The people and the value of their experience, by N. T. Pratt.--From kingship to democracy, by J. P. Harland.--Democracy at Athens, by G. M. Harper.--Athens and the Delian League, by B. D. Meritt.--Socialism at Sparta, by P. R. Coleman-Norton.--Tyranny, by M. Mac Laren.--Federal unions, by C. A. Robinson.--Alexander and the world state, by O. W. Reinmuth.--The Antigonids, by J. V. A. Fine.--Ptolemaic Egypt: a planned economy, by S. L. Wallace.--The Seleucids: the theory of monarchy, by G. Downey.--The political status (...) of the independent cities of Asia Minor in the Hellenistic period, by D. Magie.--The ideal states of Plato and Aristotle, by W. J. Oates.--Epilogue, by A. C. Johnson.--Bibliography (p. 225-233).--Index, by H. V. M. Dennis, III. (shrink)

“To consent to love or be loved,” said Merleau-Ponty, “is to consent also to influence someone else, to decide to a certain extent on behalf of the other.” This essay explicates that idea through a meditation on intimacy. I propose, first, that, on Merleau-Ponty’s account, we are always transgressing into each other’s experience, whether we are strangers or familiars; I call this “ontological intimacy.” Concrete experiences of intimacy are based upon this ontological intimacy, and can take place at two levels: (...) (1) at-this-moment (such that we can experience intimacy even with strangers, by sharing a momentary but extra-ordinary mutual recognition) and (2) in shared interpersonal institutions, or habitual, enduring, and co-enacted visions of who we are, how to live, and what matters. Through particular examples of dynamics within these layers of intimacy (drawing upon work by Berne and by Russon), I claim that we are always, inevitably, imposing an “unfreedom” upon our intimate others. Freedom, then, can only develop from within and by virtue of this “unfreedom.” Thus, what distinguishes empowering or emancipating relationships from oppressive ones is not the removal of transgressive normative social forces; it is rather the particular character of those transgressive forces. Some transgressions upon others’ experience—some forms of “unfreedom”—will tend to promote freedom; others will tend to hinder it. This amounts to a call for promoting agency and freedom not only through critical analysis of public institutions, practices and discourses, but also through critical insight into and transformation of our most private and intimate relationships. (shrink)

This paper argues for an understanding of emotion based upon Merleau-Ponty's conceptions of embodiment and passivity. Through a critical assessment of cognitive theories of emotion, and in particular Solomon's theory, it argues (1) that there is a sense in which emotions may be judgments, so long as we understand such judgments as bodily enactments of meaning, but (2) that even understood in this way, the notion of judgment (or construal) can only account for a subset of emotions which I call (...) "emotional clichés," and not for authentic passions. In contrast with Solomon's account which conceives the subject as constituting, this account of emotion requires us to understand subjectivity as moved by meanings in the world, and as sometimes, in an authentic passion, dispossessed by those meanings. (shrink)

Against recent claims that infants begin with a sense of themselves as distinct selves, I propose that the infant's initial sense of self is still indeterminate and ambiguous, and is only progressively consolidated, beginning with embodied perceptions of others. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and Hegel's notion of mutual recognition, and with reference to empirical studies in developmental psychology, I argue that perceiving other persons is significantly different from perceiving inanimate things. Until sufficient motor capacities have developed for exploring (...) and perceptually disambiguating inanimate things, it is only in perceiving others who recognize her that the infant is able to realize herself as a self. As the physiological and behavioural evidence suggests, whereas inanimate things initially captivate and dispossess the young infant, other people return her to herself. This paper lends support to the ideas that humans are ontologically social beings, and that selfhood is socially conditioned rather than given with consciousness. (shrink)

In this essay, I propose that human development is the emergence of something significantly new out of a past situation that does not hold that novel achievement as a determinate potential except retrospectively. Development, in other words, might best be understood as a “realization” in the sense of a making-real of some new form of being that had no prior place in reality, that was not programmed in advance, but that once realized can have its roots traced back to determinate (...) conditions and potentials in its own past. This amounts to a rethinking of the nature of developmental potential as retrospectively determined. But it also involves a reconception of the locus of such potential: I argue that developmental potential must be understood as located in the human-organism-in-its-situation, rather than simply in the human organism. I take my bearings from phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and I make my case by elucidating three different forms of human development described by Merleau-Ponty: intellectual realizations of insight; the realization of a new perceptual-motor skill; and a child’s realization of a new lived way of making sense of the interpersonal world. (shrink)

