In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle examines the nature of happiness, which he defines as a specially good kind of life. He considers the nature of practical reasoning, friendship, and the role and importance of the moral virtues in the best life. This new edition features a revised translation and valuable new introduction and notes.

"Clearly argued and captivatingly developed through subtle analyses of ethnographic materials...[this book] will revitalize cultural anthropology."--Fredrik Barth.

Defenders of two Rationality Views of love—the Qualities View and the Personhood View—have drawn on Iris Murdoch's philosophical writings to highlight a connection between love and a “realistic” perspective on the beloved. Murdoch does not inform the basic structure of these views—she is rather introduced as a supplement who shows that in love, we pay accurate, nuanced, unguarded, and unflinching attention to the other. In this paper, I contend that these authors have failed to see that Murdoch offers a distinct (...) view of love and is inappropriate to enlist as an ally. This is in large part because they have missed the full sense of what Murdoch means by connecting love and realism. I contend that for Murdoch, to love someone means seeing them in light of a realistic vision of what it means to be human; this includes an appreciation of the limits of freedom, the formative influence of personal history, and the nature and extent of our differences from one another. This helps us to see why Murdoch variously describes loving attention as realistic, compassionate, tolerant, and extremely difficult. It also sheds light on some important and familiar ways that we criticize one another's grounds for love. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch's famous case of M and D illustrates the moral importance of learning to see others in a more favourable light through renewed attention. Yet if we do not read this case in the wider context of Murdoch's work, we are liable to overlook the attitudes and transformations involved in coming to change one's mind as M does. Stanley Cavell offers one such reading and denies that the case represents a change in M's sense of herself or the possibilities (...) for her world of the kind exemplified by Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House. In this essay, I challenge Cavell's reading, suggesting that the case, while it may not be an exemplar of the perfectionist outlook as described by Cavell, can and should be interpreted in perfectionist terms. To see this, I reflect on Murdoch's views on the endless perfectibility of language, the importance of humility, and the role of love and attention in moral learning. I conclude that Murdoch's work uniquely sheds light on how we might cultivate a perfectionist outlook in ourselves and others, and describes the distinctive role that some novels can play in moral education. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science by Ann BlairPeter DearAnn Blair. The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv + 382. Cloth, $45.00.Jean Bodin’s Universae naturae theatrum (1596) is the least celebrated of all the major publications by this outstanding figure of the French renaissance. It lacks the apparent political, historiographical, and philosophical relevance of Bodin’s well-known (...) earlier works (the Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem of 1566, Les six livres de la République of 1576, and De la démonomanie des sorciers of 1580, all receiving much more attention then as now). Ann Blair focuses our attention on the Theatrum, as a text whose significance for her book exists on at least three interrelated levels: there is its relation to Bodin’s views in the more famous texts; its advantage as a treatise on natural philosophy about whose author we know much more (intellectually) than those of most such works; and in connection with the last, there is above all its value as a distinguished representative of a genre of natural philosophical writings that was prominent in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.It is the third consideration that motivates Blair’s book most centrally. She declares her wish to enrich our view of the history of science with works, like the Theatrum, that were not made by subsequently regarded stars such as Galileo or Descartes; the very typicality of its genre makes the Theatrum, she argues, a valuable window on contemporary understandings of what natural knowledge was and should be about. Bodin’s enterprise possessed a religious core: natural philosophy was for him a tool to be used in shoring up broadly irenical positions (of the kind associated with the Colloquium heptaplomeres, usually attributed, as here, to Bodin). This kind of “natural theology” avant la lettre characterized a good number of different thinkers and writers on natural philosophy in this period, many of them German (besides their discussion here, Blair is considering such people, and their project of pia philosophia, more fully in her current work). It is a subject that, more than anything, stands at the heart of her study.Bodin, rather conventionally, tried to establish a close liaison between natural philosophy and religious knowledge—that is, between those things to be inferred from experience of the natural world and the central dogmas of faith. Less conventionally, he attempted to demonstrate on occasion truths that were far from orthodox. Regardless of whether Bodin was “really” a Catholic or a Protestant (and Blair observes the great interest in the Theatrum shown by German Calvinists in the first few decades after its original publication), his general religious stance was one of accommodation. Thus good philosophizing could demonstrate (in the weak, rhetorical sense of that term) such doctrines as the existence and providence of God; contentious issues, such as the correct interpretation of the Eucharist, were left aside. Nonetheless, Bodin also argued, at such length and with such vigor as to have the propositions condemned by the Catholic church, that human souls and angels (as well as, more usually, demons) were corporeal beings. The importance to Bodin of this position stemmed from its sociopolitical implications: in particular, if human souls were incorporeal, it became unclear how rewards and punishments—necessary sanctions for restoring the social order threatened by the Wars of Religion—could be meted out after death. Curiously, such a view seems to imply that pleasure and pain are inextricably connected to bodies alone. [End Page 363]Among the historiographical strands informing Blair’s approach is recent literature on the “history of the book,” best known through the work of Roger Chartier. Accordingly, Blair discusses the vicissitudes of production of Bodin’s book in its various editions and emissions, and carefully considers, along with the likely reading practices by the aid of which Bodin came to compose it, the various uses to which its first readers put it. Her major interpretive trope is that of the commonplace book. While acknowledging the lack of direct material evidence for Bodin’s use of such a technique as his chief means of... (shrink)

