Why would a country strongly influenced by Buddhism's reverence for life allow legalized, widely used abortion? Equally puzzling to many Westerners is the Japanese practice of mizuko rites, in which the parents of aborted fetuses pray for the well-being of these rejected "lives." In this provocative investigation, William LaFleur examines abortion as a window on the culture and ethics of Japan. At the same time he contributes to the Western debate on abortion, exploring how the Japanese resolve their conflicting (...) emotions privately and avoid the pro-life/pro-choice politics that sharply divide Americans on the issue. (shrink)

During the past few decades a growing interest in what is often called the ‘Kyoto School’ of philosophy has evidenced itself here and there in the West, especially in discussions of comparative religious thought and in the pages of journals which are sensitive, in the post-colonial world, to the value of giving attention to contemporary thought that originates outside the Anglo-American and continental contexts. What has made the so-called Kyoto School especially interesting is the fact that those thinkers identified with (...) it obviously possess a wide acquaintance with Western thought but also have a programme of clarifying points at which they, as Japanese philosophers, find Western philosophy either in sum or in its parts inadequate or objectionable. Moreover, inasmuch as the philosophers of the Kyoto School have deliberately reached back into the Mahayana Buddhist component in Japanese civilization in order to find terms, perspectives, and even foundations for their own analyses and constructions, Western students of comparative religion and comparative thought have in the study of this school a unique aperture for observing how a group of thinkers, while sharing modernity and its problems with us, reates both of these to a religious tradition which is in many ways strikingly different from that of the West. (shrink)

We explore how power and justice dynamics influence whistleblowing behaviour in family firms, focusing on the under-explored construct of connection power. Power and justice are two important, interrelated forces strongly affecting moral behaviour. We hypothesise a moderated moderation model and use a 2 × 2x2 between-subject experiment with 331 participants to test our conceptual model. We find that the family relation (i.e., connection power) of the wrongdoer changes what we know about the relationship between the legitimate power of the observer (...) and whistleblowing likelihood, and that, in some instances, observers with high legitimate power are even less likely to blow the whistle than those with low legitimate power. Our exploration further reveals that, although the family relation of the wrongdoer discourages would-be whistleblowers, even those with legitimate power, organisational justice consistently increases the likelihood of whistleblowing in every case. (shrink)

This essay argues that Japan's resistance to the practice of transplanting organs from persons deemed “brain dead” may not be the result, as some claim, of that society's religions being not yet sufficiently expressive of love and altruism. The violence to the body necessary for the excision of transplantable organs seems to have been made acceptable to American Christians at a unique historical “window of opportunity” for acceptance of that new form of medical technology. Traditional reserve about corpse mutilation had (...) weakened and, especially as presented by the theologian Joseph Fletcher, organ donation was touted as both expressive of agape and a way of “updating” Christianity via the ethics of Utilitarianism. Many Japanese, largely Buddhist and Confucian in their orientation, view these changed valorizations as neither necessary nor patently more ethical than those of their own traditions. (shrink)

