This paper provides a critical assessment of classical liberals’ view of foreign and security policy. In the United States, the defenders of free enterprise and limited government have embraced a neorealist perspective on international relations, which typically prescribes restraint for a country’s engagement overseas. Neorealism and classical liberalism, however, make strange bedfellows. Neorealism does not share the commitment to methodological individualism embraced by the classical liberal tradition and ignores the problems related to the aggregation of individual (...) preferences into concepts such as the “national interest.” Neorealism also downplays the importance of institutions, understood as rules of the game, in favor of crude power calculus. Finally, neorealism is incompatible with the universalist, cosmopolitan outlook of classical liberalism. (shrink)

In a time when conservatives believe that the traditional family is under increasing fire, some think an appeal to Darwinian science may be the answer. I argue that these conservatives are wrong to maintain that Darwinian theory can serve as the intellectual foundation for the traditional conception of the family. Contra Larry Arnhart and James Q. Wilson, a Darwinian philosophy of nature simply lacks the stability the traditional family requires; it cannot support the traditional conception of human (...) nature and the normativity it was thought to contain. If conservatives are to maintain these traditional ideas, the theoretical foundation must lie elsewhere. (shrink)

In a time when conservatives believe that the traditional family is under increasing fire, some think an appeal to Darwinian science may be the answer. I argue that these conservatives are wrong to maintain that Darwinian theory can serve as the intellectual foundation for the traditional conception of the family. Contra Larry Arnhart and James Q. Wilson, a Darwinian philosophy of nature simply lacks the stability the traditional family requires; it cannot support the traditional conception of human (...) nature and the normativity it was thought to contain. If conservatives are to maintain these traditional ideas, the theoretical foundation must lie elsewhere. (shrink)

This author’s reply addresses critiques by Daniel Engster, Kelly Gawel, and Andrea Westlund about my 2020 book, Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture. I begin with a statement of my commitment to liberalism. In section two, I defend the value of a distinction between conceptions of persons in the real world and in contract theory to track inequalities in care when indexed to legitimate needs. I argue, as well, that my variety of contract theory supplies the normative content (...) needed to reject the subordination of women of color. Acknowledging the enduring danger of expressive subordination, I emphasize my theory’s compatibility with the full social inclusion of people with disabilities. Section three then defends liberal dependency care’s compatibility with radical critique and transformative change by emphasizing the abstract nature of its core theoretical module. Finally, in section four, I reaffirm conceptual distinctions between autonomy skills, care skills, and a sense of justice by explicating their theoretical roles. In that section, I also embrace Westlund’s insight that theorists of justice need to have skills enabling responsiveness to other perspectives. To this new requirement for actual theorists of justice, I further add that we must attain capacities to engage critically with our society’s norms. Thus, the final section of this article supplements the justificatory module of liberal dependency care, building from the necessary conditions specified as two-level contract theory toward an account of necessary and sufficient conditions for this liberalism’s justificatory module. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders liberal nationalism in light of the current autocratic nationalist threat. I argue that liberal nationalism cannot redress the social ailments which acclimatize people to the sorts of no-holds-barred political contestation favoured by autocratic nationalists – excessive polarization. I then argue that liberal nationalists do not recognize the degree to which ‘in-group’ racial solidarity motivates members of the racial/ethnic majority to preserve their status, and that the liberal nationalist approach to defending minorities’ rights therefore risks either emboldening the (...) majority to embrace autocracy or consolidating social hierarchies between the majority and minorities. On these bases, I show that democrats must seek to not only detach race/ethnicity from nationality but also redress those problematic racial/ethnic hierarchies. This suggests the need to develop liberal nationalism into multiculturalist nationalism. Multiculturalist nationalism, however, promises a sort of bounded solidarity that does not include all citizens: it makes use of targeted political antagonism against anti-democrats like White supremacists and Identitarians to help diffuse any social antagonism that might exist among minorities, inclusive members of the majority, and cultural conservatives. (shrink)

Many despair at trying to understand something’s meaning and express dissatisfaction with language wholesale. What if some things simply are not understandable? Thich Nhat Hanh coined interbeing to name the fundamental principle of interdependence defining Buddhist ontologies, and uses interbeing to dislodge despair resulting from rigid expectations of how things must be. Thich also criticized a standard view of language as generating those rigid expectations. Drawing upon classical humanist traditions, Hans-Georg Gadamer promoted a hermeneutics whereby interpreters overcome (...) existential alienation. In his theory of understanding meaning, Gadamer rehabilitated language as having its being in revealing aspects of truth. By situating Gadamer’s hermeneutics within Thich’s interbeing, I develop limits of understanding that facilitate freedom from despair about meaning and language. Thich and Gadamer both taught that the quest for stability within change is misguided. This requires rigorous attention to the limits of understanding. Attention to these limits serves to liberate people from clinging to the illusion that all things are understandable and despair accompanying the incapacity to understand some things. (shrink)

Lays out an account of the origins and development of liberal political and economic theoryIncludes case studies that cover thinkers and ideas from the English Civil War through to liberalism's first encounters with socialism Provides comparative analysis of distinct intellectual traditions including English natural rights theory, the Scottish Enlightenment, Victorian-era utilitarianism and classical political economyIntegrates history of economic thinking into broader milieu of modern political, moral and natural philosophyExamines secondary literature and research from a range of disciplinary areas including (...) political theory, modern intellectual history, economic thought and modern British history and philosophyThis book re-examines the philosophical roots of classical liberal political economy, as well as addressing the relationship between the empire and liberalism. It proposes an interpretive model based upon the interconnection between distinct theories of natural rights and the harmony of interests. It takes a fresh look at classical liberalism by exploring economic arguments in thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Paine, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, who are not typically viewed as economic thinkers, and by highlighting the importance of Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith in the development of interest-based liberalism. It also re-examines lesser-known economic tracts by thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume and John Stuart Mill in light of their more well-known political writings. With classical liberal assumptions still prominent in contemporary debates about economic justice, it is vital for every democratic citizen to understand the complex origins and development of the ideas that did so much to shape our world today. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. This paper reconsiders liberal nationalism in light of the current autocratic nationalist threat. I argue that liberal nationalism cannot redress the social ailments which acclimatize people to the sorts of no-holds-barred political contestation favoured by autocratic nationalists – excessive polarization. I then argue that liberal nationalists do not recognize the degree to which ‘in-group’ racial solidarity motivates members of the racial/ethnic majority to preserve their status, and that the liberal nationalist approach to defending (...) minorities’ rights therefore risks either emboldening the majority to embrace autocracy or consolidating social hierarchies between the majority and minorities. On these bases, I show that democrats must seek to not only detach race/ethnicity from nationality but also redress those problematic racial/ethnic hierarchies. This suggests the need to develop liberal nationalism into multiculturalist nationalism. Multiculturalist nationalism, however, promises a sort of bounded solidarity that does not include all citizens: it makes use of targeted political antagonism against anti-democrats like White supremacists and Identitarians to help diffuse any social antagonism that might exist among minorities, inclusive members of the majority, and cultural conservatives. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. This paper reconsiders liberal nationalism in light of the current autocratic nationalist threat. I argue that liberal nationalism cannot redress the social ailments which acclimatize people to the sorts of no-holds-barred political contestation favoured by autocratic nationalists – excessive polarization. I then argue that liberal nationalists do not recognize the degree to which ‘in-group’ racial solidarity motivates members of the racial/ethnic majority to preserve their status, and that the liberal nationalist approach to defending (...) minorities’ rights therefore risks either emboldening the majority to embrace autocracy or consolidating social hierarchies between the majority and minorities. On these bases, I show that democrats must seek to not only detach race/ethnicity from nationality but also redress those problematic racial/ethnic hierarchies. This suggests the need to develop liberal nationalism into multiculturalist nationalism. Multiculturalist nationalism, however, promises a sort of bounded solidarity that does not include all citizens: it makes use of targeted political antagonism against anti-democrats like White supremacists and Identitarians to help diffuse any social antagonism that might exist among minorities, inclusive members of the majority, and cultural conservatives. (shrink)