Who were the true forerunners of the seventeenth-century theorists of innate ideas? Credit should go, not to Plato, despite the common label Platonist, but to the Stoics—or so this challenging new study claims. Plato’s celebrated doctrine of knowledge as recollection differed from these others’ theories not merely in its extravagant postulate of a prenatal knowing state but in many hitherto unrecognized ways, Scott argues. Among those who shared the belief that all men are endowed at birth with considerable epistemological resources, (...) Plato alone is a pessimist both about how few of us make any use of these—only those who make philosophical progress—and about the difficulty of unearthing these resources. Contrary to a prevalent view, Scott holds that Plato invokes recollection to explain not “ordinary learning,” the acquisition or application of everyday concepts such as equality or beauty, but “higher learning”—the province of the philosopher. (shrink)

This book explores Iris Murdoch as a philosopher who, through her distinctive methodology, exploits the advantages of having a mind on the borders of literature and politics in her early career writings (pre-The Sovereignty of Good). By focusing on a single decade of Murdoch’s early career, Jamieson tracks connections between her views on the state of literature and politics in postwar Britain and her approach to the philosophy of mind and moral philosophy. Furthermore, this close study reveals that, far from (...) a stylistic quirk, Murdoch’s use of metaphors, analogies, and other literary devices is internal to her methodology. Finally, rather than asking what Murdoch’s views are, this work will ask “what is Murdoch trying to achieve with her writings and public lectures, and how does she go about this?” By answering the latter question, we will have a new strategy for interpreting her writings more generally. The book contributes to the growing body of scholarship focusing on Iris Murdoch’s philosophical writings, and on women in the history of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I challenge standard views of the moral badness of sentimentality defended by art critics and philosophers. Accounts based on untruthfulness and self-indulgence lack the resources to both explain the badness of bad sentimentality and to allow that there are benign instances. We are sometimes permitted to be sentimental even though it is self-serving. A non-moralistic account should allow for this. To provide such an account, I first outline a substantive view of the ideal of unsentimentality by turning (...) to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne. Rilke celebrates the artist for his unsentimental love of his subjects and “untiring objective wakefulness” to them. I then turn to Iris Murdoch’s ethics of attention (itself influenced by Rilke) to explain why this ideal is so difficult to live up to in practice, the various ways that we fall short, and what our failures mean. What Murdoch contributes is both a sense that the lovingly attentive attitude that Rilke describes is morally—and not just artistically—important and a compassionate account of the human egocentrism that inhibits it. By thinking of sentimentality as a failure of moral attention, we can appreciate how particular instances differ from one another. Sentimentality can console us in difficult times or can gratify our egos; it can be a form of escapism or can rigidly enclose reality; and it can be harmlessly self-serving or a selfish failure to morally attend to the other when it counts. I conclude by outlining some ways that being seen with Cézanne-like moral attention can matter to us. (shrink)

Of the later dialogues of Plato, the Sophists stand out. This article highlights the concept of sophist as propounded by Plato. A didactic approach runs through the text. Socrates harps on the relation between sophist, philosopher and a statesman. Are they three different or they are the same. The basic idea that Plato wants to convey is, both features highlight some of the key enigmas of the dialogue: What is the relation between the outer and middle parts? How seriously are (...) we to take the outer part? And is there a genuine, and successful, attempt to say what the sophist is? The article focuses on two key problems discussed and solved in the middle part: the late-learners' problem, and the problem of false statement. The article also discusses communion of kinds and Plato's idea of the four quartets. (shrink)

