suggesting a fried egg; a two-sided zig-zag; X forms; and solid and empty trapezoids made sail-like with superimposed crosses serving as mast and boom.Unlike the chosen craypas, however, those that do not pass Sung's inspection suffer a terrible fate; they are broken in two and their pieces tossed without ceremony to opposite sides of the room to be trodden into flat, bright smears by the other children in the class, pathetic traces of Sung's art. The craypas boxes themselves also play a role. For when they are closed they are used as blocks or toys, objects to be neatly stacked and restacked or placed side by side on the floor. When they are open, however, they are mere receptacles, passively holding... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Response to Elizabeth Gould, “Nomadic Turns:Epistemology, Experience, and Women University Band Directors” Epistemology, Experience, and Women University Band Directors”Julia Eklund KozaClimate and its impact on women in instrumental music education is a tremendously important subject, and I thank Liz Gould for her thoughtful analysis. Rather than offering a critique of her work, I will respond as one might answer in a call and response. Gould has sung (...) a call that articulates a definition of feminism and invites us to explore climate in the professions, specifically in instrumental music education; I will answer in affirmation, confirmation, and extension. The nomadic metaphor, which is central to her paper, has been appropriated by a number of postmodern [End Page 187] theoreticians, including, among others, Baudrillard, Grisoni, Deleuze and Guattari, and of course, Braidotti.1 I have decided not to talk about this metaphor, however, principally because the complexities of any analysis of Western constructions of nomadism—constructions that are rife with exoticism, fascination, revulsion, and fear—are multiplied at this moment, as my country wages war against Iraq, a land of nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples, after having recently engaged in military action in Afghanistan, which is similarly home to nomads. An incisive discussion of postmodern use of nomadic metaphors appears in Caren Kaplan's book Questions of Travel, which I recommend to anyone interested in the subject.2My response has two goals: first, to forward another, not necessarily competing, postmodern understanding of feminism and power; and second, keeping this understanding in mind, to expand Gould's project of examining professional climate. According to my working postmodern definition, feminism is a constellation of dynamic political positions, which address and attempt to change the unequal power relations and material conditions that are produced and supported by a normative regulatory ideal called sex. In speaking of a constellation of political positions, I acknowledge the existence of a multiplicity of modern and post-modern feminisms, and by calling these positions dynamic I acknowledge their fluidity. In asserting that sex is a regulatory ideal, I rely on the work of feminist theorist Judith Butler, who posits that sex and sexual difference are discursively constructed; distinguishing herself from feminists who draw a distinction between gender, which is assumed to be socially constructed, and sex, which is theorized as a pre-social given or surface, Butler not only questions such a distinction by arguing that both sex and gender are culturally produced, but also theorizes about how materializations of bodies are accomplished. Drawing on the work of philosopher Michel Foucault, she maintains that sex is a regulatory norm, "part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs,"3 and she claims that this materialization is accomplished through a reiterative process called performativity. A performative, according to Butler, is a "discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names."4 Butler claims that "the regulatory norms of 'sex' work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body's sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative."5 She provides an example of how this reiterative process works: when a particular child is born, the child is cited as a girl at birth and many times afterward; each citation helps to constitute that child as a girl and also to reinforce the discursive formation "girl."6 To summarize, Butler asserts that sex is "a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies,"7 and she posits that materiality is a productive effect of power.8She also theorizes that subject formation necessitates both an "identification with the normative phantasm of 'sex,'" and the creation of a zone of abjection.9 Bodies relegated to this abject zone, according to Butler, can be a valuable and "critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility."10 She maintains that disidentification can be a fruitful way to mobilize feminist and queer politics.11 Collective disidentifications, Butler states, can facilitate a "reconceptualization of which bodies matter," which bodies count.12 [End Page 188]Finally, my definition of feminism relies on several Foucauldian assumptions about... (shrink)

Die Theorie des Hörens von Hermann von Helmholtz kreist um eine offene Frage: Wie geschieht der Übergang von der physikalischen Schwingung zum wahrgenommenen Klang? Helmholtz sucht die Antwort darauf nicht nur in einer Synthese des verfügbaren Wissens der Mathematik, Physik, Physiologie und Anatomie, sondern auch in der Musikgeschichte, die er als einen hörphysiologischen Langzeitversuch auffasst. Er fügt sie in sein eigenes Experimentalsystem ein, um das Wissen vom Hören aufzudecken, das in der Musik steckt. Julia Kursell zeichnet diese Experimentalisierung der (...) Musik nach, nimmt das Verhältnis von Ohr und Instrument in den Blick und rekonstruiert die Rolle und Funktion der Musik in Helmholtz' Theorie der Wahrnehmung. (shrink)