Liberal egalitarians have been wary of being orientated by the empathetic understanding of others lest it offends the separateness of persons. This worry can be overcome by embracing second‐order as well as first‐order empathetic‐imagination, while doing so strengthens liberal‐egalitarian claims to treat all with equal concern and respect. ‘First‐order’ empathic‐imagination, which accesses objective knowledge about a person’s experience, is a necessary but not sufficient part of relating to others as agents. ‘Second‐order’ empathic‐imagination, encompassing a ‘disposition of surprise’ at an agent’s (...) ability to have a valued life contrary to what is normally and reasonably expected, should also be encouraged. This disposition accepts that making fundamental mistakes in empathic‐imagination is inevitable, but by being disposed to recognize these as mistakes a person is more open to understanding and identifying with ‘disadvantaged others’ who are agents. As a result, policy‐makers and practitioners must recognize a potential tension between promoting social systems that redistribute resources and the image those defined as ‘worse‐off’ hold of themselves. Such interventions need to be sensitive to the positive image those they view as disadvantaged may hold of themselves, while nevertheless recognizing their entitlement to resources to improve their condition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Catholic Social Teaching and the Allocation of Scarce ResourcesJohn Langan S.J. (bio)I shall approach the issue of justice in the allocation of scarce resources from the viewpoint of Catholic social teaching, as developed over the last century. This teaching is found primarily in the social encyclicals issued by popes from Leo XIII (1878–1903) to John Paul II (1978- ), but also in the pastoral letters of the various (...) bishops’ conferences, especially in the United States and in Latin America. These documents, which enjoy a high standing in Catholic teaching but which are not taken as binding in all their particulars, form part of a tradition of moral and social theorizing that a contemporary American would regard as “communitarian.” On social questions, this tradition also has shown itself to be historicist in that it is capable of modifying itself in significant ways in response to changing political and economic situations. It normally approaches issues from a universalist perspective, though it has shifted from a preoccupation with the concerns of the industrial societies of Europe to an advocacy of much of the reform agenda of the Third World.Rooted in classical and biblical sources and modified in the course of the last [End Page 401] century to include a principled acceptance of religious freedom, of human rights, and of democratic political institutions, the Catholic social tradition proposes a number of ideas that can serve as the basis for significant criticism of currently dominant liberal modes of organizing and interpreting advanced industrial societies. These ideas do not form a countertheory to liberalism so much as they indicate ways in which a religious organization that includes both hierarchical and egalitarian elements in its structure and that has both moral commitments and practical responsibilities with regard to health care can draw on its intellectual resources to develop alternative strategies for the reform of health care.I shall survey six ideas that figure prominently in Catholic social teaching and that are relevant to the allocation of scare resources in American health care. Space constraints require that I present them in a very condensed fashion, without tracing the complex development they have undergone in the internal Catholic debate or subjecting them to much criticism.First, Catholic social teaching, especially the great encyclical of John XXIII, Pacem In Terris (PT 1963), affirms the full range of human rights recognized in such modern documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1949). In addition to the civil and political rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights added to the original U.S. Constitution (1791), the Universal Declaration includes rights “to life, to bodily integrity, and to the means which are suitable for the proper development of life; these are primarily food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care, and finally the necessary social services” (PT 11). Catholic social teaching has not committed itself to one particular way of institutionalizing these rights, but it effectively endorses the comprehensive West European welfare states that the Christian Democratic political parties helped to construct in the period after 1945.Second, Catholic social teaching has accorded a central organizing role to the notion of the common good, the realization of which “is the whole reason for the existence of civil authorities” (PT 54). The common good, however, is not to be understood as identical with the interest or the power of the state; rather, it “embraces the sum total of those conditions of social living whereby men are enabled to achieve their own integral perfection more fully and more easily” (PT 58; quoting Mater et Magistra). John XXIII is particularly anxious to affirm that the common good cannot be construed so as to exclude some groups or to violate the rights of individuals and that it must include both physical and spiritual goods (PT 55–61). The notion of the common good has both an inherent attractiveness and a vagueness that cries out for specification and clarification. But in the contemporary situation it serves to remind us that “individual citizens and intermediate groups are obliged to make their specific contributions to the common welfare” (PT 53).Third, while an insistence on the primacy of the common good and on the [End Page 402... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Vetera Novis Augere et Perficere:Thomas Aquinas and Christian-Muslim DialogueJoseph Ellul, O.P.Pope Leo XIII's encyclical letter Aeterni Patris, issued on August 4, 1879, sought to address many issues that were challenging nineteenth-century Catholic scholarship and academic life. In proposing the thought of Thomas Aquinas as a model of Catholic teaching, the Pope intended, in his own words, "to strengthen and complete the old by aid of the new,"1 not only (...) by reviving the study of the works and teachings of the Angelic Doctor, especially in the realm of philosophy, but also to uphold as perennial his method of engaging with his contemporaries within and without the Catholic faith.2 It is within this context that we are called upon to reflect upon this appeal: "vetera novis augere et perficere."The thirteenth century was indeed a time of intellectual upheaval, following the introduction of Aristotle and, later on, the translations into Latin of the Arabic commentaries on Aristotle by Ibn Rušd (Lat. Averröes; d. 1198). This event was met within the ecclesiastical world with apprehension, if not outright fear. Neo-Platonic philosophy and its interpretation by Ibn Sina (Lat. Avicenna; d. 1037) was already perfectly acceptable to Mediaeval Christian scholars. The latter was in fact considered an essential tool for understanding the illuminationist thought of St. Augustine. Étienne Gilson even spoke of Augustinisme avicennisant (Avicennized [End Page 1231] Augustinianism).3 The problem was Aristotle and his renowned commentator Ibn Rušd: a pagan commented on by an infidel.One must also note, however, that mediaeval Western intellectuals and institutions were able to encounter and adapt the Islamic legacy, because they already possessed a sufficient scientific base (with of course the contribution of translations of Greek together with Latin works) with which to understand, assimilate, and build upon this new knowledge that appeared from the East. In sum, mediaeval Christendom created living, vibrant societies, constantly searching, always discovering something new.In dealing with the specific (and delicate) subject of Aquinas's dialogue with Islamic thought, it would be necessary to reflect in particular upon two key works of his: the Liber de Veritate Catholicae Fidei contra Errores Infidelium (A Book on the Truth of the Catholic Faith against the Errors of Unbelievers),4 popularly known as the Summa contra gentiles [SCG], together with his De rationibus fidei contra Saracenos, Gnæcos et Armenos ad Cantorem Antiochenum, better known simply as De rationibus fidei.At this point it would be necessary to articulate the term "Islamic thought." Of itself it should not be identified with Islam as a religion. Rather, it should be considered as embracing classical Greek philosophy as interpreted by the Neo-Platonic movement and disseminated through Oriental Christian and Jewish schools of thought. Islamic civilization absorbed these teachings and built its own proper ediice upon these foundations.A Model for Interreligious Dialogue?Proposing Thomas Aquinas as a model for engagement with Islamic thought may also raise a few eyebrows. Hence, it would be appropriate to pose an essential question: "What type of dialogue existed in mediaeval times?" One should begin with an a priori exclusion of dialogue as it is understood today, given the fact that there existed neither the motive nor the means to implement it.In fact mediaeval society was aware of only three religions: the pagan, which had been replaced by Christianity; the Jewish, founded upon the precepts of the First Covenant which "Christ fulilled by his actions and [End Page 1232] by his teaching"5 and which was also believed to prefigure the everlasting New Covenant sealed by Jesus on the Cross; and finally, the Christian, which believed in Jesus as the final revelation of God to humanity.6 With such a vision in mind it is obvious that any doctrine that is not situated within these parameters, or which proposes some form of belief or conduct which was different from, if not contrary to, the Christian vision of God, the cosmos, and society, would be considered as heretical and its promoter an impostor.7When Islam made its appearance in the Christian world, it carried with it a book that it considered of divine provenance, and... (shrink)

Among classical liberals and libertarians a serious debate has been afoot about whether any sort of government is justified. Murray N. Rothbard, Jan Narveson, Bruce Benson and Randy Barnett are usually listed as the main skeptics, while Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, John Hospers, among others, are listed as defenders of the morality of limited government. In this paper I argue that once properly understood, the two sides aren’t in fundamental disagreement. Anarcho-libertarians do embrace the idea that men (...) and women in a free society are justified in establishing a legal order in defense of their basic and derivative rights, and this is also what limited government proponents advance as the basis for the system they deem to be just. I argue that no fundamental difference exists between these two legal orders. The monopoly anarcho-libertarians claim limited government proponents wrongfully sanction is, in fact, not a coercive monopoly and the legal order proposed by anarchists would also have this monopolistic characteristic. This should put an end to this fruitless dispute and free the energies on both sides to mount a really important and henceforth united defense of the free society with its just legal order.Parmi les libéraux classiques et les libertariens un important débat concerne la question de savoir si une quelconque forme de gouvernement est justifiée. Murray N. Rothbard, Jan Narveson, Bruce Benson et Randy Barnett sont habituellement classés parmi les principaux sceptiques, alors qu’Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, John Hospers, entre autres, sont plutôt classés en tant que défenseurs de la moralité d’un gouvernement limité. Dans cet article, je soutiens qu’une fois correctement compris, les deux clans ne sont pas fondamentalement en désaccord. Les anarcho-libertariens soutiennent l’idée que les hommes et les femmes dans une société libre sont en droit d’établir un ordre législatif pour défendre leurs droits fondamentaux et leurs droits dérivés, et c’est aussi ce que les partisans du gouvernement limité proposent comme fondement du système qu’ils considèrent être juste. Je soutiens qu’il n’existe pas de différence fondamentale entre ces deux ordres législatifs. Le monopole du gouvernement limité que les partisans anarcholibertariens sanctionnent à tort est, en fait, non pas un monopole coercitif, et l’ordre législatif proposé par les anarchistes aurait lui aussi cette caractéristique monopolistique.Cela devrait mettre un terme à cette dispute stérile et libérer les énergies des deux côtés pour ériger à l’avenir une défense unie réellement importante pour une société libre avec un ordre juridique juste. (shrink)