Emotion is usually conceived as playing a relatively external role in education: either it is raw material reshaped by rational practices, or it merely motivates intellectual reasoning. Drawing upon the philosophy of Hegel and Plato’s Socrates, I argue, however, that education is a process of existential transformation and that emotion plays an essential, internal role therein. Through an analysis of Hegel’s master and slave dialectic, I argue that emotions have their own logic and that an individual can be propelled to (...) increasingly rational emotional stances by the demands of the emotional situationitself, even in the absence of any intellectual reasoning or rational training. Appealing also to the structure and content of Socrates’ conversations, I argue that intellectual reasoning can lead to self-overcoming only insofar as it involves a particular emotional orientation towards the emotional challenges of genuine learning, that is, insofar as it is “conscientious reasoning.”. (shrink)

Abstract:Although Angelina Weld Grimké's 1916 play, Rachel, has historically been read as a sentimental, anti-lynching drama, such classifications might limit the play's anarchic potential. Instead of viewing the characters as responding to anti-Black violence, this paper proposes reframing the play's discussion within a context of Black maternity and its necessary engagement with the Afro-pessimist concept of social death. Such reorientation suggests that Rachel works within the theater's very materiality in order to explore the effects of anti-Blackness on Black life. Specifically, (...) this paper argues that the play's performances of abiological Black maternity—and, particularly, the titular character's performances—fugitively evade the natal alienation of social death. Furthermore, such performances link past, present, and future stage productions as well as character representations, recreating kinship formations within Black social life to stage spatio-temporal disruptions on the equation of Blackness as social death. In this way, Rachel offers modern scholars an understanding of how older works might yet be read in light of the more recent theoretical work of radical Black feminist and Afro-pessimist scholars. (shrink)

This book proposes a new, rationally-justified, evidence-based theory concerning values. It discusses practical applications of these universally-applicable values, especially to morality, society, education and upbringing. In doing so, it discusses sexism, sexuality, racism, freedom, politics, law, animal rights, environmental ethics, health-care, war, economics, psychology, science, literature, religion, and much more.

Though singularity of the self can be understood in different ways, this essay argues that it ought ultimately to be understood temporally, in terms of becoming and the establishment of what Merleau-Ponty calls «personal institutions». Anorexia is used as a case study: anorexics can oscillate between feeling themselves expressed in their anorexic desires, and feeling themselves expressed in their opposition to anorexic desires. I argue, drawing upon Laing’s understanding of psychopathology, that neither is their «true singular self» but that singularity (...) ultimately realizes itself in the process of this oscillation. Guided by Merleau-Ponty’s concept of «institution», I propose that oscillations result from lived efforts to resolve indeterminately felt existential problems; that the repetitions and «binary rhythm» involved in such oscillations are endemic to personal becoming; and that what enables success rather than failure in such becoming singular are relations with others who act in recognition of this process. (shrink)

The core insight of Dr. Angelica Tratter’s essay, as I see it, is that we can approach the question of a person’s ways of being in the world in an ‘ontological’ rather than ‘ontical’ manner. Tratter communicates this insight primarily through a rehabilitation of Ludwig Binswanger’s notion of ‘world-design.’ In what follows, I wish both to affirm Tratter’s insight, and also, through my own elaboration of it, to propose some possible divergences of thought. As Tratter notes, Heidegger was unhappy with (...) Binswanger’s appropriation of his thought. Binswanger, Heidegger claims, mistakenly begins with the subject–object divide, and understands “being in the world” as bridging this divide ;.. (shrink)

This is a French abstract for an English-language article, published as "Life is Inherently Expressive: A Merleau-Pontian response to Darwin's _The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals_".

This is a French abstract, published in _Chiasmi_, describing an English-language article entitled "Intercorporeality, Intersubjectivity and the Problem of “Letting Others Be” .".

This is an Italian abstract, published in _Chiasmi, describing an English-language article published under the title "Intercorporeality, Intersubjectivity and the Problem of “Letting Others Be”.".

Monique Wittig's The Lesbian Body subverts the authority of the anatomy teaching text, and challenges its claim to objectivity, by writing to the texts of Andreas Vesalius. Vesalius, working in the late 15th century, is recognized as having set the precedent for how the anatomy of the human body is taught even today. By writing a ‘lesbian body’ in disarray, Wittig metaphorically topples the authority and order of the standard Vesalian anatomy. By writing that body as a desiring subject, she (...) also invites us to question the desire for knowledge and ownership of that knowledge, and the illusion of scientific objectivity. Indeed, she offers us a celebration of the subjectivity of the production of texts and identities. But in her rewriting, she must also adopt a particular subject position and guard that position from the ‘wrong’ interpretations. The Lesbian Body is then, despite its literary and political force, a text which fears the interpretive role of its reader. (shrink)

This study identified a range of pedagogies developed to promote global citizenship within a university Latin American dance unit. It implemented changes to teaching and learning approaches in the...

