After presenting an overview of the research on Nietzsche’s political thought, this article discusses Robert C. Holub’s book Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem. While Holub talks about Nietzsche’s “eugenic calculations”, he does not mention his notion of a “great politics”, which aims at breeding superior humans. This notion is central for Hugo Drochon’s Nietzsche’s Great Politics and Gary Shapiro’s Nietzsche’s Earth. Great Events, Great Politics, which are critically examined in the article. Shapiro’s “postmodern” interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought neglects (...) Zarathustra’s crucial statement that “The Übermensch is the meaning of the earth”. Drochon uses Bernard Williams’s four criteria to define what a “coherent politics” is. Drochon’s arguments that Nietzsche is indeed a political thinker are persuasive. However, William’s criteria are not sufficient and need to be amended. (shrink)

“Ancient Chinese political thought” refers to the reflections and discussions about politics during the period before the First Emperor established the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE. Although one could also infer some political thought of that period from the other archeological evidence, the main sources of such reflections and discussions are texts believed to date back to that period, some of which became the foundation of Chinese education that began in the Han dynasty and lasted (...) till the beginning of the 20th century. Although disrupted by the turbulent history of China’s encounter with modernity in the early 20th century, the study of ancient Chinese texts has become the center of what is known as “national studies ” in the People’s Republic of China today, with institutes devoted to it in many Chinese universities, supporting researchers from various disciplines. In the revival of Confucianism coupled with the rise of cultural nationalism in mainland China, many Chinese scholars have turned to ancient Chinese political thought for inspiration in their search for distinctively Chinese perspectives on politics, both local and global, and they advocate Chinese alternatives or models to address contemporary challenges. With limited space, the publications selected for this article make up only a small fraction of the works in English and even fewer in Mandarin that discuss ancient Chinese political thought. In addition to being studied as part of early Chinese civilization that has influenced Chinese society through subsequent centuries, political theorists and philosophers engage ancient Chinese political thought to address perennial or contemporary political problems, contributing significantly to the growth of comparative political theory and comparative political philosophy. (shrink)

This book is an important effort to fill a notable void in moral and political philosophy, for there has been, according to Sharon K. Vaughan, “no formal study of the treatment of poverty in Western political thought” . Vaughan attempts to rectify this with a survey of the views of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Mill, de Tocqueville, Hegel, Marx, Rawls, and Nozick on the subject of poverty, the poor, the redistribution of wealth, and justice. (...) Her effort is valuable, even if more work remains to be done.The time is well chosen for Vaughan’s undertaking, both because of the resurgence of political philosophy in the past forty years and also because of a more recent interest in the relationship between the empirical sciences and philosophy. An account of poverty, and a philosophical theory of how to respond to poverty, are clearly of importance to the justice project, central to contemporary political philosophy; but it is unlikely to be carried out well without attention to empirical details concerning the sources of poverty, the demographics of the poor, analyses of programs that have, and have not, been effectively used in the past, and the like. As Daniel Shapiro has recently shown in Is the. (shrink)