SummaryHumans are now entering a post-human era. Through technological advancements and their applications for humans themselves, humans as homo sapiens might change into a different species. Depending on individual decisions about whether to embrace certain technologies, the co-existence of humans and post-humans is also possible. Christians and theologians must ponder this trajectory for the technology will affect all domains, including religions, in society at large. In this regard, this article introduces and examines transhumanism. Transhumanism is a movement (...) based on the convergence of ideology and scientific technology which aims to liberate humans from their biological constraints, thereby bringing about human well-being. This article argues that the transhumanist ideology should be critically examined while its technology can be embraced and even supported from a theological perspective because this ideology determines the direction of technological advancement and application. Regarding ideological problems, I highlight transhumanists’ disembodiment propensity, optimistic belief in the progress of human civilization, and individualism. These features are embedded in and originate from transhumanism’s succession of classical humanism and the Enlightenment. If these features are not rectified, transhumanism and its technology might repeat disastrous incidents in human history such as eugenics and exacerbate social inequality. As a theologian, I critically examine the ideological features of transhumanism, proposing an alternative understanding with regard to human beings and existence. This effort helps to remedy potential problems of transhumanism in the future, relieve anxiety relating to these problems, and prepare a dialogue between transhumanism and Christian theology. This dialogue will eventually contribute to the robust development of transhumanism and the opening of a new era of the post-human. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Political AuthorityThe Two Wheels of the DharmaWhalen Lai“The twin wheels of the dharma The two wings of the dove”The twin wheels of the dharma, one of power and the other of righteousness, is the classic metaphor in the Buddhist view of the state and the saṅgha. We will first register the distinction of that metaphor by going back to its historical roots, showing how and why it is more (...) meaningful for Buddhists than for Hindus. Then we will map its structural growth sociologically, weigh its overall strengths and weaknesses, and consider other Buddhist options for civil order and interstate relationships. Finally we will examine the price of modernity and the crisis of authority that Buddhist culture faces.Toward a Genealogy of the Twin WheelsThe legend of the Buddha is by now well known. Prince Siddhārtha left family and home, and renounced the kingdom and the world. He had seen the inevitability of suffering. He vowed to find its cause to eliminate that result. After his enlightenment, he reflected upon releasing that path to the world. When the Buddha so taught the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path to his old companions at Benares, tradition then remembers that as the Buddha “turning the wheel of dharma.” The wheel (cakra) is a metaphor; it refers to the wheel of a sun chariot and is now on the national flag of India. That cosmic wheel has rolled on since time immemorial; as saṃsāra, it has been endless suffering. That is, until the Buddha so turned the sun wheel anew, marking it possible for the first time end that cycle and point the way to nirvāṇic liberation. History was so changed with that act of the Buddha at Benares. Mankind turned a corner. Christianity sees the event on the cross to be, likewise, a break in time. History as we know it had ended. The end time, the eschatological kingdom with its promise of a new heaven and a new earth, have dawned. The price of Adam’s sin was death. Christ’s resurrection turned that around.In Buddhism, the normal course of life and death (rebirth: saṃsāra) also ended [End Page 171] with the Buddha’s enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. The path to nirvāṇa was open. The city of nirvāṇa is in sight. Or as a Buddhist miracle would tell it, the water of the Ganges flowed backward in response to an act of truth (satyāgraha).The event at Benares when the Buddha turned the wheel of dharma anew may be a major inspiration for the ideology of the twin wheels. In general, Hinduism needs only to presume one wheel; it does not count a second. Although Hinduism knows its share of renunciation and liberation (mokṣa), the Brahmanical system set down by the Vedas is committed to safeguarding the sanctity of the caste system. It can absorb mokṣa under the larger law for its varṇāśramadharma. The renunciation is ideally the last station in life, coming after formal retirement from active household duties, and well approaching old age and a good time for learning how to transcend it. Buddhism challenged the caste system by setting up the saṅgha, a new Buddhist community. Hinduism lacks that call for reconstituting society. It does not know the “saṅgha and state” tension that Buddhists know like Christians would the tension between church and state. In the end, the Vedānta philosophy in Hinduism does not postulate that tension. The ātman-brahman identity of self and universe is inherently monistic.This is not to say Hindus do not face a basic conflict between two contrary worlds. It does but it solves it differently. The tragic dilemma in the Bhagavadgītā is that Arjuna, who came to embrace nonviolence like a Buddhist or a Jain would, was eventually persuaded to fight, namely, to perform his caste duty of being a warrior, ready to kill and be killed. That, in a Greek tragic term, is the dike of some cosmic dharma wheel. Oedipus Rex, in the end, must bow to his fate and lot... (shrink)

After the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, scientists working in molecular biology embraced reductionism—the theory that all complex systems can be understood in terms of their components. Reductionism, however, has been widely resisted by both nonmolecular biologists and scientists working outside the field of biology. Many of these antireductionists, nevertheless, embrace the notion of physicalism—the idea that all biological processes are physical in nature. How, Alexander Rosenberg asks, can these self-proclaimed physicalists also be antireductionists? With (...) clarity and wit, Darwinian Reductionism navigates this difficult and seemingly intractable dualism with convincing analysis and timely evidence. In the spirit of the few distinguished biologists who accept reductionism—E. O. Wilson, Francis Crick, Jacques Monod, James Watson, and Richard Dawkins—Rosenberg provides a philosophically sophisticated defense of reductionism and applies it to molecular developmental biology and the theory of natural selection, ultimately proving that the physicalist must also be a reductionist. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

What is our nature? What is this enigma that we call human? Who are we? Since the dawn of human history, people have exhibited wildly contradictory qualities: good and evil, love and hate, strength and weakness, kindness and cruelty, aggressiveness and pacifism, generosity and greed, courage and cowardice. Experiencing a sense of eternity in our hearts--but at the same time confined to temporal and spatial constraints--we seek to understand ourselves, both individually and as a species. In Who Are We? Theories (...) of Human Nature, esteemed author Louis P. Pojman seeks to find answers to these questions by exploring major theories in Western philosophy and religion, along with several traditions in Eastern thought. The most comprehensive work of its kind, the volume opens with chapters on the Hebrew/Christian view of human nature and the contrasting classical Greek theories, outlining a dichotomy between faith and reason that loosely frames the rest of the book. The following chapters cover the medieval view, Hindu and Buddhist perspectives, conservative and liberal theories, Kant's Copernican revolution, Schopenhauer's pessimistic idealism, and Karl Marx's theory. Freud's psychoanalytic view, the existentialist perspective, the Darwinian view, and scientific materialism are also discussed. Pojman concludes with a discussion of the question of free will, ultimately asserting that each one of us must decide for ourselves who and what we are, and, based on that answer, how we shall live. (shrink)