A vibrant portrait of four college friends-Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgley-who formed a new philosophical tradition while Oxford's men were away at war.

This collection is the first extended investigation of the relation between time and memory in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a whole as well as the first to explore in depth the significance of his concept of institution. It brings the French phenomenologist’s views on the self and ontology into contemporary focus. Time, Memory, Institution argues that the self is not a self-contained or self-determining identity, as such, but is gathered out of a radical openness to what is not self, and (...) that it gathers itself in a time that is not merely a given dimension, but folds back upon, gathers, and institutes itself. Access to previously unavailable texts, in particular Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on institution and expression, has presented scholars with new resources for thinking about time, memory, and history. These essays represent the best of this new direction in scholarship; they deepen our understanding of self and world in relation to time and memory; and they give occasion to reexamine Merleau-Ponty’s contribution and relevance to contemporary Continental philosophy. This volume is essential reading for scholars of phenomenology and French philosophy, as well as for the many readers across the arts, humanities, and social sciences who continue to draw insight and inspiration from Merleau-Ponty. Contributors: Elizabeth Behnke, Edward Casey, Véronique Fóti, Donald Landes, Kirsten Jacobson, Galen Johnson, Michael Kelly, Scott Marratto, Glen Mazis, Caterina Rea, John Russon, Robert Vallier, and Bernhard Waldenfels. (shrink)

When Sartre arrives late to meet Pierre at a local establishment, he discovers not merely that Pierre is absent, but Pierre’s absence, where this depends, or so Sartre notoriously supposes, on a frustrated expectation that Pierre would be seen at that place. Many philosophers have railed against this view, taking it to entail a treatment of the ontology of absence that Richard Gale describes as ‘attitudinal’ – one whereby absences are thought to ontologically depend on psychological attitudes. In this paper, (...) I aim to make Sartre’s intuition respectable. What Sartre perceives is an absential location, only the boundaries of which are circumscribed by what Sartre is doing at that place: meeting Pierre. I explain how this Sartrean view, though not specifically attributable to Sartre, nonetheless honours some of the phenomenological data described, if a little opaquely, in Being and Nothingness. (shrink)

This essay argues that pre-health humanities programs should focus on intensive research practice for baccalaureate students and provides three guiding principles for implementing it. Although the interdisciplinary nature of health humanities permits baccalaureate students to use research methods from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, pre-health humanities coursework tends to force students to adopt only one of many disciplinary identities. Alternatively, an intensive research approach invites students to critically select and combine methods from multiple disciplines to ask and answer (...) questions about health problems more innovatively. Using the authors’ experiences with implementing health humanities baccalaureate research initiatives at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the authors contend that pre-health humanities programs should teach and study multiple disciplinary research methods and their values; examine how health humanities research might transfer across disciplines; and focus on mentoring opportunities for funding, presenting, and publishing research. These recommendations have the potential to create unprecedented research experiences for baccalaureate students as they prepare to enter careers within and beyond the allied health professions. (shrink)

Finance is an area that, in practice, is plagued by accusations of unethical activity; the study of finance had adopted a largely nonbehavioral approach to business ethics research. We address this gap in by assessing whether individual ethical orientations predict the acceptability of questionable decisions about financial issues. Results show that individual ethical orientations are associated with different levels of acceptability of questionable decisions about financial issues, though the pattern of these differences varies across individual ethical orientations assessed. These results (...) represent evidence that ethical individual differences are associated with the acceptability of questionable finance decisions and are discussed in terms of methodological limitations and future directions in finance ethics research. (shrink)

I ask whether figure-ground structure can be realized in touch, and, if so, how. Drawing on the taxonomy of touch sketched in Katz's 1925 The World of Touch, I argue that the form of touch that is relevant to such consideration is a species of immersed touch. I consider whether we can feel the space we are immersed in and, more specifically, the empty space against which the surfaces of objects, as I shall urge, “stand out.” Harnessing M. G. F. (...) Martin's account of bodily awareness and touch, I defend a positive thesis, pace Graham Nerlich on whose The Shape of Space I otherwise rely, both to defend the supposition that empty space can in principle be felt and to argue that touching empty space is not a mere species of absence perception. Along the way, I defuse a causal worry that might be thought to arise in the case of touching empty space. (shrink)

