Are intrinsic desires subject to reasoned criticism, and if they are, what is about them that makes them subject to such criticism? It is argued that though the answer given to this question in The Moral Problem is wrong, a more promising answer can be found if we attend to the metaphysics of agency.

Explication of the concept of socialrace: the concept variously refers to (1) a social group that is taken to be a racialist race, (2) the social position occupied by a particular social group that is a socialrace and (3) the system of social positions that are socialraces. Socialrace is distinguished from other more familiar forms of social construction. The sense in which socialrace counts as a race concept is explained. The advantages of the term ‘socialrace’ are discussed. The desiderata for (...) a conception of socialrace are articulated. The concept socialrace is contrasted with other similar concepts. (shrink)

In this important study, Michael Luntley offers a compelling reading of Wittgenstein’s account of meaning and intentionality, based upon a unifying theme in the early and later philosophies. A compelling reading of Wittgenstein’s account of meaning and intentionality. Offers an important and original reading of Wittgenstein’s key texts. Based upon a unifying theme in Wittgenstein’s early and later philosophies.

The story of "natural law" - the idea that God has written a law on the human heart so that ethical norms derive from human nature - in twentieth-century Protestant ethics is one of rejection and resurgence. For half a century, luminaries like Karl Barth, Carl F. H. Henry, and Cornelius Van Til cast a shadow over natural law moral reflection because of its putative link to natural theology, autonomous reason, associations with Catholic theology, and ethical witness devoid of special (...) revelation. However, over the past twenty years, Protestant theologians have renewed their interest in the subject, often animated by debates on Christian involvement in the public arena and on matters of life, death, and gender and sexuality. Much of this engagement has happened within Reformed circles and has largely been conducted without reference to Roman Catholic construals of the natural law. Conversely, Catholic developments in natural-law thinking have paid little attention to the surge of interest on the Protestant side. As a result, Protestant and Catholic natural proponents - and even those skeptical of the natural law - are not in conversation with one another.The lack of dialog between the various schools of natural law has left a historic tradition within Christan moral thought underdeveloped in contemporary Protestant theology. By bringing together a variety of perspectives in much-needed conversation, this book helps readers to understand the various construals of natural law within the broader strands of Christian and classical traditions and clarifies its unique importance for Christian moral witness in a secular culture. The contributors address the following questions:What is natural law?Can moral norms be derived from immanent, creaturely ends? If so, how specific or action-guiding can those norms be? How extensive might these moral norms be?How does natural law endure despite Christian insistence on the noetic, epistemological effects of sin?What is the relationship between Christian reflection on natural law and the broader classical tradition's understanding of natural law?How do Catholic and Protestant construals of natural law differ?What is the relationship between faith and reason?What's the relationship between human nature and natural law?Does "natural law" mean: "secular moral reasons"? Or is "natural law" merely religious belief disguised as public reason?How does natural law relate to public reason?Does the affirmation of a "natural law" lead to a natural theology? Or are these distinct?What is the relationship between natural law and the laws of nature?Five views:Classical Natural Law - Michael PakalukNew Natural Law - Melissa MoschellaReformed Natural Law - W. Bradford LittlejohnLutheran Natural Law - Joel D. BiermanAnti-Natural Law - Peter J. Leithart. (shrink)

“What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?” This apparently simple question opens into the massive, provocative, and complex A Secular Age, where Charles Taylor positions secularism as a defining feature of the modern world, not the mere absence of religion, and casts light on the experience of transcendence that scientistic explanations of the world tend to neglect. -/- In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, a prominent and varied group of scholars chart the (...) conversations in which A Secular Age intervenes and address wider questions of secularism and secularity. The distinguished contributors include Robert Bellah, José Casanova, Nilüfer Göle, William E. Connolly, Wendy Brown, Simon During, Colin Jager, Jon Butler, Jonathan Sheehan, Akeel Bilgrami, John Milbank, and Saba Mahmood. -/- Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age is edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun. (shrink)

Leibniz states that 'metaphysics is natural theology', and this is especially true of his metaphysics of modality. In this book, Michael V. Griffin examines the deep connection between the two and the philosophical consequences which follow from it. Grounding many of Leibniz's modal conceptions in his theology, Griffin develops a new interpretation of the ontological argument in Leibniz and Descartes. This interpretation demonstrates that their understanding God's necessary existence cannot be construed in contemporary modal logical terms. He goes on (...) to develop a necessitarian interpretation of Leibniz, arguing that Leibniz, like Spinoza, is committed to the thesis that everything actual is metaphysically necessary, but that Leibniz rejects Spinoza's denial of God's moral perfection. His book will appeal to scholars of early modern philosophy and philosophers interested in modal metaphysics and the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