For theorists in search of a political theology that is more responsive to the challenges now facing Western democracies, this book tenders a new political economy anchored in a theory of value. The political theology of the future, Carl Raschke argues, must draw on a powerful, hidden impetus--the "force of God"--to frame a new value economy. It must also embrace a radical, "faith-based" revolutionary style of theory that reconceives the power of the "theological" in political thought (...) and action. Raschke ties democracy's retreat to the West's failure to confront its decadence and mobilize its vast spiritual resources. Worsening debt, rising unemployment, and gross income inequality have led to a crisis in political representation and values that twentieth-century theorists never anticipated. Drawing on the thought of Hegel and Nietzsche as well as recent work by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Joseph Goux, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou, among others, Raschke recasts political theology for a new generation. He proposes a bold, uncompromising critical theory that acknowledges the enduring significance of Marx without his materialism and builds a vital, more spiritually grounded relationship between politics and the religious imaginary. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Response to Louise Pascale, “Dispelling the Myth of the Non-Singer: Embracing Two Aesthetics for Singing”Maya HooverLouise Pascale encourages a redefinition of the word "singer" and suggests ways to make it apply to a broader spectrum of people. The problem with the current definition, she believes, is that it is outdated and needs to be changed in order to better embrace the ideals of current society. In order (...) to fully understand the problem and incorporate her suggestions, it is helpful to look at the issue as a symptom of a larger philosophical problem and to examine her proposed aesthetics from a non-philosophical perspective. [End Page 202]A Philosophical Approach to an Ethnographic StudyPascale specifies the current definition of singer as one understood in terms of values set by a white, middle class, American society. She argues that this definition is a direct result of the actions of the church in the 1600s, which has influenced and effected how North Americans (specifically people from the United States) perceive and experience singing. She refers to the manner in which this definition is significantly rooted in history and has only strengthened with time as a "taproot" in music education.Pascale's main argument revolves around the fact that we in the United States have adopted and ascribe to the Western European value system of singing. She notes that in the quest to extract the highest form of singing, we tend to sort out the very best and tell everyone else not to bother. This elitist attitude is a serious problem and she is quite right to point it out. Although there is nothing wrong with classical studies revolving around a canon, we are often taught that anything else is not worthy of study or practice. As a result, we have a very narrow perception of singing due to the guidelines set by the "taproot philosophy," which greatly limits musical expression on many levels.The issue of Western European elitism in the United States is a big one that many scholars and educators like to avoid for fear of offending tradition. In Onika's case, she becomes completely redefined as a non-singer by these elitist constraints. Pascale hints at this concept at other points in her essay, but Onika's story stands out as a blatant example of subjugation.Pascale's story about her own trials in trying to learn about African dance and drumming reinforces the idea of Western elitism. She refers to Christopher Small's idea about the Western value of timing and rhythm, which is linked to "a more logical relationship between pitch and harmony."2 It is important to note that while Pascale was frustrated with her Western background, she was still encouraged by her Ghanaian instructor. She may have felt incompetent, but she was by no means subjugated, as Onika had become.Pascale relates both experiences to the link between culture, society, and the construction of belief systems. However, there is a deeper connection here that deals specifically with American society and its attitude toward those with a different belief system. Looking at other cultures shows how societies can encourage the exploration of their music by giving participants permission to be imperfect and accepting the interest in their culture with grace. This poses a question that is much larger than Pascale's original one, but one that is intricately linked to it: Why do we, as members of American society, continue to perpetuate the subjugation of anyone from outside of our established network of beliefs? [End Page 203] The problem of singers versus non-singers seems only to be a symptom of a much larger illness that is well deserving of a much deeper exploration.The Second Aesthetic from a Scientific Vantage PointPascale explores how the phenomenon of the "non-singer" translates into the music classroom. She argues that there must be a way to maintain the classical tradition while simultaneously allowing everyone to participate, trained or not. There must also be a way to allow every classroom teacher to feel comfortable singing with her/his students, and likewise to allow every student to feel comfortable enough to participate.She suggests incorporating... (shrink)

Classical liberals have a long and convoluted history with the welfare state. Welfare policy has engaged liberals ever since the debates round poor relief, land ownership, and distributive justice in authors like John Locke, Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer, and Henry George. However, the majority of the welfare state debate, from David Hume and Adam Smith to Milton Friedman and Richard Epstein, has been conducted primarily on the basis of rule-consequentialist reasoning, weighing the expected (long-term) costs and benefits (...) of different institutional rules. Classical liberals tend to be primarily concerned with welfare in the “happiness of individuals” sense and only secondarily with welfare in the “government handout” sense. This necessitates an investigation into the expected benefits and costs of various institutional rules and social policies. As a result, any disagreements about the best institutional pathway forward must be settled through comparative institutional analysis. Today, it seems to me that the classical liberal perspective must choose between two alternative pathways, each of which has its pros and cons, and each of which seems compatible with the abstract and general rules of the market society: 1) The Minimally Redistributive State based on a classical liberal constitution supported by robust market institutions and a civil society mosaic of polycentric mutual aid networks; or 2) The Welfare State of Law which, in addition to all of the above, adds a few carefully rule-bound and market-conforming redistributive mechanisms, the most important of which is the robust guarantee of something like a conditional minimum income scheme or an unconditional UBI/NIT scheme. In addition, the 3) “Third Way” models of the Social Market Economy and the Free Market Welfare State are also sometimes included as a third option. (shrink)

Professor Eric A. Havelock in his book The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics approaches classical political philosophy from the positivistic point of view. The doctrine to which he adheres is however a somewhat obsolete version of positivism. Positivist study of society, as he understands it, is "descriptive" and opposed to "judgmental evaluation" but this does not prevent his siding with those who understand "History as Progress." The social scientist cannot speak of progress unless value judgments can be objective. The (...) up-to-date or consistent positivist will therefore refrain from speaking of progress and instead speak of change. Similarly Havelock appears to accept the distinction between primitive men or savages and civilized men, whereas the consistent positivist will speak not of savages but of pre-literate men and assert that preliterate men have "civilizations" or "cultures" neither superior nor inferior to those of literate men. It would be wrong to believe that the up-to-date positivist is entirely consistent or that his careful avoidance of "evaluative" terms is entirely due to his methodological puritanism; his heart tells him that once one admits the inequality of "cultures," one may not be able to condemn colonialism on moral grounds. Havelock is therefore perhaps only more intelligent or more frank than the consistent positivists when he describes his position as liberal rather than as positivist. Yet this does not entirely dispose of the difficulty. "For the liberals man is to be taken as you find him and therefore his present political institutions are to be taken as given also." This means that here and now the liberals will take American democracy as given and will then "concentrate empirically and descriptively on this kind of political mechanism." This is a fair description of positivistic political science at its best. Yet Havelock praises the same liberals for writing "in defence of democracy". What then is a liberal? Was a German social scientist who in 1939 took "the present political institutions as given" and subjected them to "empirical analysis" for this reason by itself a liberal? If so then a liberal is not a man of strong moral or political convictions, and this does not seem to agree with the common meaning of the word. Yet from Havelock's Preface it appears that the liberal regards all political and moral convictions as "negotiable" because he is extremely tolerant. Havelock applies the implicit maxim of conduct to the relations between the United States and Soviet Russia today. For all one can know from his book, he would have given the same advice during the conflict between the Western democracies and the Fascist regimes at the time of the Munich conference. At any rate he does not seem to have given thought to the question of whether Tolerance can remain tolerant when confronted with unqualified Intolerance or whether one must not fall back in the end on "moral convictions" which are not "negotiable." In almost all these points Havelock is liberal in the sense in which the word is commonly used here and now. (shrink)

Is capitalism inherently predatory? Must there be winners and losers? Is public interest outdated and free-riding rational? Is consumer choice the same as self-determination? Must bargainers abandon the no-harm principle? Prisoners of Reason recalls that classical liberal capitalism exalted the no-harm principle. Although imperfect and exclusionary, modern liberalism recognized individual human dignity alongside individuals' responsibility to respect others. Neoliberalism, by contrast, views life as ceaseless struggle. Agents vie for scarce resources in antagonistic competition in which every individual (...) seeks dominance. This political theory is codified in non-cooperative game theory; the neoliberal citizen and consumer is the strategic rational actor. Rational choice justifies ends irrespective of means. Money becomes the medium of all value. Solidarity and good will are invalidated. Relationships are conducted on a quid pro quo basis. However, agents can freely opt out of this cynical race to the bottom by embracing a more expansive range of coherent action. (shrink)

With a new foreword by Paul Kelly 'I regard Hayek's work as a new opening of the most fundamental debate in the field of political philosophy' - Sir Karl Popper 'This promises to be the crowning work of a scholar who has devoted a lifetime to thinking about society and its values. The entire work must surely amount to an immense contribution to social and legal philosophy' - Philosophical Studies Law, Legislation and Liberty is Hayek's major statement of political (...) philosophy and one of the most ambitious yet subtle defences of a free market society ever written. A robust defence of individual liberty, it is also crucial for understanding Hayek's influential views concerning the role of the state: far from being an innocent bystander, he argues that the state has an important role to play in defending the norms and practices of an ordered and free society. His arguments had a profound influence on the policies of Thatcher in the 1980s and resonate today in visions of the 'Big Society'. First published in three separate volumes, this Routledge Classics edition makes one of his most important books available in a single volume. Essential reading for understanding the background to the recent world economic turmoil and financial crisis, it also foreshadows the subsequent heated debate about regulation and political governance if such disasters are to be avoided in the future. (shrink)