Alexis Lafleur-Paiement et Mitia Rioux-Beaulne.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Unconventional Guest: Masao Abe’s Dialogue with the American AcademyWilliam R. LaFleurDuring the two years we were together at Princeton I once took Masao Abe to meet my parents, then alive and living in New Jersey. I had told them some things in advance about Abe, about Zen, and about what in Abe’s ways could at times be unconventional. My mother, I knew, would put lots of effort into preparing (...) the Sunday dinner we ate on the day of our visit. At the meal’s conclusion Abe turned to my mother and declared: “Mrs. LaFleur, this meal has been simply outrageous! ” For a moment I thought he might have meant “delicious” and had landed on the wrong word. But then I saw his smiling eyes and mouth. He had meant what he said. Everyone laughed and my mother promptly thanked him for his “compliment.”Being at times a genially unconventional guest, one who also in academic or dialogic contexts would say surprising or even unsettling things, was something at which Abe excelled. He was also unconventional in his teaching. He frustrated us when we expected the usual approach. In the book edited by Donald Mitchell I told how in 1969 at the University of Chicago Abe aggravated those of us graduate students who wanted to do a survey of all of modern Japanese philosophy; Abe forced us to stay with certain sentences in Nishida, wanting our minds to be changed. He would not budge.1Some years later at Princeton he proved to be maddeningly insistent on this. Reading The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch with graduate students in 1977 who knew some Chinese and Japanese was not for Professor Abe going to be exercise in the usual historico-textual excavation; all that was available, he said, in the introduction and notes to Philip Yampolsky’s translation of that text. He was not interested in an “objectification” that put distance between the voice speaking through the text and the person being addressed by it today. For him the ancient text must read as if written for us and for us today. With Abe as teacher the dialogic mode of the seminar room had to replicate in its own way the lecture hall of the Ta-fan Temple! But graduate students at Princeton, inured as they were to the conventional mode of textual-historical analysis, were made clearly uncomfortable by this. Therefore, hoping I might serve as a mediator, they asked me to ask Abe if we might be more historical and move on more quickly. When, with some trepidation, I transmitted this request [End Page 127] to Abe, he merely chuckled and smiled, leaving me to guess why we should expect no change in his emphasis. What follows is my attempt to unpack what was involved in this... and why it remains relevant today.Even some more recent scholars of East Asian Buddhism in our academy today resemble those graduate students back then in Princeton. They, too, have been suggesting that there was something “behind the times” or in need of being updated in the dialogic teaching mode used so brilliantly by Abe—as well as by Hisamatsu Shin’ichi and D. T. Suzuki. However, there is, I think, something both laughably conventional and arrogantly neocolonialist in these critics’ assumptions. They believe that textual and historicist methods (of which Ideologiekritik is an extension) remain something that the West still needs to teach to the non-West, that these render all other methods outdated and irrelevant, and that they can be deployed to expose what remains flawed in the way that, for instance, Japanese such as Abe study and teach Buddhism and Zen.Ironically, this presumptuous stance itself crumbles under historical and textual analysis—at least when applied to Japan. In various studies, Michael Pye has shown that Tominaga Nakamoto’s studies of Buddhist texts, historical and critical to the core, were done in the early seventeenth century and show a solid tradition of scholarship in this mode arising there without any influence from Europe. As Pye shows, interest in the plurality of religions and an early stage of a “science of religions” were present in Japan... (shrink)

As a general introduction to Ockham’s commentaries on logic, that of Porphyry and Aristotle, the Expositionis in libros artis logice Prohemium deals with the nature of this discipline, its subject, its utility, its specificity, and of its epistemological status. The new French translation offered here is accompanied by an annotated edition that reproduces the medieval spelling of Ockham’s Latin. The same goes for the new translation of the beginning of Ockham’s first logical commentary, the Expositio in librum Porphirii De predicabilibus, (...) whose highlight is the interpretation of Porphyry’s questions on universals (genera and species). (shrink)

Following the traditional order in his time of a course on “Old Logic”, or Ars Vetus, Ockham, after commenting on Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s Categories, comes to his Expositio in librum Perihermenias Aristotelis, of which is offered here a French translation and an orthographic edition of the part considered then as the Proem (chapter 1 of Bekker’s edition, 16a1-18, for us famous because of the “semiotic triangle” of the written, vocal and mental signs, in relation, taking into account the realities (...) [pragmata, res], with truth and falseness), a part itself divided in three parts (Bekker 16a1-2, 3-9, 9-16) — the exegesis of the Venerable Inceptor insisting very strongly on the beginning of the second part (16a3-4, thus on two lines) and, notably, even more especially on what a “passion of the soul” means, in other words, for Ockham himself and particularly for us, a “concept” (a remarkable exegesis whose structure and reprise are also considered). (shrink)

The Questiones in Libros Phisicorum Aristotelis (Questions on the books of Aristotle’s Physics), putatively discussed in public at the Franciscan Studium of London by Ockham before leaving England for Avignon in the spring of 1324, opens with seven questions about the nature of the concept. Here are offered a French translation and an orthographic edition, with an intertextual correspondence table, of this De conceptu, which, massively, appears to have been “magistrally” compiled from the excursus of the Expositio in Prohemium libri (...) Peryermenias Aristotelis, also translated and edited in this way, above, in this dossier. (shrink)

What does a Utilitarian mean by happiness when he says that it is the good? Specifically, pleasure. But how many different kinds of experiences are included under this term? It appears that as the word was used by Bentham, and indeed by almost all other hedonists, it had so wide an extension that it included all experiences not properly termed "unhappiness." Partly, however, because of the identification of happiness with pleasure and the absence of pain, and partly because of a (...) failure to emphasize by frequent explanation the difference between the meanings of terms as used by hedonists and the same terms in common usage, there has existed at all times a disposition to assume that hedonists intended a narrower meaning than they actually did. Even in hedonistic writings there has been a tendency to make a distinction between the usages accorded "pleasure" and "happiness," the former as used more frequently to refer to pleasures of the moment, and the latter to a long continued state of felicific feeling; or a distinction is made between "pleasure" as used when referring to happiness which has an immediately obvious physiological origin and "happiness" to felicific feeling of all types. Nevertheless, the terms are not used consistently in this way, and on the whole it would be better to think of "pleasure" and "happiness" as interchangeable in the writings of Jeremy Bentham and many others. (shrink)