In this paper I shed new light on contemporary developments in global health governance, policymaking, and knowledge production. Specifically, by investigating the historical roots and emergence of global health emergency governance. Drawing on the Foucauldian notion of “problematisation” and on Science and Technology Studies of disaster, I trace, examine, and elucidate three main axes through which, I argue, health emergencies became a problem of global governance. I show, first, the formation of emergency management as a distinct professional field. Second, the (...) migration of emergency management into global health governance and its proliferation within it. And third, the move from global health emergency management to the global governance of health emergencies. Overall, I suggest the rise of global health emergency governance provides crucial context for understanding social, political, and epistemic tensions and controversies in health emergencies such as COVID-19. Through the analysis, I identify a particular rationale that is rooted in emergency management and had become embedded in global health emergency governance. A rationale that involves “temporal compression” and “structural plasticity.” I discuss possible implications of this rationale for global health governance, policy, and knowledge. (shrink)

The question of the metaphysical status of the laws of physics has received increased attention in recent years. Perhaps most well-known among this work are David Lewis’s Humean supervenience and Nancy Cartwright’s dispositionalism, both of which reject the classical conception of the laws of physics as necessary and real independent of the objects they govern, arguing instead that what we call laws are shorthand for the regularities of local states of affairs or the dispositions of objects. The properties of necessity (...) and reality are generally taken to go hand-in-hand when physical laws are concerned; however, this leaves aside the possibility that the laws of physics are independently real yet contingent. This paper will explore this third option which is found in the work of Quentin Meillassoux. We will ask: if laws both exist independent of their objects and are contingent, what happens when laws change? Specifically, the possibility of metaphysical retro-causation becomes a live option. This raises both questions of the ontological status of the past as well as our epistemic access to the past after a change in physical laws. Meillassoux’s ontology of hyper-chaos weathers this challenge with its consistency intact; however, it is an open question of whether or not saving the reality of physical laws by sacrificing their necessity is worth the epistemic limits and metaphysical strangeness that it implies. (shrink)

Although he primarily remained acknowledged as an authoritative theoretician of capitalism and one of the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology as a scientific discipline in Germany, Werner Sombart dedicated a significant amount of attention to the critique of modern culture that coincided with his withdrawal from the active participation in political life during the beginning of the twentieth century. After he failed to motivate German social democracy to carry out a social reform, and following a very negative impression he got in (...) the encounter with modern industrial society while visiting the United States of America, Sombart criticised capitalism, parliamentary-democratic system and mass culture from the standpoint of ‘cultural pessimism’. In the journal Der Morgen: Wochenschrift für deutsche Kultur, and in some other papers, sharply but fruitfully Sombart criticised industrial mass culture. In it, he saw a direct reflection of spiritual poverty and general decadence of the capitalistic society. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Runner is Born A Runner's Conversion to Cycling A Few Lessons from a Relatively New Convert The End of the Tour Notes.