This article builds on the food sovereignty literature to ask pointed questions about the interplay of market forces and political liberalism. Specifically, we use cuisine as a lens to interrogate the assumption that multiculturalism is compatible with Indigenous food sovereignty. Because multicultural inclusion is the means by which Indigenous Peoples’ gastronomies are commodified and alienated, they experience not gastronomic multiculturalism but culinary colonialism. Accordingly, food sovereignty in colonial contexts must embrace both the active sharing and the mindful withholding (...) of food as political acts, and acknowledge that culinary culture is not simply a market commodity but also a politically-embedded process. In drawing together the threads of this argument, we advocate for a broadening of the discussion on Indigenous food sovereignty to include the resistance and resurgence enacted through gastronomy. (shrink)

Freedom of association holds an uneasy place in the pantheon of liberal freedoms. Whereas freedom of association and the abundant plurality of groups that accompany it have been embraced by modern and contemporary liberals, this was not always the case. Unlike more canonical freedoms of speech, press, property, petition, assembly, and religious conscience, the freedom of association was rarely extolled by classical liberal thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Adam Smith, and others (...) seem to have regarded freedom of association with some trepidation because of the violent, irrational, and factional behavior of groups. This chapter illuminates these anti-associational assumptions in the writings of James Madison. Although Madison famously deplored political associations as sources of faction and civil dissension, he differed from other members of the Founding generation in his willingness to defend associational freedom. Madison's writings also shed light on the unenumerated status of the freedom of association in American constitutional law. (shrink)

Influential libertarians from diverse backgrounds and professions who have worked toward a freer society across the globe share their personal and intellectual journeys, including what their lives and thoughts were before they embraced libertarianism; which people, texts, or events most inspired them; what experiences, challenges, tribulations, and achievements they have had as participants or leaders in this movement, and how this philosophy has affected their private and professional lives. The volume’s 80 contributors span the political-philosophical spectrum of libertarianism, including anarcho-capitalists, (...) monarchists, constitutionalists, classical liberals, and thick libertarians. Their essays express different perspectives on many issues even while articulating such core principles as an appreciation for individual liberty, private property rights, the rule of law, and free enterprise. Together, they represent myriad individual journeys toward libertarianism, however defined. By bringing together a range of contemporary voices from outside the dominant left-right paradigm, this book aims to contribute to the viewpoint diversity that is crucially needed in today’s public discourse. These autobiographies not only offer compelling insights into their individual authors and the state of the world today, but may also inspire the next generation to make our society a freer one. (shrink)

Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.

As a classical liberal, or libertarian, I am concerned to advance liberty and minimize coercion. Indeed on this view liberty just is the absence of coercion or costs imposed on others. In order to better understand the notion of coercion I discuss Robert Nozick's classic essay on the subject as well as more recent contributions. I then address the question of whether law is coercive, and respond to Edmundson and others who think that it isn't. Assuming that the law (...) is in fact coercive, there is still a question,as with all coercive acts, as to whether that coercion is justified. Edmundson thinks that this places a special burden on the state of justifying its existence, whereas it simply places the same burden on the state as anyone else. What I reject is the longstanding doctrine of Staatsrason, namely that the state is not subject to the same moral rules as its subjects. With respect to the relation of morality to law, Edmundson thought that another of the fallacies of which philosophical anarchists were guilty was that of assuming that there was a sphere of morality where law had no business. On the contrary, our concern is with spheres of law which appear to have little to do with morality, which is to say laws against wrongs of the malum prohibitum variety, as opposed to wrongs which are malum in se. I then turn to a matter with which Edmundson begins his study, namely how it is that states acquire the authority to do what they do, namely coerce their subjects. While the fact that the philosopher's stone of political obligation has proved rather elusive may mean that a legitimate state lacks the authority to demand obedience pure and simple, Edmundson contends that it can at the very least demand that we do not interfere in the administration of justice. I argue that this attempt to sidestep the justification of the authority of the state fails and that we seem in the end to be having to take the state's word for it that we must do X on pain of penalty P. Nor, as I go on to argue, is it any help to appeal to democracy to remedy a failed justification of the authority of the state. There either is a moral justification of state coercion in order to prevent harm to innocent subjects, or there isn't, and this holds,if it does, not only at the level of individuals, but also at the level of the state, regardless of its constitutional form. After concluding that the attempts of Edmundson and others to refute the anarchic turn in recent political philosophy have failed, it would seem that the withering away of the state foreseen in Marx's eschatology is not as improbable as maybe it once appeared. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that classical logic is trivialized in the presence of a transparent truth-predicate. In this paper, we will explain why this point of view must be given up. The hierarchy of metainferential logics defined in Barrio et al. and Pailos recovers classical logic, either in the sense that every classical inferential validity is valid at some point in the hierarchy ), or because a logic of a transfinite level defined in terms of the (...) hierarchy shares its validities with classical logic. Each of these logics is consistent with transparent truth—as is shown in Pailos —, and this suggests that, contrary to standard opinions, transparent truth is after all consistent with classical logic. However, Scambler presents a major challenge to this approach. He argues that this hierarchy cannot be identified with classical logic in any way, because it recovers no classical antivalidities. We embrace Scambler’s challenge and develop a new logic based on these hierarchies. This logic recovers both every classical validity and every classical antivalidity. Moreover, we will follow the same strategy and show that contingencies need also be taken into account, and that none of the logics so far presented is enough to capture classical contingencies. Then, we will develop a multi-standard approach to elaborate a new logic that captures not only every classical validity, but also every classical antivalidity and contingency. As a€truth-predicate can be added to this logic, this result can be interpreted as showing that, despite the claims that are extremely widely accepted, classical logic does not trivialize in the context of transparent truth. (shrink)

We model opportunities in society as ‘chances of success’, that is as they are commonly described by practitioners. We show that a classical liberal principle of justice together with a limited principle of social rationality imply that the social objective should be to maximise the chance that everybody in society succeeds. Technically, this means using a ‘Nash’ welfare criterion. A particular consequence is that the failure of even only one individual must be considered maximally detrimental. We also (...) study a refinement of this criterion and its extension to problems of intergenerational justice. (shrink)

A few years ago I gave a paper on the aesthetics of ‘noise,’ that is, on the ways in which non-musical sounds can be given aesthetic shape and structure, and thereby form the basis of significant aesthetic experience. Along the way I made reference to Arnold Schoenberg's musical theory, in particular his notion of Klangfarbenmelodie, literally ‘sound colour melody,’ or musical form based on timbre or tonal colour rather than on melody, harmony or rhythm. Schoenberg articulated his ideas about Klangfarbenmelodie (...) in the final section of his Harmonielehre. ‘Pitch is nothing else but tone colour measured in one direction,’ wrote Schoenberg. ‘Now, if it is possible to create patterns out of tone colours that are differentiated according to pitch, patterns we call ‘melodies’…then it must also be possible to make such progressions out of the tone colours of the other dimension, out of that which we simply call “tone colour.”’ In other words, traditional melodies work by abstracting and structuring the dominant pitch characterizing a musical sound, while ‘sound colour melodies’ work, Schoenberg argues, by structuring the combined set of pitches contained in a given musical sound. Schoenberg is emphatic that, although a neglected and underdeveloped possibility within Western classical music, ‘sound colour melody’ is a perfectly legitimate and viable form of musical expression; indeed for Schoenberg it is a musical form with enormous potential. (shrink)

Liberalism generally holds that legitimate political power is limited and is to be impartially exercised, only for the public good. Liberals accordingly assign political priority to maintaining certain basic liberties and equality of opportunities; they advocate an essential role for markets in economic activity, and they recognize government's crucial role in correcting market breakdowns and providing public goods. Classical liberalism and what I call “the high liberal tradition” are two main branches of liberalism. Classical liberalism evolved from (...) the works of Adam Smith and the classical utilitarian economists; its major 20th century representatives include Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The high liberal tradition developed from John Stuart Mill's works, and its major philosophical representatives in the 20th century are John Dewey and, later, John Rawls. This paper discusses the main distinguishing features of the classical and the high liberal traditions and their respective positions regarding capitalism as an economic and social system. Classical liberals, unlike high liberals, regard economic liberties and rights of private property in productive resources to be nearly as important as basic liberties. They conceive of equality of opportunity in more formal terms, and regard capitalist markets and the price system as essential not only to the allocation of production resources, but also as the fundamental criterion for the just distribution of income, wealth, and economic powers. High liberals, by contrast, regard the economic liberties as subordinate to the exercise of personal and civic liberties. They are prepared to regulate and restrict economic liberties to achieve greater equality of opportunities, reduce inequalities of economic powers, and promote a broader conception of the public good. And while high liberals endorse markets and the price system as essential to allocation of productive resources, they do not regard markets as the fundamental criterion for assessing just distributions of income, wealth, and economic powers and positions of responsibility. The paper concludes with some reflections upon the essential role that dissimilar conceptions of persons and society play in grounding the different positions on economic justice that classical and high liberals advocate. (shrink)