'Philosophy in a world of women. I reflected, talking with Mary, Pip and Elizabeth, how much I love them.' Two brilliant young scholars uncover the major philosophical contributions of four women whose ideas could have changed the course of twentieth-century thought. Written with energy, expertise and panache, The Quartet is a page-turning blend of research and recovery, storytelling, and a call to arms. Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Elizabeth Anscombe were great friends and comrades in the intellectual trenches, (...) rethinking the possibilities of moral philosophy when the men 'left the room' and taking on the establishment, ultimately embodied by President Truman. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman bring these women out of the shadows and into vivid colour. (shrink)

In this collection of essays, Camillo “Mac” Bica, Ph.D., a former Marine Corps Officer, Vietnam Veteran, and philosopher, provides a cogent analysis of why a veteran may not want to be thanked for his “service” in war. Mac’s experiential and theoretical perspective is both gut wrenching and concise. “The Philosopher speaks from the mind,” Mac writes, “the warrior from where it hurts.” With simplicity, poignancy, and power, this book, together with future installments of the War Legacy Series, works to dispel (...) the mythology of nobility and heroism by providing a window into the reality of war and its devastating effects upon all who experience its horrors. (shrink)

This paper expands on the notion of "moral conversion" (advanced by Bernard Lonergan but underdeveloped in his work) by developing a typology that uses two "cross-hatching" criteria. First, it distinguishes between moral conversions that have to do with a person's relation to moral obligation, good and evil, and between moral conversions that have to do with how a person regards the question of happiness and the meaning of life. Secondly, it distinguishes between conversions regarding the _content_ (what is good/evil or (...) the meaning of life?), regarding _attitude_ (becoming committed to doing good or to the meaning-seeking process), and regarding _coherence_ (conforming one's actual life to what is understood to be right/wrong or meaning-giving). Combining both criteria leaves us with six types of moral conversion. Each type is then illustrated and supported with concrete real-life narratives. I conclude with an attempt at a definition of moral conversion that includes all types. The article is a summary of Chapter 5 of my dissertation (2008) "Narratives of Hope: A Philosophical Study of Moral Conversion.". (shrink)

O artigo apresenta uma visão de conjunto do pensamento de Lima Vaz, a partir de seu método original, caracterizado por seu cunho rememorativo, dialético e sistemático. Ele é aplicado particularmente na Antropologia Filosófica e na Ética, sintetizando a categoria de história com a de transcendência, superando assim a crise do pensamento moderno à luz da práxis ética.

I present a novel anti-sceptical BIV argument by focusing on conditions on the production and use of the locative preposition ‘in’. I distinguish two uses of ‘in’—material and descriptive phenomenological—and I explain in what respect movement is central to the concept that our use of ‘in’ expresses. I go on to argue that a functionalist semantics of the intelligible use of ‘in’ demands a materialist philosophy of action in the spirit of G.E.M. Anscombe, but also why the structure of space (...) is not irrelevant either; appeal to the structure of space unsettles the causal-empirical assumptions that ground the picture of subjectivity and agency that the biv narrative assumes. Finally, I explain why a functionalist semantics demands a Naïve Realist metaphysics of perception, consistent with some of Putnam’s last writings on philosophy of perception. (shrink)

Se analizan fragmentos de Diodoro Sículo donde se manifiestan algunos de los mecanismos de dominación de los amos sobre los esclavos. Observamos larepresentación que se hace desde el discurso dominante del ejercicio del control social y el ocultamiento de las prácticas violentas propias de la relación esclavista. Se trata de fragmentos en donde aparecen referidas situaciones concretas, ocurridas tanto en el ámbito doméstico como en los espacios productivos. La teoría de la dominación social de O. Patterson y los conceptos del (...) análisis del discurso son fundamentos sobre los que se elabora nuestra perspectiva metodológica. (shrink)

This paper briefly examines the concept of the ancient mode of production as expressed in Karl Marx’s Formations. It looks at how twentieth-century Marxist historiography picks up this concept in its characterisation of the Greco-Roman city-state. It explores the feasibility of the use of the concept in relation to the advancement of knowledge of the city-state, especially through the development of archaeology. It examines how social classes are structured and relations of exploitation are presented. And it analyses the need for (...) politics in the organisation of this socio-economic form in terms of how it is joined up with the social relations of production. (shrink)

Om ett värdeobjektivistiskt inslag i Hägerströms moralfilosofiska teorier.--Till försvar för Zenon från Elea.--Den speciella relativitetsteoriens förhållande til de newtonianska föreställningarna om rum och tid.