The volume includes the proceedings of the 2nd Roma Sinica project conference held in Seoul in September 2019 and aims to compare some features of the ancient political thought in the Western classical tradition and in the Eastern ancient thought. The contributors, coming from Korea, Europe, USA, China, Japan, propose new patterns of interpretation of the mutual interactions and proximities between these two cultural worlds and offer also a perspective of continuity between contemporary and ancient (...) political thought. Therefore, this book is a reference place in the context of the comparative research between Roman (and early Greek thought) and Eastern thought. Researchers interested in Cicero, Seneca, Plato, post-Platonic and post Aristotelic philosophical schools, history, ancient Roman and Chinese languages could find interesting materials in this work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond Ratzinger's Republic:Communio's Postliberal TurnSam Zeno Conedera S.J. and Vincent L. Strand S.J.Is the political future of the West a postliberal one? For the past decade, numerous prominent thinkers in America and Europe have been debating this question. Matters that not long ago were merely of historical interest, such as Pope Gelasius I's understanding of the relation between sacral authority and royal power, Thomas Aquinas's thought (...) on monarchy and Robert Bellarmine's theory of the pope's indirect authority in temporal matters are now increasingly studied for their potential answers to contemporary political questions. This development, which would have been nearly unimaginable just a decade earlier, unsurprisingly has been led by Catholics. We say "unsurprisingly" in view of the long pre-modern tradition of Catholic political thought, as well as the Church's long struggle against liberalism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the current postliberal writers explicitly connect themselves to both of these aspects by using the term "integralist" to describe their position.1 [End Page 889]This "new integralism" represents a radical departure from the mainstream of Catholic political discourse of the last half century, which has largely sought rapprochement with Western liberalism. A group of writers, led by John Courtney Murray, George Weigel, Michael Novak, and Robert George, have held that the American constitutional order is rooted in the natural law tradition, and therefore is basically friendly to Catholic political thought. The Church's role in American life, they say, is upholding the natural law as a public moral philosophy, while embracing the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment as a matter of principle, in accordance with the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. This "Whig Thomism," which for decades represented the predominant outlook of conservative American Catholics, must now face the challenge of a different sort of Thomism represented by the integralists.2While the engagement between Whig Thomists and integralists has received most of the attention from scholars and journalists alike, another postliberal option has emerged in recent years. Its source is a group of Catholic thinkers associated with the Communio theological movement. Their political vision, which has no single name or label, has a complex and subtle relationship with the thought of earlier Communio writers, most of whom shared the Whig Thomist desire for reconciliation with Western liberalism. [End Page 890] The appearance of a Communio postliberalism therefore represents a significant development within this intellectual tradition. The most important representative of the earlier Communio perspective on political questions is Joseph Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI, who has recently been lauded as the "most important Catholic thinker of the twentieth century" on matters at the intersection of theology and politics.3In an article titled "Ratzinger's Republic" that appeared in these pages in 2020, we identified a significant tension in his thought about the Church's contribution to political life.4 Exploring Ratzinger's writings on natural law, we demonstrated that two currents are present. In accord with his fundamental theological commitments about nature and grace and about faith and reason, Ratzinger often questioned the effectiveness of arguments from natural law. He claimed that, since reason is historically conditioned, and therefore in the current order marked by sin, reason needs grace and faith to function properly. Yet, on other occasions, Ratzinger strongly endorsed arguments from natural law, highlighting its role as the foundation of a just democratic political order. We traced this ambivalence about natural law back to a dilemma at the heart of Ratzinger's political thought. On the one hand, in accord with his thinking about the relations of nature and grace and faith and reason, Ratzinger argued that the state needs the Church to supply moral values that the state cannot furnish on its own. On the other hand, he believed it belongs to the very nature of the Church to be separate from the state, and he endorsed nonconfessional, religiously pluralistic states.5 In light of these two commitments, Ratzinger argued that the contribution Christians are to make to the state is to supply moral values that were discerned under the influence of grace and divine revelation but... (shrink)

The purpose of this book is to trace the main developments in Greek philosophy during the period which runs from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.c. to the end of the Roman Republic. These three centuries, known to us as the Hellenistic Age, witnessed a vast expansion of Greek civilization eastwards, following Alexander's conquests; and later, Greek civilization penetrated deeply into the western Mediterranean world assisted by the political conquerors of Greece, the Romans. (...) But philosophy throughout this time remained a predominantly Greek activity. The most influential thinkers in the Hellenistic world were Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics. This book gives a concise critical analysis of their ideas and their methods of thought. The last book in English to cover this ground was written sixty years ago. In the interval the subject has moved on, quite rapidly since the last war, but most of the best work is highly specialized. There is a clear need for a general appraisal of Hellenistic philosophy which can provide those who are not specialists with an up-to-date account of the subject. Hellenistic philosophy is often regarded as a dull product of second-rate thinkers who are unable to stand comparison with Plato and Aristotle. This book will help to remove such misconceptions and arouse wider interest in a field which is fascinating both historically and conceptually. (shrink)