As the term "family values" achieves prominence in the rhetoric of political debate, the social issues at the heart of today's political controversies deserve to be studied in depth. This volume brings together a group of philosophers, political scientists, and legal scholars to explore a wide range of specific topics dealing with the legal, ethical, and political dimensions of familial relationships. Topics addressed include the rights of unwed fathers, the nature of children's autonomy, children's rights to divorce their parents, parental (...) rights with respect to medical treatment and religious education of children, surrogate parenting, same-sex parenting, and single-parent families. Collectively, the essays point out that many contemporary issues pertaining to the having and raising of children pose genuinely hard choices for public policy makers, for those who make and enforce the laws, and for citizens who would like to engage in informed and critical democratic debate on these issues. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide a rendition of the care ethic in Confucian philosophy and to argue that social policy developments in Hong Kong society, including health care policy, have been significantly shaped and justified in terms of the ideal of care in the Confucian moral tradition. On the basis of this analysis, the paper raises a number of questions about a recent proposal for health care reform for Hong Kong put forth by the Harvard School of Public Health which (...) argues for adopting the principle of equity as the overriding value for the moral foundation of Hong Kong's health care system. The paper examines how the over-emphasis on equity in the Harvard Report proposals can lead to the erosion of care and ultimately the eclipse of the vision of care in Hong Kong's health care system. It argues that the pursuit of equity, which is itself a valuable principle, should not displace the importance of the value of care or undermine the ideal of care and that health care decisions must be firmly embedded in local cultures and moral traditions. (shrink)

This article reflects on some ethical dilemmas presented by an ethnographic study of prostitution that I conducted in the 1990s. The study drew one research subject into a long and very close relationship with me, and though she was an active and fully consenting participant in the research, she was also objectified within both the field relationship and the textual products it generated. This kind of contradiction has been recognized and discussed as a more general problem for ethnography by feminist (...) and critical ethnographers. In this article it is considered specifically in relation to informed consent as an ethical issue. If an ethnographer secures the free and informed consent of a research subject, does this necessarily make the intimacy of their subsequent relationship ethical? Is it possible for anyone to genuinely consent to being objectified through the research process? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 33.2 (2005) 71-97 [Access article in PDF] The Subject of Religion Lacan and the Ten Commandments Kenneth Reinhard Julia Reinhard Lupton Despite Freud's Nietzschean unmasking of religion as ideology, psychoanalysis has frequently been attacked as itself a religion, a cabal of analyst-priests dedicated to the worship of a dead master. Such critics "do not believe in Freud" in much the same way as atheists "do not believe (...) in God," and their rejections of psychoanalysis in the name of the secular partake in the very structure of religious thought they claim to repudiate. In Seminar XXI: Les non-dupes errent, Lacan comments on the blindness of the atheistic insight concerning religion: "I know that you're not believers, right? But that doesn't mean that you aren't all the more conned... because even if you are not believers, you still believe in that aspiration [for the love of God]. I won't say that you suppose it; rather, it supposes you" [Dec. 18, 1973; our trans.]. In Lacan's analysis, it is not that secular intellectuals suffer from unexamined religious "suppositions" or assumptions, to be swept away through a little ideology-critique or time on the couch. The case is rather, in Lacan's strong formulation, that religious discourse supposes us—supports and underwrites our very structures of being, subjectivity, and social interaction. That is, the secular subject is produced by the religious discourses that precede and continue to speak through it; the challenge for the contemporary critic is not to silence or debunk those discourses, but rather to bring the modern subject to assume responsibility for their enunciation.Throughout the decades of his seminar, Lacan addressed the monotheistic foundations of Western subjectivity as a set of discursive ruptures or cuts which continue to scar and brand the modern subject beyond their secular abrogation. Distinguishing between Freud "the individual with his atheistic profession of faith" and "the Freud who was the first to acknowledge the value and relevance of [the] myth... we call the death of God" [S VII 192–93], Lacan insists that Freud regarded monotheism as an epochal divide that irrevocably altered all that came before and after it: "On the left of this [monotheistic] message, there are some things that are henceforth outdated, obsolete; they no longer hold beyond the manifestation of the message. On the right, things are quite different" [172]. What, in Lacan's analysis, is the difference that monotheism has made, both during its periods of dominance and after? The laws, narratives, and symbols of monotheism continue to undergird key fantasies of personhood, nationhood, and neighborhood in the modernity that purports to have supplanted them. In Lacan's formulation, monotheism "supposes" the subject of these fantasies, precipitating it from out of the expanse of signifiers and in relation to a sublime object of both unbearable enjoyment and social obligation. Moreover, it is the scandal and the gift of monotheism that it not only creates moments of traumatic singularity, but also thinks the singular as trauma, rending the fabric of an animistic nature which would unite every polarity of being in the fullness of a sexual relation. Unlike the gods of Greek philosophy, the monotheistic God is not part of the nature he creates. In its decisive thinking of singularity, monotheism elicits and eludes all rapprochement with philosophical conceptions of the One, whether in the guise of Hellenized Judaism, Pauline theology, or Arab Aristotelianism. Lacan extends the monotheistic project of thinking singularity [End Page 71] by insisting that "there is something of One" [il y a de l'Un]—not the self-identical One of Greek logic, mathematics, and cosmology, but the One of a violent rupture that creates subjects and their worlds around a void, an un that un-does the primacy it speaks.If, from the Lacanian vantage, the singular invention of the God shared by the People of the Book forever separates religion from philosophy, we would also insist that religion is not simply a subset of "culture," understood as the symbolic practices that unify a people... (shrink)

De l'homme dans l'experimentation biomedicale.