Pursuing equality is an important challenge for any modern democratic society but this challenge faces two sets of difficulties: the theoretical question of what sort of equality to pursue and for whom; and the practical question concerning which legal and political institutions are the most appropriate vehicles for implementing egalitarian social policy and thus realizing egalitarian justice. This book offers original and innovative contributions to the debate about equality of opportunity. The first part of the book sets out a theory (...) of equality of opportunity that presents equal opportunities as a normative device for the regulation of competition for scarce resources. The second part shifts the focus to the consideration of the practical application by courts or legislatures or public policy makers of policies for addressing racial, class or gender injustices. The author examines standardized tests, affirmative action, workfare, universal health-care, comparable worth, and the economic consequences of divorce. (shrink)

This paper is essentially the author's Gödel Lecture at the ASL Logic Colloquium '09 in Sofia extended and supplemented by material from some other papers. After a brief description of traditional reverse mathematics, a computational approach to is presented. There are then discussions of some interactions between reverse mathematics and the major branches of mathematical logic in terms of the techniques they supply as well as theorems for analysis. The emphasis here is on ones that lie outside the usual main (...) systems of reverse mathematics. While retaining the usual base theory and working still within second order arithmetic, theorems are described that range from those far below the usual systems to ones far above. (shrink)

Honeybees show lateral asymmetry in both learning about odours associated with reward and recalling memory of these associations. We have extended this research to show that bees exhibit lateral biases in their initial response to odours: viz., turning towards the source of an odour presented on their right side and turning away from it when presented on their left side. The odours we presented were the main component of the alarm pheromone, iso-amyl acetate (IAA), and four floral scents. The significant (...) bias to turn towards IAA odour on the right and away from it on the left is, we argue, a lateralization of the fight-flight response elicited by this pheromone. It contrasts to an absence of any asymmetry in the turning response to an odour of the flowers on which the bees had been feeding prior to testing: to this odour they turned towards when it was presented on either the left or right side. Lemon and orange odours were responded to differently on the left and right sides (towards on the right, away on the left) but no asymmetry was found in responses to rose odour. Our results show that side biases are present even in the initial, orienting response of bees to certain odours. (shrink)

We show that there are Π5 formulas in the language of the Turing degrees, [Formula: see text], with ≤, ∨ and ∧, that define the relations x″ ≤ y″, x″ = y″ and so {x ∈ L2 = x ≥ y|x″ = y″} in any jump ideal containing 0. There are also Σ6&Π6 and Π8 formulas that define the relations w = x″ and w = x', respectively, in any such ideal [Formula: see text]. In the language with just ≤ (...) the quantifier complexity of each of these definitions increases by one. For a lower bound on definability, we show that no Π2 or Σ2 formula in the language with just ≤ defines L2 or L2. Our arguments and constructions are purely degree theoretic without any appeals to absoluteness considerations, set theoretic methods or coding of models of arithmetic. As a corollary, we see that every automorphism of [Formula: see text] is fixed on every degree above 0″ and every relation on [Formula: see text] which is invariant under the double jump or under join with 0″ is definable over [Formula: see text] if and only if it is definable in second order arithmetic with set quantification ranging over sets whose degrees are in [Formula: see text]. (shrink)

Among political philosophers - and indeed public officials - it is generally believed that some sort of general principle of distributional equality can provide solid moral foundations for universal access to health care. In fact, this belief is so widely received that even among those who are very critical of egalitarianism, few have expressed doubts about the prospects for an egalitarian defense of universal access to health care. The purpose of this paper is to put pressure on this received view.

Judgements concerning proper or appropriate educational endeavour, methods of investigation and philosophising about education necessarily implicate perspectives, values, assumptions and beliefs. In recent years ideas from the complexity sciences have been utilised in many domains including psychology, economics, architecture, social science and education. This paper addresses questions concerning the appropriateness of utilising complexity science in educational research as well as issues relating to the ways in which complexity might be engaged. I suggest that, just like all human endeavour, approaches to (...) research emerge out of discursive communities and can be understood as self‐organising, dynamic and emergent over time. In this formulation, complexity represents one such newly emergent approach. I argue that it is important that researchers partake in critical and reflective discourse about the nature of education and conceptual frameworks, as well as about impacts and legacies of utilising complexity, so as to participate in and influence the ongoing emergence of educational endeavour. I conclude by suggesting a series of caveats for researchers considering using complexity in educational research. (shrink)