Résumé Cette première traduction française d’une portion significative de l’In « Isagogen » Porphyrii Commentorum Editio secunda, en regard d’un texte latin reponctué en conséquence et accompagné d’annotations critiques, est précédée d’une présentation historico-doctrinale mettant en relief le rôle — à la fois central et problématique — de l’abstraction dans la solution boécienne, ouvertement rattachée à Alexandre d’Aphrodise, du statut des genres et des espèces dans ce texte qui, à travers l’exégèse du célèbre questionnaire porphyrien, a fait connaître le problème (...) des universaux à l’Occident latin et en est demeuré l’expression la plus achevée jusqu’au xiie siècle, où Abélard en a donné un méta-commentaire particulièrement brillant dans sa Logica « Ingredientibus » : Super Porphyrium, éditée, traduite et étudiée ci-après dans ce numéro thématique.This first French translation of a relevant portion of the In “Isagogen” Porphyrii Commentorum Editio secunda, in parallel with a consequently reponctuated and critically annotated latin text, is preceded by a historico-doctrinal presentation highlighting the role — both central and problematic — of abstraction in the Boethian solution, openly linked to Alexander of Aphrodisias, of the status of genera and species in this text which, through the exegesis of the well-known porphyrian questionary, has revealed the problem of universals to the Latin West and remained its most achieved expression until the 12th century, where Abelard wrote on those pages a particularly brilliant meta-commentary in his Logica “Ingredientibus” : Super Porphyrium, edited, translated and studied hereafter in this thematic issue. (shrink)

Résumé Appuyée sur une collation systématique — incluant l’orthographe — de l’unique manuscrit subsistant, cette nouvelle édition critique du début de la Logica « Ingredientibus » : Super Porphyrium, accompagnée d’une traduction française inédite et complétée par une abondante annotation, rend ainsi accessible l’exposé le plus détaillé d’Abélard sur les universaux, des pages célèbres où, dans une approche sémantique non exempte de perspectives métaphysiques, on trouve, comme l’étude précédente l’a laissé voir, des développements philosophiques importants relatifs à l’intellection et à (...) l’abstraction.Based on a systematic collation — including the orthography — of the only surviving manuscript, this new critical edition of the beginning of Abelard’s Logica “Ingredientibus” : Super Porphyrium, accompanied by an original French translation and an abundant annotation, thus makes accessible Abelard’s most elaborate account on universals, well known pages where, in a semantical approach non exempt of metaphysical perspectives, one finds, as the preceding study as shown, important philosophical developments on intellection and abstraction. (shrink)

Cet article se penche sur la doctrine de l’abstraction chez les néo-scolastiques et ses sources immédiates pour en évaluer la fidélité par rapport à ses sources ultimes , avec insistance - terminologique et conceptuelle - sur la distinction thomasienne entre abstraction et séparation , une distinction aussi présente dans des textes de maîtres ès arts de l’Université de Paris contemporains ou même antérieurs, une distinction capitale - est-il rappelé en conclusion - par laquelle l’Aquinate limite épistémologiquement la portée de la (...) théologie philosophique. On prépare ainsi l’étude du témoignage jusqu’ici inédit des Communia logice sur ce thème de l’abstraction et de la séparation. (shrink)

Dans la section de La querelle des universaux intitulée «Séparation et abstraction: l'influence d'Al-Fârâbî sur la première scolastique» — section comprenant elle-même deux sous-sections: 1. «Intuition intellectuelle et connaissance métaphysique: Roger Bacon»; 2. «La métaphysique comme connaissance des choses divines» —, Alain de Libera écrit: «La distinction entre abstraction et séparation a [...] joué un rôle capital dans la pensée du XIIIe siècle. On la retrouve aussi bien chez Thomas d'Aquin que dans les diverses Introductions à la philosophie rédigées dans (...) l'euphorie épistémologique des années 1240-1260». Dans une étude parue postérieurement, avec le titre Structure du corpus scolaire de la métaphysique dans la première moitié du XIIIe siècle, A. de Libera ajoute encore au sujet de «la distinction entre abstraction et séparation» que «c'est un thème typique de la métaphysique scolaire de la première moitié du XIIIe siècle qui, dans l'historiographie, passe pour la pierre de touche de la ‘révolution thomiste’». (shrink)