Who protects individual liberties and human dignity from domination by the State, by Civil Society or by individuals is a question under debate in China as well as the West, not from the point of view of Liberalism, but from the point of view of ‘Relationality’. Liberalism posits the individual as the measure of these matters but the ‘individual’ in question is an abstraction. Relationality posits social relations as the measure of these matters. Persons are not abstractions. They combine several (...) different social ‘roles’, and each role includes obligations as well as rights. These roles limit the individual’s freedom of action. There are no unipersonal societies. Liberalism also posits rights as an abstraction: ‘All men are created equal’. Relationality posits rights in a context of mutual recognition of rights and responsibilities. Rights only exist if they can in fact be exercised. From the point of view of Relationality, therefore, a person’s ability to exercise her or his rights must be seen in the light of a concept of Justice and there must be an agency that can guarantee this Justice, the exercise of these rights, while it guarantees the fulfilment of social obligations. Is this the role of the State? of Civil Society? of the Market? To truly discuss these matters in a transcultural context, we would need to look for common ground, not take as ‘self-evident’ the classical Liberal perception of the individual. Understanding the underlying political philosophy of China’s concept of ‘responsive authoritarianism’ does not mean endorsing it. But understanding this idea and its ramifications does provide room for amplifying the basic question of who protects individual liberties and human dignity. (shrink)

How can respect for cultural and religious differences be reconciled with the conviction that everyone has basic human rights that must be secured? Should liberal states require that non-liberal states secure human rights, and can they do so without being intolerant and oppressive? Is there a human right to democracy, and should a liberal hold that all states must become modern liberal democracies and may be pressured to reform their traditional practices and institutions? Do human rights include only (...) the classical liberal civil and political rights, and no economic rights? ;In this dissertation I defend a conception of human rights derived from John Rawls's Political Liberalism, which comprises both Justice as Fairness, the view he presented in A Theory of Justice , and the Law of Peoples, the view he presented in The Law of Peoples . According to this conception, human rights are binding on all societies, and cannot be rejected as peculiarly liberal or politically parochial. Outlaw states that violate them are to be condemned and may in grave cases be subjected to sanctions or intervention. Moreover, human rights include not only basic civil and political rights but also basic economic rights. However, while there may be a human right to live under a procedurally democratic government, it would not be a basic right but a derivative one. ;The conception of human rights that I here defend is a rational reconstruction of Rawls's view. In Chapters 1--3 I argue against the most natural interpretation of The Law of Peoples, defend a different interpretation, and expose and bridge a logical gap in that text. I then develop new responses to objections by Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge, who hold that liberals who endorse Justice as Fairness must reject the Law of Peoples as insufficiently egalitarian. I also respond to the additional objection that the set of human rights cannot include economic rights. As I show, endorsing Justice as Fairness requires endorsing the Law of Peoples, and public reason can reconcile respect for cultural and religious differences with the conviction that everyone has basic human rights that must be secured. (shrink)

We have found that a sparse version of the claim that alienated labor is a bad thing can inform a political morality without turning that morality into one which makes more comment on people's ends than the liberal can accept. We have also seen that a modification of the ideas of alienation from our species being can play a limited role in a liberal political morality, but that the rational kernel of the critique from species alienation is already a (...) familiar part of the liberal tradition. However, the substantive view of the good life - as one which essentially involves engagement in communal ties and satisfying labor - cannot play the role which certainly many Marxists would like it to play in their critique of capitalism, at least if their critique is to be recognizably liberal. Why should it matter so much that Marxists be able to accommodate central liberal insights? It is not because a political morality has to be liberal in order to be successful in the real world: history and the contemporary world are full of examples of political views which command wide assent despite (or because of) their illiberality. But the foreseeable stages of a socialist society will be plagued by the circumstances of justice as they have been classically conceived. A socialism which is sufficiently better than capitalism to be worth the significant risk and sacrifice it is likely to require must be liberal in the sense that it can be regarded as defensible to each person who is actually subject to it. This does not require that it accommodate the greed of the greedy or the injustice of the unjust. But it does require that it not presume the unworthiness of the moral commitments of its reasonable citizens. 47. (shrink)