This article outlines a moral education guided by African traditional values such as ubuntu and ukama. It argues that ubuntu is not by definition speciesist, as some have claimed, but that it has strong ecocentric leanings, that is, if ubuntu is understood as a concrete expression of ukama. In fact, ubuntu deconstructs the anthropocentric?ecocentric distinction which has characterised and continues to characterise debates in environmental theory/philosophy. To become more fully human does not mean caring only for the self and other (...) human beings but also for the entire biophysical world. Some implications that this discussion has for moral education are explored, as well as some opportunities that post-apartheid curriculum frameworks offer for implementing a moral education guided by ubuntu. (shrink)

Complexity is introduced as a fitting paradigmatic orientation to social inquiry. A complexity approach is compared and contrasted with other holistic social inquiry orientations and constructivist styles of thinking that have informed and guided the evolution of qualitative social inquiry.

In response to a series of allegations of scientific misconduct in the 1980’s, a number of scientific societies, national agencies, and academic institutions, including Harvard Medical School, devised guidelines to increase awareness of optimal scientific practices and to attempt to prevent as many episodes of misconduct as possible. The chief argument for adopting guidelines is to promote good science. There is no evidence that well-crafted guidelines have had any detrimental effect on creativity since they focus on design of research studies, (...) documentation of research findings, assignment of credit through authorship, data management and supervision of trainees, not on the origin and evolution of ideas. This paper addresses a spectrum of causes of scientific misconduct or unacceptable scientific behavior and couples these with estimates of the potential for prevention if guidelines for scientific investigation are adopted. The conclusion is that clear and understandable guidelines should help to reduce the chance that flawed research will escape from our institutions. However, they cannot be relied upon alone to prevent all instances of scientific misconduct and should be regarded rather as one means of bolstering the integrity of the entire scientific enterprise. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that teasing is restricted to encounters among intimates or close acquaintances. As a result of examining initial interactions among speakers of English, however, this article shows that teasing also occurs between persons who are becoming acquainted. Analysis reveals that tease sequences unfold across three actions that constitute the tease as an invitation to intimacy: a teasable action on the part of the target, the tease proper and a moment of interactionally generated affiliation. Given teasing is one (...) way of criticising another, it constitutes a potential breach of tact or interactional propriety. In initial interactions, however, participants can construe this potential impropriety as an invitation to intimacy, as it involves the proposal of a shared ironic stance that may be either accepted or declined by the target of the tease. (shrink)

A social partner’s emotions communicate important information about their motives and intentions. However, people may discount emotional information that they believe their partner has regulated with the strategic intention of exerting social influence. Across two studies, we investigated interpersonal effects of communicated guilt and perceived strategic regulation in trust games. Results showed that communicated guilt (but not interest) mitigated negative effects of trust violations on interpersonal judgements and behaviour. Further, perceived strategic regulation reduced guilt’s positive effects. These findings suggest that (...) people take emotion-regulation motives into account when responding to emotion communication. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the way that cultures change and how cultural diversity is created, maintained and lost. Human culture is the inevitable result of the way our species acquires its behavior. We are extremely social animals and an overwhelming proportion of our behavior is socially learned. The behavior of other animals is largely a product of innate evolved determinants of behavior combined with individual learning. They make quite modest use of social learning while we acquire a massive cultural repertoire (...) from the people we associate with (Richerson & Boyd, 2005: Chapter 2). Expertise in exploiting our environment, values about what matters in life and even feelings about whom to trust and whom to hate are mostly “absorbed” from those around us. (shrink)

I examine Aristotle's brief remarks in N.E. I.3 to the effect that fine and just things – ta kala and ta dikaia – have much diversity and variation and hence are thought to be...

