The linguistic turn in historiography has given way to a ‘cultural’ or ‘practical’ turn over the course of the last several decades. For its proponents, this new development heralds a return of the intentional subject and a re-invigorated concern with the dynamic nature of the social realm. Approaches clustered around the concept of practice, emphasizing routines of daily activities as the backbone of social organization and its stability, specifically seek to resolve the persisting conceptual tension in social sciences between structure (...) and agency. This article surveys the seminal work on the topic of practice, and considers how the approach can be recruited for purposes of historiographic analysis. In defending a tentatively optimistic assessment of practice theory’s usefulness for this purpose, the article also evaluates some of the weaknesses that this approach has yet to cogently address. (shrink)

Philosophers often claim that studying philosophy helps people to become better thinkers. Thanks to a grant from the American Philosophical Association, we were able to test this claim empirically, using a large sample of students (N = 122,352) graduating from 369 colleges and universities across the United States between 2010 and 2019. We investigated whether philosophy majors show more growth than non-philosophy majors in intellectual traits like open-mindedness and a tendency to think carefully and thoroughly, as well as more personal (...) forms of growth that might be fostered by philosophical study (e.g., self-understanding). Additionally, although this was not our primary question, we sought to better understand what students who major in philosophy are like. Specifically, we examined the demographics of philosophy majors, the other subjects that they tend to study when they double major, and the patterns of adding and dropping of philosophy majors between freshman and senior year. (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.

In the Sophist, the Eleatic Stranger develops an account of non-being according to which it is understood as a part of Different. Yet the precise language he uses to characterize the form Non-Being and other negative forms has two variations. In the first, a negative form is characterized as a part of the nature of Different contraposed to the nature of the form negated. Thus, Non-Beautiful is described as ‘something different among beings that is marked-off from some one kind and (...) in turn contraposed with something among beings’ (257e2-4), and Non-Being is identified as ‘the part of the nature of Different contraposed with the being of each thing’ (258e2). In the second variation, however, a negative form is characterized as the contraposing (antithesis) of the nature of a part of Different relative to the nature of the form negated. Hence, Non-Beautiful ‘turns out to be a contraposing of being in relation to being’ (257e6-7) and Non-Being is ‘the contraposing of the nature of a part of Different and of the nature of Being’ (258a11-b1). In this essay, I develop an account of the parts of Different that explains the two variants in the Stranger’s characterization of negative forms, focusing on the Stranger’s description of the Non-Beautiful as a part of Different. Since the Stranger’s account of the parts of Different is based on an analogy with parts of knowledge, I begin by examining what it means to be a part of knowledge, drawing on Socrates’ account of knowledge in Republic V. (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)

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)

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)

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)

The frequent use of the term ‘metaphilosophy’ and the corresponding research in the 1960s may lead to the conclusion that there has been a development of a new discipline, a formation of a new kind of philosophical discourse. Such questions as, “What is philosophy?”, “What kind of questions does philosophy ask?”, “Which methods does it adopt to answer them?” and “Is there progress in philosophy?” are put at the center of attention. They constitute a separate research field. Just as the (...) laws of logic, nature and natural sciences, epistemology, morals, freedom and law, philosophy is one of its own normal topics. Several sources of the need for metaphilosophy can be named, such as the re-orientation in philosophy due to its diversity and possible dissent within itself, justification of philosophy and its relevance against the backdrop of the progress in sciences, or the re-evaluation of a research tradition, such as analytic philosophy or phenomenology. The overall goal of metaphilosophy could be understood as the development of theoretical means for a better understanding of philosophy and for a better philosophical practice. (shrink)

Concepts and Cases in Nursing Ethics is an introduction to contemporary ethical issues in health care, designed especially for Canadian audiences. The book is organized around six key concepts: beneficence, autonomy, truth-telling, confidentiality, justice, and integrity. Each of these concepts is explained and discussed with reference to professional and legal norms. The discussion is then supplemented by case studies that exemplify the relevant concepts and show how each applies in health care and nursing practice. This new fourth edition includes an (...) added chapter on end-of-life issues, and it is revised throughout to reflect the latest developments on topics such as global health ethics, cultural competence, social media, and palliative sedation. (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.

Most anyone interested in such topics as creation mythology, Jungian theory, or the idea of "secret teachings" in ancient Judaism and Christianity has found "gnosticism" compelling. Yet the term "gnosticism," which often connotes a single rebellious movement against the prevailing religions of late antiquity, gives the false impression of a monolithic religious phenomenon. Here Michael Williams challenges the validity of the widely invoked category of ancient "gnosticism" and the ways it has been described. Presenting such famous writings and movements (...) as the Apocryphon of John and Valentinian Christianity, Williams uncovers the similarities and differences among some major traditions widely categorized as gnostic. He provides an eloquent, systematic argument for a more accurate way to discuss these interpretive approaches.The modern construct "gnosticism" is not justified by any ancient self-definition, and many of the most commonly cited religious features that supposedly define gnosticism phenomenologically turn out to be questionable. Exploring the sample sets of "gnostic" teachings, Williams refutes generalizations concerning asceticism and libertinism, attitudes toward the body and the created world, and alleged features of protest, parasitism, and elitism. He sketches a fresh model for understanding ancient innovations on more "mainstream" Judaism and Christianity, a model that is informed by modern research on dynamics in new religious movements and is freed from the false stereotypes from which the category "gnosticism" has been constructed. (shrink)

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)

Chapter One distinguishes the early, individualistic, writings from the later, more socially conscious ones. The metaphysical language of impermeable surfaces and levels, and rigid hierarchies, is consonant in James's writing with the assumption of what Dewey calls an individual/society split. ;Chapter Two focuses upon the relational self from the Principles of Psychology. The central pair of terms is that of strength/fragility, in which a self is revealed that is both functionally efficacious through activities of emphasis, selection, and negation, and permeable (...) to context. ;Chapter Three discusses the "social organism" and the "intellectual republic" from The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. James uses more socially conscious metaphors, and discusses the public and the private; "inner" and "outer" tolerance; and the "personal contribution," "X," which must be added to the "world," "M." ;Chapter Four discusses the "nucleus" of relations from Essays in Radical Empiricism. The personal aspect of social experience falls within the realm of "co-conscious relations" and the public falls within the sphere of the "conterminous." The strong side of the self, from Chapter Two; the private, or personal; inner tolerance; and the personal contribution, "X," from Chapter Three, belong to the sphere of co-conscious relations, as discussed in Chapter Four, just as the fragile side, the public; outer tolerance; and the world, "M," all belong to the sphere of conterminous relations. ;Chapter Five discusses the metaphor of Papini's corridor from Pragmatism. The adjoining rooms can be seen to symbolize the sphere of co-conscious relations, and the corridor of conterminous ones. The metaphysics of background and foreground points to an instrumentalist interpretation of the self, which represents a complete departure from James's early individualism. (shrink)