Are women's movement and feminist theories still connected to radical politics and the interest in changing social inequalities, when feminism has been `institutionalized', for instance in the academia, and has become a mainstreaming issue in social policies? This main question was put to eminent feminist scholars, with the aim of investigating the renewed critical role of international feminism and women's/gender studies in society, science, information, education and research. A reconstruction of the main changes which have occurred to (...) women's movements and feminist theories in the last decades were the core of the interview, stressing differences and disagreement, also in relation to the new sociopolitical claims, supported by younger generations. The conclusion was that feminism has not lost its historical political mission, even though the world scenario and ideologies have dramatically changed. Indeed, feminism has become transcultural and `glocal', facing new socioeconomic inequities induced by globalization both in western societies and countries in development, confronting with the transformation of collective/gender identities and questioning the increasing importance of technologies. (shrink)

This carefully selected and integrated series of discourses on the central issues of political life presents Robert M. MacIver's views on ethics and politics, society and the state, government and political change, war and peace, and the conditions of a viable international order. It is both a key to the astonishing scope and versatility of MacIver's mind and a major contribution to political thought. Politics and Society elucidates some of the major themes and essential problems of (...) political theory. Here are incisive essays on the nature of understanding in social and political science; on the discontinuities between ethics and politics that render difficult, yet imperative, the ordering of a multigroup society; and on the ever-present tensions between liberty and authority, private interests and the common good. Here too are MacIver's assessments of the forces that make for social change and the transformations requisite to the establishment of a viable international order. And here, with sensitivity and wisdom, are MacIver's articulations of relevant ends and their realization through appropriate means. David Spitz provided a lengthy introduction to this volume on its first publication in 1969 assessing the importance of MacIver's teachings as well as relating these essays within the broader context of MacIver's political and social thought. The republication of this collection now attests to Spitz's conclusion: "The rewards that await the reader of these essays support my conviction that MacIver's eminent achievements, in both method and vision, stamp him as the most distinguished of our social and political theorists."Robert M. MacIver (1882-1970) was Lieber Professor of Political Philosophy and Sociology at Columbia University (1929-1950) and held many other academic posts, directorships and honorary degrees, and in 1962 came out of retirement to be chancellor of the New School for Social Research. Among his most important books were Social Causation and Community, a Sociological Study. David Spitz was professor of political science at Columbia University. He was the author among other books of The Liberal Idea of Freedom. The David and Elaine Spitz Prize is awarded every year for the best book in liberal and/or democratic theory by the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought in his honor. (shrink)

Plato's _Republic_ is one of the best-known and most widely-discussed texts in the history of philosophy. But how might we get to the heart of this work today, 2,500 years after its original composition? Alain Badiou breathes life into Plato's landmark text and revives its universality. Rather than producing yet another critical commentary, he has instead worked closely on the original Greek and, through spectacular changes, adapted it to our times. In this innovative reimagining of Plato's work, Badiou has removed (...) all references specific to ancient Greek society--from lengthy exchanges about moral courage in archaic poetry to political considerations mainly of interest to the aristocratic elite--and has expanded the range of cultural references. Here, philosophy is firing on all cylinders: Socrates and his companions are joined by Beckett, Pessoa, Freud, and Hegel, among others. Together these thinkers demonstrate that true philosophy endures, ready to absorb new horizons without changing its essence. Moreover, Badiou--who is also a dramatist--has transformed the Socratic dialogue into a genuine oratorial contest. In his version of the _Republic_, the interlocutors do much more than simply agree with Socrates. They argue, stand up to him, put him on the spot, and show thought in motion. In this work of dramatic scholarship and philosophy, we encounter a modern version of Plato's text that is alive, stimulating, and directly relevant to our own world. (shrink)