William Rothman argues that the driving force of Hitchcock's work was his struggle to reconcile the dark vision of his favorite Oscar Wilde quote, "Each man kills the thing he loves," with the quintessentially American philosophy, articulated in Emerson's writings, that gave classical Hollywood movies of the New Deal era their extraordinary combination of popularity and artistic seriousness. A Hitchcock thriller could be a comedy of remarriage or a melodrama of an unknown woman, both Emersonian genres, except for the (...) murderous villain and godlike author, Hitchcock, who pulls the villain's strings -- and ours. Because Hitchcock believed that the camera has a murderous aspect, the question "What if anything justifies killing?," which every Hitchcock film engages, was for him a disturbing question about his own art. Tracing the trajectory of Hitchcock's career, Rothman discerns a progression in the films' meditations on murder and artistic creation. This progression culminates in _Marnie _(1964), Hitchcock's most controversial film, in which Hitchcock overcame his ambivalence and fully embraced the Emersonian worldview he had always also resisted. Reading key Emerson passages with the degree of attention he accords to Hitchcock sequences, Rothman discovers surprising affinities between Hitchcock's way of thinking cinematically and the philosophical way of thinking Emerson's essays exemplify. He finds that the terms in which Emerson thought about reality, about our "flux of moods," about what it is within us that never changes, about freedom, about America, about reading, about writing, and about thinking are remarkably pertinent to our experience of films and to thinking and writing about them. He also reflects on the implications of this discovery, not only for Hitchcock scholarship but also for film criticism in general. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 135-136 [Access article in PDF] Alastair Hannay. Kierkegaard: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi + 496. Cloth, $39.95. In the opening pages of this carefully crafted biography, Hannay states that he has no intention of making matters easy for his reader. By this, he means that "final judgments" will not be forthcoming on a number of key (...) issues surrounding Kierkegaard and his works: the nature of his relation to Christianity, the motives leading him to collide with The Corsair, and the meaning and wisdom of his final attack on Bishop Jakob Mynster and the established Danish Church. This is not to say that Hannay presents Kierkegaard either through rose-colored lenses or through narrowly intellectualist ones. Indeed, one of the book's central virtues is that it combines a philosopher's long-standing interest in Kierkegaard's writings with other guiding passions: a fascination with the sources of human creativity, the twists and turns of nineteenth-century European intellectual history, and the drama of one man's sustained grappling with the meaning of (his) life and the degree to which this meaning could be forged and sustained in his own writing.Hannay raises the curtain on Kierkegaard's life at the intellectual debut of the latter. In his first public appearance before the Student Union at the University of Copenhagen, Kierkegaard took issue with a student colleague's espousal of liberal reform. Hannay sees in Kierkegaard's performance signs of things to come: (1) the attempt to gain the notice and approval of the leading cultural lights, such as Danish literary icon Johan Ludvig Heiberg, and (2) a habit of seeking unity and definition through opposition and controversy. In his subsequent discussion of Fear and Trembling, Hannay notes the inescapable fact that Kierkegaard's philosophic positions are often tailor-made justifications for his private [End Page 135] behavior. The classic example is de Silentio's celebration of Abraham's teleological suspension of the ethical, a celebration which would, as often noted, vindicate equally Isaac's sacrifice by Abraham and Regine's "sacrifice" by Kierkegaard. Already on the occasion of his address to the Student Union, Kierkegaard's thought lines up nicely with his self-interest. But Hannay's work is hardly a reductive exposé. His ear for the varied leitmotifs of the authorship, their development and integration, is unrivaled. Regarding Kierkegaard's first skirmish in the academic arena, Hannay alerts his reader to emergent themes: (1) the valorization of personal unity, and the assertion that such unity must emerge from a life rather than be imposed upon it, and (2) a corresponding respect for the power of lived experience and a critique of any life or movement which is either primarily reactive or abstracted from individual existence. While personal unity remains a desideratum throughout his life, the integrity of lived experience is ultimately placed in question by Kierkegaard's construal of Christianity, which he comes increasingly to see as opposed to the humanism which underlies both Enlightened and Romantic thought.Hannay's biography focuses primarily on the development of Kierkegaard's thought as expressed in his journals and published writings. As such, his biography tends to emphasize the continuity of the authorship over its internal tensions. Hannay views, for example, thehumanistic stance of Climacus's Religiousness A as propadeutic to the radical transcendenceof the godhead embraced by Religiousness B. This is a topic open to dispute, since Kierkegaard himself went out of his way to record, and perhaps exhibit, the offensiveness of Christian demands to (fallen) human nature. Hannay acknowledges Kierkegaard's lifelong ambivalencetoward Christianity, but he does not show how this ambivalence echoes in the authorship. Ifhis Kierkegaard is a less divided character than the original, Hannay nevertheless challenges those who would minimize either (1) the depth of Kierkegaard's breach with humanistic thought or (2) the degree to which "the religious life-view [is] persistently in the offing" (Hannay, "Something on Hermeneutics and Communication in Kierkegaard After All," forthcoming in Kierkegaard and the Word, Poul Houe and Gordon D. Marino... (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn is a rarity. Widely regarded as one of the most influential theorists of the physical sciences, he has also, largely through his concept of the ‘paradigm’, had a sustained effect on the social sciences and education. His classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is read and cited by scholars in an astonishing range of disciplines, in part due to its acquired association with progressive social research and practice. This article takes issue with Kuhn’s conceptions of science and (...) its translation into educational practice, and suggests that they do not deserve the warm embrace they have received. It is argued that Kuhn’s popularity among progressive thinkers is somewhat ironic, since his portrayal of ‘normal science education’ is inherently indoctrinatory, presenting insurmountable barriers to acceptance as part of a liberal educational philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices: Body ed. by Elliot N. Dorff and Louis E. NewmanGeoffrey ClaussenJewish Choices, Jewish Voices: Body Edited by Elliot N. Dorff and Louis E. Newman Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2008. 134 pp. $16.00This volume, focused on Jewish attitudes toward the human body, is the first volume of the Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices series published by the Jewish Publication Society. Subsequent volumes focus on money, power, (...) sex and intimacy, war and national security, and social justice. Each volume in the series presents hypothetical case studies involving modern moral questions, a collection of classical and contemporary sources relevant to the case studies, and a collection of short essays by a range of contemporary American Jews reflecting on these materials or on other related issues. Elliot Dorff and Louis Newman, the preeminent scholars of Jewish ethics who edited this first volume in the series, explain in their introduction that they sought to gather together “a variety of authors with many different Jewish beliefs and approaches” (xvi). They do not claim to present “what Judaism says,” but, rather, to anthologize a variety of Jewish perspectives. In doing so, they seek to follow the approach of the Bible and the Talmud, both of which contain “many, many voices articulating often diverse points of view” (xvi).On the other hand, Dorff and Newman reject the idea that “anything goes” when it comes to Jewish views about the body. They indicate that modern American Jews may be tempted to endorse such a perspective, accustomed as they are to the American notion that “I own my body.” But, Dorff and Newman suggest, American Jews would do well to consider the contrary notions that animate much of classical Jewish thought on the body: that God is the true owner of every human body, and that God makes demands about how one should use one’s body. The case studies that follow challenge readers to keep these ideas in mind as they consider duties to limit one’s body weight, refrain from tattooing one’s body, and avoid high-risk behaviors.The essays that make up the heart of this book do by and large embrace Dorff and Newman’s challenge. A few do so quite confidently, such as the one Orthodox contributor to the volume, who declares God’s ownership of human bodies to be “the attitude of Torah Judaism.” But a similar view is also upheld by less traditionally inclined authors such as Adam Goodkind, a college student who expresses his doubts about conventional Jewish observance and theology but who sees the idea of not owning one’s body as reflecting the “common sense” of the Jewish tradition. [End Page 213]Many of the essays are also linked by their view of Judaism as a tradition that does not disparage bodily pleasures. Such pleasures should be greatly valued, a number of authors stress, at least within certain limits. Goodkind takes a stronger stance, opining that “part of being a good Jew is getting a maximum amount of enjoyment out of life” (43). Such talk is not surprising—it fits well with the this-worldly ethos of contemporary American Judaism. But it is worth noting that the more ascetic and otherworldly voices found in the tradition are largely absent from this volume.The volume may not showcase the full breadth of traditional Jewish perspectives, but it does demonstrate how thoughtful and generally liberally minded American Jews do think about key ethical questions when they are asked to consider them through a Jewish lens. And while the essays in the volume are somewhat uneven in quality, they tend to be marked by moral sensitivity and by the creative application of traditional Jewish ideas. This first book in the Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices series offers stimulating reflections about the human body, and it also offers a fine introduction to the patterns of moral reasoning found among many contemporary American Jews.Geoffrey ClaussenElon UniversityCopyright © 2013 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

As part of our small contribution in dialogue toward better peace development and reconciliation studies, and following Toffler & Toffler’s War and Antiwar (1993), the present article delves into a realm of logic beyond the traditional confines of negation and the excluded middle principle, exploring the nuances of "Otherness" that transcend classical and Nagatomo logics. Departing from the foundational premises of classical Aristotelian logic systems, this exploration ventures into alternative realms of reasoning, specifically examining Neutrosophic Logic and Klein (...) bottle logic (cf. Smarandache, 2005). The study challenges conventional boundaries and explores the implications of embracing paradoxes and self-reference in logic systems, aiming to redefine approaches to understanding truth and reasoning. The paper investigates how these alternative logics open avenues for philosophical inquiry, redefining entropy, and potentially influencing innovative perspectives in free energy systems. Through this exploration, it seeks to expand the discourse on logic, welcoming a broader spectrum of thought beyond established frameworks; and we also discuss shortly a number of possible implementations including in risk management and also Klein bottle entropy redefinition (Tang et al, 2018). (shrink)

Toleration classically denotes a relation between two agents that is characterised by three components: objection, power, and acceptance overriding the objection. Against recent claims that classical toleration is not applicable in liberal democracies and that toleration must therefore either be understood purely attitudinally or purely politically, we argue that the components of classical toleration are crucial elements of contemporary cases of minority accommodation. The concept of toleration is applicable to, and is an important element of descriptions of (...) such cases, provided that one views them as wholes, rather than as sets of isolated relations. We explain this by showing how certain cases of toleration are multi-dimensional and how the descriptive concept of toleration might be understood intersectionally. We exemplify this by drawing on case studies of mosque controversies in Germany and Denmark. Finally, we propose that intersectionality is not only relevant to the descriptive concept of toleration but also captures an important aspect of normative theories of toleration. We illustrate this by discussing ideals of respect-based toleration, which we also apply to the case studies. (shrink)

Political liberals argue that the classical conception of autonomy must be discarded because it is sectarian and metaphysical. This article rejects that a commitment to autonomy necessarily leads to sectarianism and questions the notion that respect for persons is separable from the commitment to autonomy. It defends a Kantian approach to autonomy, as belonging to the standpoint of practical reason, and argues that in this approach autonomy is a norm regulating how we should treat each other as (...) opposed to a good to be promoted. This approach also avoids the metaphysical idea of autonomy as self-origination of binding principles. (shrink)