The Qing dynasty scholar Wang Guowei 王國維 (1877–1927) has received little recognition in the English-speaking world, and even less in the philosophical community. Raised to be a Ruist (or Confucian) scholar official, he gave up this path to pursue the study of the “new learning” (xīnxué 新學) from the West and became enamored with German aesthetic philosophy, especially the works of Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. However, by the start of the modern Republic period in China, Wang had denounced all (...) his previous research interests and dedicated himself to “old learning” (jiùxué 舊學), fearing for the future of China’s traditions and cultures. Taking Wang Guowei as a case study, my dissertation functions as an exercise in decolonial philosophy, highlighting the impacts of coloniality on his thinking while attempting to revitalize his theories from the perspective of decoloniality. -/- The Introduction sets up this case study by clarifying the points laid out in the title: Who is Wang Guowei, what is coloniality, and why is this case study “philosophical?” To begin, it details the specifics of Wang’s life and explaining his approach to comparative thinking, which became a target of criticism for later Chinese thinkers, including Qian Zhongshu. Next, it offers an overview of the concept of coloniality, referring to thinkers such as Aníbal Quijano, Maria Lugones, Walter Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado-Torres. From this point, this chapter moves into the literature on colonialism in China, emphasizing Anne Reinhart’s understanding of China’s situation as one of “semi-colonialism.” To end, it briefly outlines the earliest and latest periods of Wang’s life, in order to bookend my own discussion, which focuses on the period after he became invested in new learning and before he abandoned it for old learning. -/- Part I centers on Wang’s philosophical essays, all of which were published in the journal Education World between 1903 and 1908. Chapter 1 focuses on Wang’s earliest writings on “philosophy” (zhéxué 哲學), wherein he aims to properly introduce this imported discipline to his peers and make them aware of its value. Chapter 2 concentrates on the earliest of Wang’s major philosophical influences: Kant and Schopenhauer. Although Wang was attracted to Kant’s demarcation of the limits of reason, he could not accept his reimagining of the demands of reason as regulative principles. And while he sympathized with Schopenhauer’s criticisms of Kantian philosophy, he eventually came to regard metaphysical pessimism and the will to life as flawed theories. Chapter 3 deals with the two thinkers who shaped Wang’s views the most in his later philosophical essays: Nietzsche and Schiller. After rejecting Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, Wang came under the influence of Nietzsche and adopted a psychophysiological worldview. However, even though he accepted Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power, he could not accept Nietzsche’s view of overcoming. For Wang, consolation is all we can hope for in this life, and the best means to attain it is through the creation and appreciation of art, which prompts him to look to Schiller and his doctrine of aesthetic education. -/- Part II revolves around Wang’s mature aesthetic writings, specifically his Remarks on Lyrics in the Human World (1908–1909), a work in the “remarks on lyrics” (cíhuà 詞話) genre of literary criticism, which he published just before the Qing dynasty fell in 1911. Under the influence of decoloniality, Chapter 4 examines this work through the lens of praxis, highlighting the specifics of the traditional “remarks on lyrics” genre. After discussing the unique praxical features of this work, Chapter 5 analyzes it through the lens of theory, discussing its most significant ideas, such as its reimagining of the beautiful and the sublime, and the concept of “poetic worlds” (jìngjiè 境界). -/- The Conclusion examines everything discussed in Chapters 1 through 5 from the perspective of coloniality. It begins by determining how, and to what extent, colonial modernity impacted Wang’s thinking, in terms of both theory and praxis. It then provides some ways in which Wang’s theories and practices can contribute to the development of intellectual “worlds otherwise.” Beyond this, it aims to demonstrate how investigating the scholarly endeavors of non-Western thinkers caught in confluence of tradition and modernity can give us glimpses of alternatives to our modern intellectual and ontological modalities, thereby furthering the movement of decoloniality. (shrink)

This book traces the linguistic turns in the history of modern philosophy and the development of the philosophy of language from Locke to Wittgenstein. It examines the contributions of canonical figures such as Leibniz, Mill, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Austin, Quine, and Davidson, as well as those of Condillac, Humboldt, Chomsky, and Derrida. Michael Losonsky argues that the philosophy of language begins with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He shows how the history of the philosophy of language in the modern (...) period is marked by a dichotomy between formal and pragmatic perspectives on language and that modern philosophy has not been able to integrate these two aspects of human language. Language as a human activity and language as a syntactic and semantic system remain distinct and competing focal points, although the interplay between these points of view has driven the development of the philosophy of language. (shrink)

In our paper, “The reference of proper names” (2018), we raised and rebutted the “New‐Meaning” objection to our methodology. Our rebuttal rested on theoretical considerations and experimental results. In “Do the Gödel vignettes involve a new descriptivist meaning?”, Nicolò D'Agruma provides an interesting argument against our theoretical considerations (but does not address the experimental evidence). Our present paper argues against D'Agruma. So, our original rebuttal of the objection still stands. We offer further evidence against the objection.

Throughout Immanuel Kant’s works on natural philosophy, he utilizes an omnipresent aether to explain a wide variety of physical events: including optical, thermodynamical, chemical, and magnetic phenomena. Kant even went as far as claiming that the existence of an omnipresent physical aether can be deduced a priori (without appeal to experience, observation, or experiment), in the notorious “aether proof” of his _Opus postumum_. In retrospect, these commitments are widely seen as a blunder, especially after the demise of the luminiferous aether (...) at the turn of the 20th century. In this paper, I situate Kant’s theory of the aether in the context of the physics of his day. I show that, contra the common understanding of the Scientific Revolution, the 17th and 18th centuries witnessed a staggering proliferation of aethereal explanations in natural philosophy: those appealing to subtle substances as causal grounds for classes of physical phenomena. Kant was a part of this tradition in physics, and his aether theory was no embarrassment but rather revealed a keen understanding both of coeval aethereal theories and their shortcomings. (shrink)

An introduction to Thomas Aquinas's theology of the One Creator God, this book provides a basic explanation of Aquinas's theology, while showing its compatibility with contemporary science and relevance to current theological issues.