This collection of essays, written by leading experts, showcases historiographical problems, fresh interpretations, and new debates in medieval and Renaissance history and political thought. Recent scholarship on medieval and Renaissance political thought is witness to tectonic movements. These involve quiet, yet considerable, re-evaluations of key thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and Machiavelli, as well as the string of lesser known "political thinkers" who wrote in western Europe between Late Antiquity and the Reformation. Taking stock (...) of thirty years of developments, this volume demonstrates the contemporary vibrancy of the history of medieval and Renaissance political thought. By both celebrating and challenging the perspectives of a generation of scholars, notably Cary J. Nederman, it offers refreshing new assessments. The book re-introduces the history of western political thought in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the wider disciplines of History and Political Science. Recent historiographical debates have revolutionized discussion of whether or not there was an "Aristotelian revolution" in the thirteenth century. Thinkers such as Machiavelli and Marsilius of Padua are read in new ways; less well-known texts, such as the Irish On the Twelve Abuses of the Age, offer new perspectives. Further, the collection argues that medieval political ideas contain important lessons for the study of concepts of contemporary interest such as toleration. The volume is an ideal resource for both students and scholars interested in medieval and Renaissance history as well as the history of political thought. (shrink)

To date no comprehensive treatment of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism has yet appeared. However, we are beginning to see the regular publication of more specialised studies, and Frederick Whelan’s interesting book is a noteworthy entry in this genre.

Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays edited by Christa Davis Acampora (Critical Essays on the Classics: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.) This astonishingly rich volume collects the work of an international group of scholars, including some of the best known in academia. Experts in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, political theory, aesthetics, history, critical theory, and hermeneutics bring to light the best philosophical scholarship on what is arguably Friedrich Nietzsche's most challenging text. Including essays that were commissioned (...) specifically for the volume as well as essays revised and edited by their authors this collection showcases definitive works that have shaped Nietzsche studies alongside new work: of interest to students and experts alike. Sections are devoted to the topic of genealogy generally, the numerous essays on specific passages, the applications of genealogy in later thinkers, and the import of Nietzsche's Genealogy in contemporary politics, ethics, and aesthetics. A lengthy introduction, annotated bibliography, and comprehensive index make this an extremely useful guide for the classroom and advanced research. (shrink)

Plato's _Republic_ is one of the best-known and most widely-discussed texts in the history of philosophy. But how might we get to the heart of this work today, 2,500 years after its original composition? Alain Badiou breathes life into Plato's landmark text and revives its universality. Rather than producing yet another critical commentary, he has instead worked closely on the original Greek and, through spectacular changes, adapted it to our times. In this innovative reimagining of Plato's work, Badiou has removed (...) all references specific to ancient Greek society -- from lengthy exchanges about moral courage in archaic poetry to political considerations mainly of interest to the aristocratic elite -- and has expanded the range of cultural references. Here, philosophy is firing on all cylinders: Socrates and his companions are joined by Beckett, Pessoa, Freud, and Hegel, among others. Together these thinkers demonstrate that true philosophy endures, ready to absorb new horizons without changing its essence. Moreover, Badiou -- who is also a dramatist -- has transformed the Socratic dialogue into a genuine oratorial contest. In his version of the _Republic_, the interlocutors do much more than simply agree with Socrates. They argue, stand up to him, put him on the spot, and show thought in motion. In this work of dramatic scholarship and philosophy, we encounter a modern version of Plato's text that is alive, stimulating, and directly relevant to our own world. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name (...) for threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