Theorems of hyperarithmetic analysis (THAs) occupy an unusual neighborhood in the realms of reverse mathematics and recursion theoretic complexity. They lie above all the fixed (recursive) iterations of the Turing Jump but below ATR $_{0}$ (and so $\Pi _{1}^{1}$ -CA $_{0}$ or the hyperjump). There is a long history of proof theoretic principles which are THAs. Until Barnes, Goh, and Shore [ta] revealed an array of theorems in graph theory living in this neighborhood, there was only one mathematical denizen. (...) In this paper we introduce a new neighborhood of theorems which are almost theorems of hyperarithmetic analysis (ATHAs). When combined with ACA $_{0}$ they are THAs but on their own they are very weak. We generalize several conservativity classes ( $\Pi _{1}^{1}$, r- $\Pi _{2}^{1}$, and Tanaka) and show that all our examples (and many others) are conservative over RCA $_{0}$ in all these senses and weak in other recursion theoretic ways as well. We provide denizens, both mathematical and logical. These results answer a question raised by Hirschfeldt and reported in Montalbán [2011] by providing a long list of pairs of principles one of which is very weak over RCA $_{0}$ but over ACA $_{0}$ is equivalent to the other which may be strong (THA) or very strong going up a standard hierarchy and at the end being stronger than full second order arithmetic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Sacred and the Myth: Havel's Greengrocer and the Transformation of Ideology in Communist Czechoslovakia Marci Shore University ofToronto There is nothing a free man is so anxious to do as to find something to worship. But it must be something unquestionable, that all men can agree to worship communally. For the great concern ofthese miserable creatures is not that every individual should find something to worship that (...) he personally considers worthy ofworship, but that they should find someming in which they can all believe and which they can all worship in common; it is essential that it should be in common. And it is precisely that requirement ofshared worship that has been the principal source of suffering for individual man and the human race since the beginning of history. In their efforts to impose universal worship, men have unsheathed their swords and killed one another.Fyodor Dostoevsky (306) Thus the conflict between the aims of life and the aims of the system is not a conflict between two socially defined and separate communities; and only a very generalized view (and even that only approximative) permits us to divide society into the rulers and the ruled. Here, by the way, is one of the most important differences between the post-totalitarian system and classical dictatorships, in which this line of conflict can still be drawn according to social class. In the post-totalitarian system, 1 64Marci Shore this line runs defacto through each person, for everyone in his or her own way is both a victim and a supporter ofthe system. Vaclav Havel (37) The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia arrived as a symbolically gentle conclusion to a half-century long era ofharrowing violence and totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. It was an era that saw the emergence ofNazism, Stalinism, and various indigenous fascisms, effecting a startling demonstration of the potency of ideology to co-opt minds and to wreak violence. The existence of communist ideology as a myth cohering communist totalitarian societies has been widely enough asserted. Yet this analysis can be taken to a further level through the aid oftwo paradigms. The first is a theory of human relationships developed by René Girard, which blends the disciplines ofliterary criticism, anthropology, philosophy, and political science. The second is a model arising from Vaclav Havel's parable of the greengrocer, told in "The Power ofthe Powerless" (1979). Girard's model posits the existence ofthe sacred, that locus of power that was once the pole of primitive religions. The core of the sacred is transfigured human violence. Girardian scholar Robert Hamerton-Kelly explains the process by which the sacred comes into being: Girard tells us that [the sacred] is a mendacious representation of human violence; "it is the sum ofhuman assumptions resulting from collective transferences focused on a reconciliatory victim at the conclusion of a mimetic crisis." The element of "the overwhelming" defines the Sacred...but its primary content is violence understood as being...outside ofnormal human control. (142) The sacred is established as the result of a crisis, one which finds resolution in the purging ofa relatively arbitrary scapegoat. Following this catharsis, three expressions sustain the sacred: myth, ritual, and prohibition. An examination ofthe evolution ofthese expressions in Czechoslovakia from the Stalinist period through normalization (the so-termed "posttotalitarian " period described by Havel in his essay) reveals much about the paradoxical dynamics ofideologically-based totalitarianism—which Havel defines most poignantly by suggesting that at the essence of ideological totalitarianism is the collapsing of the traditional dichotomy between victim and oppressor. The Sacred and the Myth: Havel's Greengrocer165 A Girardian deconstruction of Stalinism A political space for Stalinism developed in Czechoslovakia through the tumultuous period of Nazi occupation and the communist nature of anti-Nazi resistance. By the eve ofthe 1948 communist coup, the communists had claimed thirty-eight percent ofthe popular vote in free elections. Milan Kundera describes the coup as a usurpation of power "not in bloodshed and violence, but to the cheers of about half the population" (1986, 8). Defining this initial fanaticism was its honesty, especially among the younger generation. A young Stalinist later to become a reformist, and still later a dissident, Zdenek Mlynár, explains... (shrink)