Philosophy and Theory in Music Therapy: Navigating the Labyrinth invites students, clinicians, and educators to explore the foundational philosophies and theories that shape music therapy. For students, it emphasizes the importance of philosophy and theory as the cornerstones of practice, research, and professional growth. For clinicians, it offers fresh perspectives to enhance their practice, delving into ideas that may not have been part of their formal training. For educators, it provides nuanced explanations of music therapy theories, transcending the adaptation of (...) frameworks from other disciplines. Designed as more than just a textbook, this book is a versatile resource. Some chapters align with specific coursework, while others span multiple academic or clinical contexts. Clinicians may find certain sections helpful in explaining treatment approaches to colleagues or administrators, while other chapters are simply enjoyable for intellectual exploration. Educators can draw inspiration for developing new theories, and researchers may discover frameworks to test and refine. Rich with case studies and clinical examples, each chapter offers practical insights and tangible applications, bringing music therapy philosophies and theories to life. Whether for study, practice, or teaching, this book provides an inclusive and accessible guide to the dynamic and ever-evolving field of music therapy. (shrink)

Imagine that Bloggs is faced with a choice between giving a benefit to his child, or a slightly greater benefit to a complete stranger. The benefit is whatever the child or the stranger can buy for $100 — Bloggs has $100 to give away — and it just so happens that the stranger would buy something from which he would gain a slightly greater benefit than would Bloggs's child. Let's stipulate that Bloggs believes this to be, and let's stipulate, as (...) well, that he believes that the consequences of his actions are otherwise identical. He chooses to give the benefit to his child. What do we learn about Bloggs from his choice? We learn that Bloggs cares more about his child than he does about complete strangers. Nor is anyone likely to be surprised by this, for it just goes to show that he is much like the rest of us. He gives preferential treatment to his nearest and dearest when he acts, those with whom he has a special relationship, much as we do. (shrink)

Since Horn (1972) the notion of conversational implicature proposed by Grice has been put to use to explain certain interpretive differences between expressions in natural language and their counterparts in formal logic. For example, the sentences in (1) seem to convey more than they would be expected to if the natural language disjunction or had the same meaning as the logical disjunction ∨, or if the quantificational determiner some was interpreted as the existential quantifier ∃.

In this provocatively compelling new book, Michael Luntley offers a revolutionary reading of the opening section of Wittgenstein’s _Philosophical Investigations _ Critically engages with the most recent exegetical literature on Wittgenstein and other state-of-the-art philosophical work Encourages the re-incorporation of Wittgenstein studies into the mainstream philosophical conversation Has profound consequences for how we go on to read the rest of Wittgenstein’s major work Makes a significant contribution not only to the literature on Wittgenstein, but also to studies in philosophy (...) of language. (shrink)

The theory of important criteria -- Value judgments and the theory of important criteria -- The rationality of aesthetic value judgments -- Inapplicable concepts -- Morality and ignorance -- Time in counterfactuals -- Assertion and belief -- Understanding free will -- Selective necessity and the free-will problem -- Is virtue possible? -- Morality not a system of imperatives -- Review of Alvin Plantinga's God and other minds -- Utilitarianism, moral dilemmas, and moral cost -- Object utilitarianism -- Utilitarian virtue -- (...) Moderation, rationality, and virtue -- Rational dilemmas and rational supererogation -- Ethics naturalized -- Nietzsche and virtue ethics -- Caring versus the philosophers -- Global caring, global justice -- Empathy and objectivity -- In place of moral reasoning -- Some thoughts for the future. (shrink)

By way of dialogues, Michael Krausz offers philosophical reflections about his life as a philosopher, artist, and musician. After providing biographical accounts of his years of experience in these areas, he rehearses his views about relativism, interpretation, creativity, and self-realization.

The contribution deals with the sources of Kant's criticism of the historical knowledge of philosophy. This criticism is an important motif in Kant's thought. Its contents are directed against Wolffianism. Nevertheless it was Christian Wolff who gave Kant the concept of the historical knowledge of philosophy. This concept is of great importance for Wolff, too. It can be traced back to the fight against Aristotelian scholastic philosophy. The reading of the traditional handbooks was criticized early, and the individual's own meditation (...) was challenged. Wolff formulated these intentions in his term: the historical knowledge of philosophy. Christian Thomasius and his followers, on the other hand, continued to criticize learning with the help of the memory, and they demanded the individual's own meditation. From this the slogan 'Selbstdenken' originated. Because of the opposition between the Wolffians and their opponents, for a long time 'self-thinking' and 'historical knowledge of philosophy' were treated side by side and independently of each other. Kant was the first to connect them definitively. He acknowledges the clarity of Wolff's terminology, but fills it up with the old content. (shrink)