La première édition, accompagnée d’une traduction française annotée, du témoignage des Communia logice sur l’abstraction, en fait la double abstraction, et la séparation - un thème philosophique dans la mouvance de Métaphysique, E, 1 notoirement présent, on l’a vu, à la même époque chez Thomas d’Aquin - est ici précédée d’une étude d’histoire littéraire et doctrinale de cette compilation exégétique de questions sur la logique contenue dans un manuscrit ayant appartenu à Pierre de Limoges, maître à la Faculté des arts (...) de l’Université de Paris au plus tard en 1260-1261 et peut-être responsable de l’insertion inattendue ainsi que de la structuration par amalgame dudit témoignage, en forme de débat sur le sujet des sciences mathématiques, dans le commentaire sur le prédicament de la quantité dans les Catégories. (shrink)

In what follows, I draw on things I have found in Japanese discussions of bioethics in order to clarify some aspects of the ethics of biotechnological enhancement. In doing so it will, I hope, become evident that what we might call a “religious” component is in Japan somewhat differently construed than in the contexts with which we are more likely to be familiar in North America. And in the end an attempt will be made here to show that the materials (...) considered give us all – not just the Japanese – reasons for going forward with biological enhancement technologies only on condition that extreme caution be exercised. The fast-moving, oncoming traffic in this domain ought to be forced, these materials suggest, to come up to a caution-demanding signal – not a green light but one that is unambiguously amber. Caution and perhaps even a full stop appear to be in order. (shrink)

This article presents two of Foucault’s lesser known notions, “justice fonctionnelle" (functional justice) and “stratégie du pourtour” (strategy of the perimeter), in order to interrogate the role of legislators in regard to the policing of political dissent. This article contains three parts. First, I present the two lesser known notions referred to above. Then, I provide my understanding of the role of law for Foucault. Finally, in the third part, I explain how a consensual relationship between the police and legislators (...) is established. I present briefly the work of Avrom Sherr (1989) and outline the contents of a recent U.S. anti-protest law (H.R. 347, or "Anti-Occupy Wall Street Law") which gives the police greater powers to redefine the legal nature of public space and to make arrests without having to show criminal intent (mens rea) on the part of protesters. My aim is to further think through the paradox that Foucault mentioned in his lectures on security societies: non-judicial methods used in security processes undermine the primacy of law but also lead to the overproduction of laws (inflation législative). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Juvenal: Satires, Book IRichard A. LaFleurSusanna Morton Braund, ed. Juvenal: Satires, Book I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. viii 1 323 pp. Cloth, $64.95; paper, $22.95. (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics)This new text and commentary on Juvenal’s book 1 (Satires 1–5) is for two reasons a most welcome addition to the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series. First, Susanna Braund has published extensively and incisively on Roman satire, (...) Juvenal in particular, over the past fifteen years; her several articles and the books Beyond Anger: A Study of Juvenal’s Third Book of Satires (Cambridge 1988), Roman Verse Satire (Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics no. 23, Oxford 1992), and The Roman Satirists and Their Masks (Bristol 1996) have all made valuable contributions to our understanding of the genre. Second, modern editions of Juvenal with text and commentary are in short supply (J. Ferguson’s remains the best in English; see my combined review of his 1979 Macmillan and E. Courtney’s important but expensive, and textless, 1980 commentary in CJ 79 [1984] 257–62), and Braund’s work, while it includes only the satirist’s first book, not only offers enough material for an undergraduate course (nearly a thousand lines) but elucidates the volume’s thematic unity in a way that will enhance our students’ appreciation of Juvenal’s later books as well and of Roman poetry books in general.The book’s apparatus is standard for the Cambridge series: a succinct but helpful and up-to-date bibliography and brief index conclude the volume, and the forty-page introduction discusses Roman verse satire generally, Juvenal’s major predecessors (Lucilius, Horace, and Persius), the little we know for certain of Juvenal’s life, what Braund rightly characterizes as the overarching characteristics of his art—indignation, rhetoric, and epic—along with various details of style and meter, the Satires’ influence on subsequent literature, and finally the manuscript tradition. All of this is economically managed and cogent, not least the discussions on several pertinent topics: persona and the “autobiographical monologue as the chief mode of presentation” in satire as in the other “personal” genres of elegy, lyric, and epigram; indignatio and the “moral ambiguity of anger,” which must condition our response to Laronia in Satire 2, Umbricius in 3, and the other “unreliable satirist” figures who control so much of the rhetoric in Juvenal’s early books; and his exploitation of epic motifs from the [End Page 474] heroic past in depicting the sordid realities of contemporary Rome. One could go further with this last point: it is a major purpose of the epicisms in Juvenal’s programmatic first poem to define satire as anti-epic and its topsy-turvy world and all its players—the satirist included—as utterly anti-heroic. The satirist’s Rome, quintessentially vicious, is on the brink of destruction (omne in praecipiti vitium stetit, 1.149), on the eve of another Great Flood, in fact, like that survived by only Deucalion and Pyrrha (this is the point, deliberately recalling through ring composition the flood sequence in 1.81–84, of utere velis, / totos pande sinus at 1.149–50, a point missed by commentators generally and not just Braund, who explains the phrase simply as a grandiloquent “nautical metaphor” with the sense of “off you go at full pelt”). And yet the best this latter-day Lucilius can do, as he whimpers in Satire 1’s closing verses, is to decline his predecessor’s battle-wagon, helmet, and sword and wage war only against Rome’s villainous dead.The most profitable section of Braund’s introduction is her “Overview of Book I” (30–36), which thoughtfully surveys “the persistence and development” of several dominant themes and images that recur throughout the book: the city of Rome itself, its palaces and alleyways seething with corruption (“the Book is a catalogue of Rome’s vices”); the “degradation of the patron-client relationship (amicitia),” which can be viewed as book 1’s major unifying theme (see Illinois Classical Studies 4 [1979] 158–77); the “day in the life” motif, advancing the action from morning to night both within Satire... (shrink)