Utilitarianism could still be a viable moral and political theory, although an emphasis on justice as distributing burdens and benefits has hidden this from current conversations. The traditional counterexamples prove that we have good grounds for rejecting classical, aggregative forms of consequentialism. A nonaggregative, liberal form of utilitarianism is immune to this rejection. The cost is that it cannot adjudicate when the basic needs of individuals or groups are in conflict. Cases like this must be solved by other (...) methods. This is not a weakness in liberal utilitarianism, on the contrary. The theory clarifies what we should admit to begin with: that ethical doctrines do not have universally acceptable solutions to all difficult problems or hard cases. The theory also reminds us that not all problems are in this sense difficult or cases hard. We could alleviate the plight of nonhuman animals by reducing meat eating. We could mitigate climate change and its detrimental effects by choosing better ways of living. These would imply that most people’s desire satisfaction would be partly frustrated, but liberal utilitarianism holds that this would be justified by the satisfaction of the basic needs of other people and nonhuman animals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Place and the "Spatial Turn" in Geography and in HistoryCharles W. J. WithersI. IntroductionA few years ago, British Telecom ran a newspaper advertisement in the British press about the benefits—and consequences—of advances in communications technology. Featuring a remote settlement in the north-west Highlands of Scotland, and with the clear implication that such "out-of-the-way places" were now connected to the wider world (as if they had not been before), the (...) advert proclaimed "Geography is History." What the advert signalled to as the "end" of geography in the sense of the social gradients associated with space and distance is what is known, variously, as "time-space convergence" and "time-space distanciation."1 The terms embrace not just the "collapse" of geographical space given technical advances (in travel time and in communications—consequences of what Castells calls "the information age" and "the network society"2), but also the idea that the modern world has become [End Page 637] more homogenized. One place is now much the same as another. Further, given the likelihood of such technical and cultural changes continuing into the future, geographical distinctiveness, evident in the particularity of place, would be a thing of the past: geography would indeed be history. There is, of course, much evidence to the contrary: that, in the face of "globalisation," questions of locality, sense of place and of identity in place matter now more than ever. Even, then, as Francis Fukuyama cautioned against the "death" of liberal democratic politics as The End of History,3 geography—that is, geography understood as questions to do with place, and questions to do with where you are in the world as part of questions about how you are and who you are in the world—has had considerably heightened significance and for some places and people more than others.4These notions of place—as a particular location, and the character or sense of place—are only part of the meanings associated with place in geographical and in historical work. Like space, its regular epistemic dancing partner in geographical ubiquity and metaphysical imprecision, place is a widespread yet complex term. What follows is historiographical in focus and, of necessity, partial in range. I offer a historiographical survey of the term place, principally but not alone within recent work in geography. In more detail, and with reference to one of the strong senses in which place is used, namely that of locale, "the local," or localness, I trace here the connections between place, space, and the idea of the local as evident in recent work in history and in geography, especially within the history and the geography of science. Particular attention is paid in this context to the distinctive features of what we may think of as the "spatial turn" in the history of science by looking at the idea of place and space in recent work in Enlightenment studies. My argument is three-fold. Notions of place and space, much debated by geographers, have been as central a concern for intellectual historians and historians of science as for philosophers and others, but they have been differently expressed. There is, I shall argue, value in looking at these different views in order to understand that whilst place is a commonplace term it is not agreed upon: working with imprecision has been both opportunity and restriction. In relation to work within the history of science and in Enlightenment studies, consideration of the so-called "spatial turn," of place [End Page 638] as social practice and of placing as a process in accounting for the uneven movement of ideas over space and time may help provide some precision and strengthen connections between geography and history.II. Place (In Geography): A Partial HistoriographyPlace is one of the most fundamental concepts in human geography. It is also one of the most problematic.5 Place, or small-scale regional space, features as a subdivision within the Classical tripartite division of cosmography (the earth in relation to other planetary bodies), geography (the earth as a whole) and chorography (parts of the earth or regional geography). So, too, does the distinction between chorography and chronology as... (shrink)

Toleration classically denotes a relation between two agents that is characterised by three components: objection, power, and acceptance overriding the objection. Against recent claims that classical toleration is not applicable in liberal democracies and that toleration must therefore either be understood purely attitudinally or purely politically, we argue that the components of classical toleration are crucial elements of contemporary cases of minority accommodation. The concept of toleration is applicable to, and is an important element of descriptions of (...) such cases, provided that one views them as wholes, rather than as sets of isolated relations. We explain this by showing how certain cases of toleration are multi‐dimensional and how the descriptive concept of toleration might be understood intersectionally. We exemplify this by drawing on case studies of mosque controversies in Germany and Denmark. Finally, we propose that intersectionality is not only relevant to the descriptive concept of toleration but also captures an important aspect of normative theories of toleration. We illustrate this by discussing ideals of respect‐based toleration, which we also apply to the case studies. (shrink)

The issue of citizenship has been one of the main topics of political thinking since antiquity, when its origins were significantly shaped by classical philosophers, whose ideas are also important for modern thinking. Gradually, with the intensification of globalization many new conceptualizations of the classical concept of citizenship were formulated to address global challenges. These shift away from the basic view of the interconnectedness of citizenship with a specific territory and give humans a wider, global identity with (...) an associated appeal to global responsibility. One such concept is environmental citizenship. This article is aimed at examining the historical development of citizenship, particularly in its republican and liberal versions, and its conceptualisation in the context of environmental problems that overcome national borders. The demands on citizens must be adapted to this reality. This article highlights the growing potential of environmental citizenship as one of the possible key factors for achieving a more sustainable world, which however requires the active involvement of nation-states. --------------------------- Received: 24/11/2022. Reviewed: 27/03/2023. Accepted: 18/04/2023. (shrink)

There is a fault line running through classical liberalism as to whether or not democratic self-governance is a necessary part of a liberal social order. The democratic and non-democratic strains of classical liberalism are both present today—particularly in America. Many contemporary libertarians and neo-Austrian economists represent the non-democratic strain in their promotion of non-democratic sovereign city-states (startup cities or charter cities). We will take the late James M. Buchanan as a representative of the democratic strain of classical (...) liberalism. Since the fundamental norm of classical liberalism is consent, we must start with the intellectual history of the voluntary slavery contract, the coverture marriage contract, and the voluntary non-democratic constitution (or pactum subjectionis). Next we recover the theory of inalienable rights that descends from the Reformation doctrine of the inalienability of conscience through the Enlightenment (e.g., Spinoza and Hutcheson) in the abolitionist and democratic movements. Consent-based governments divide into those based on the subjects' alienation of power to a sovereign and those based on the citizens' delegation of power to representatives. Inalienable rights theory rules out that alienation in favor of delegation, so the citizens remain the ultimate principals and the form of government is democratic. Thus the argument concludes in agreement with Buchanan that the classical liberal endorsement of sovereign individuals acting in the marketplace generalizes to the joint action of individuals as the principals in their own organizations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Picking Up the Pieces of a Shattered Culture:Abandoning Sartre for AquinasR. E. HouserI expect to die in my bed, my successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. Then his successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history.—Francis Cardinal George (2010)Here I propose to (...) present a feature of the ethics of Thomas Aquinas, his ethical doctrine of virtue, concentrating on the four cardinal virtues—justice, prudence or good practical judgment, courage, and temperance. Plato first selected them as the four premier virtues, but they go back at least to Homer, for whom wily Odysseus exemplified prudence, warlike Achilles courage, old Nestor justice, Penelope and Telemachus, Odysseus' wife and son, temperance. And I offer them as central to living the morally good life required to "rebuild civilization" in an America that so fair and judicious a man as Cardinal George could call a "ruined society." To see the need for Thomas's solution, we must begin with the problem. Now, all societies depend upon the deep and fundamental ideas of the most important thinkers, prophets and sages, saints, and yes, even philosophers. Their ideas "trickle down" to influence regular folk, like you and me, those who whose hard work actually makes a society thrive, or die. And when those fundamental ideas change, the moral principles of those who embrace those ideas change, and consequently their actions change, and as a result the wider society in which they live changes, for better or worse. Such effects can now be felt across America [End Page 135] by all; but most of us are unaware of the primary intellectual agents of these changes, since they operate at the level of fundamental ideas, not politics or business or day-to-day life. And often their originators have died before the ideas reach full cultural force. So, ignorance of history makes it difficult to deal with present problems caused by those ideas.My first conclusion will be that a major cause of the current coarsening of our culture is the group of ideas of the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, even though most Americans have never heard of him, and most of those who recognize his name have not read his works carefully enough to see the connection. Why Sartre? In the honors program at my university, I had a bright young lady of Muslim heritage who had gone to a lycée, one of France's elite classical secondary schools. "Did you read the classics?" "Yes." Expecting Montaigne or Pascal, I asked, "Who?" Her answer: "Sartre." So let us begin with the theory and practice of Sartre and his long-time lover Simone Beauvoir, whose book The Second Sex was an intellectual spark for the women's liberation movement. Then we turn to some real-life examples of Sartrean influence on ourselves and American culture. Finally, for the best remedy for non-Christian and Christian alike, I recommend Aquinas's doctrine of virtue, when taken in its full scope.Sartre's Ethics of Absolute FreedomIn 1946, the year I was born, Sartre gave a lecture to a meeting of French librarians, which became his most popular book, Existentialism is a Humanism. There he laid out the core of his thought about God, humans, and their ethical behavior. Here I arrange his main ideas in an order that facilitates comparison with Aquinas, beginning with his view of human ontology and proceeding to its impact on the four cardinal virtues.Human OntologySartre turned his back on the traditional metaphysical view that every creature is an individual substance defined by a nature or essence it has in common with all other things of that type. In his "first principle of existentialism," Sartre skips over other animate things, plants and animals, and compares humans to inanimate objects:Let us consider... a book or a paper-cutter: here is an object made by an artisan whose inspiration came from a concept.... One cannot postulate a man who makes a paper-cutter but does not know what it is... (shrink)