The purpose of this article is first to enrich the exposition on the contribution of the magistri artium in Claude Panaccio’s Le Discours intérieur by an in-depth scrutiny of a quotation from the Latin al-Fārābī ending the presentation of logic in the Divisio scientiarum (ca. 1250) of the Parisian Arts Master Arnoul of Provence (Arnulfus Provincialis). Once accomplished this revision using the various Latin versions or adaptations of the Farabian Enumeration of the sciences (Iḥṣāʾ al-ʿulūm) by Gerard of Cremona and (...) Gundissalinus, it is clear that, despite a certain duality in its manuscript tradition, the relevant passage in Arnulfus Provincialis’s Divisio scientiarum does not merely distinguish inner logos and external logos, but also considers, like its source, a third logos, and that in a way susceptible to refine the characterization of al-Fārābī’s triadic logos as Le Discours intérieur reports this triade at the occasion of its judicious comparison with a parallel doctrine in John Damascene (Ekdosis akribès tès orthodoxou pisteôs alias De fide orthodoxa) interpreted differently by Thomas Aquinas following Albert the Great. (shrink)

Depuis sa découverte par Martin Grabmann en 1927, la collection de questions contenue dans le manuscrit de Barcelone, Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Ripoll 109 est devenue familière aux historiens de la philosophie et des universités médiévales. Bien qu'on s'accorde à considérer cet écrit comme un document d'exceptionnelle importance à cause des informations qu'il nous fournit sur la nature de l'enseignement dispensé dans les facultés des arts au Moyen Âge, il n'est pourtant connu que par de brefs extraits, plus (...) ou moins correctement édités, et l'on en réclame depuis longtemps la publication intégrale. (shrink)

Résumé Sans négliger les autres documents pertinents dans un tour d’horizon final et comparatif, cette étude s’efforce de dépeindre l’enseignement universitaire de la philosophie tel qu’il se reflète dans le miroir des textes didascaliques artiens de Paris jusqu’au mitan du xiiie siècle, tout en fournissant en annexe un premier répertoire, encore partiel, de ce corpus, avec ses éditions et ses traductions. Malgré son caractère généralement pratique et institutionnel, certains de ses éléments théoriques — comme la mise en relief de la (...) liaison intime, trame sapientielle de ces écrits de maîtres ès arts, entre théologie cosmique et éthique philosophique — permettent d’espérer que cet article apporte une véritable contribution à l’Histoire de la philosophie.Without neglecting the other relevant documents in a final comparative survey, this study tries to depict the university teaching of philosophy as reflected in the mirror of the Parisian didascalical texts of the Arts Faculty during the first half of the thirteenth century, while giving in appendix a first repertory, still partial, of this corpus, with its editions and translations. Notwithstanding its generally practical and institutional character, some of its theoretical elements — such as the highlighting of the close relationship between cosmical theology and ethical philosophy, a sapiential thread in those arts masters writings — it is hoped that this article may prove a genuine contribution to the History of philosophy. (shrink)