This book is an unconventional articulation of the political thinking in India in a refreshingly creative manner, in more than one way. Empirically, the book becomes innovative by providing an analytically more grasping contextual interpretation of Indian political thought evolved during the nationalist struggle against colonialism. Insightfully, it attempts to unearth the hitherto unexplored yet vital subaltern strands of political thinking in India as manifested through the mode of numerous significant socio-economic movements operating side by side, (...) and sometimes as part of the mainstream nationalist movement. This book articulates the main currents of the Indian political thought by locating the text and themes of the thinkers within the socio-economic and politico-cultural contexts in which such ideas were conceptualized and articulated. The book also tries to analytically grasp the influences of the various British constitutional devices that appeared as the responses of the colonial government to redress the genuine socio-economic grievances of the various sections of Indian society. The book breaks new ground in not only articulating the main currents of the Indian political thought in analytically more sound approach of context-driven discussion but also provokes new research in the field by chartering a new course in grasping and articulating the political thought in India. This volume will be useful to the students, researchers and faculty working in the field of political science, political sociology, political economy, and post-colonial contemporary Indian politics in particular. It will also be an invaluable and interesting reading for those interested in South Asian studies. (shrink)

Western Political Thought in Dialogue with Asia is a unique collection of essays that examines the exchange of political ideas between Western Europe and Asia from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. The contributors to the volume call for globalizing the scope of research and teaching in the history of political thought.

continent. 2.1 (2012): 29–35. Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "Politieke Poëzie: Enige aantekeningen, Poëtica bij N30 (versie 2006)." In Weerstandbeleid: Nieuwe kritiek . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. L’égalité veut d’autres lois . —Eugène Pottier The modern poem does not have form but consistency (that is sensed), no content but a problem (that is developed). Consistency + problem = composition. The problem of modern poetry is capitalism. Capitalism—which has no (...) image: the unrepresentable Idea of “everything.” The problem is that a poem cannot be justified. There is no excuse for it. Political poetry— pure poetry—has to be problematic, though not in a mannerist way. Yes, its problem is first its own problem—poetry’s existence in the same world as the newspaper—but therefore also always everybody’s problem (the problem of any world at all). The cult of the sublime points at a suspect desire for transcendence, nostalgia for paradise lost (the womb?). Melancholia of the post-. But a problem neither sorrows nor mourns, it is alive, and the fact that it is alive is the problem—the problem for death (rigidity, the status quo). Our symbols and ideologies do not hide any god: symbolic = state; imaginary = human; real = money. Problem: the possibility of communal speech (poetry) in the absence of a “we.” Or: what is a “we” that is not a collective subject (or in any case is not a volonté générale )? What is a universal history that is not a History? This work was started in the shade of the anti-globalization protests at the end of November 1999. I considered N30 to be the closure of the nineties, of my adolescence, and of the a seemingly total extinction of social desire. From the beginning I was skeptical about the alterglobalization movement as the avant-garde of a new politics, but something was happening . Maybe this event did not show that, as the slogan would have it, “another world” is possible, but for me it indicated that such possibility was at least still possible. That naked possibility is carrying forward. And if the fundamental tone of this work sounds more desperate than utopian, this is not caused by the catastrophic sequence that since 1999 has plunged us ever deeper into the right-wing nightmare—a nightmare that this work also gives an account for—but because my hope as yet remains empty. Composition . Composition is no design, but the production of an autonomous block of affects (i.e. a POEM), rhythmically subtracted from the language of a community. A poem does something. Is something. New Sentence . Choosing the non sequitur as compositional unit has the advantage that an abstract composition is subjected to the stress of concrete, social references. Where there is a sentence, there is always a world. (This does not hold necessarily for words on their own.) And where sentences collide, something akin to a textual civil war takes place. It is not about “undermining” whatever, or de-scribing the raging global civil war, but about writing social (or even: ontological) antagonism -- including all its catastrophic and utopian possibilities. Minor resistance. Why would poetry be the no protest zone par excellence? It is nothing but protest, not simply qua “content,” but in its most fundamental essence: rhythm. Rhythm is resistance against language, time, and space, and the basis of (what we will continue to call) autonomy. Rhythm starts with the anti-rhythmic caesura as Hölderlin remarked about Sophocles, a disruption of the quotidian drone. The destruction of everything that is dead inside of us. The noise of the avant-garde has never been the representation of the noise of (post)modernity (from the television or shopping mall), but the sober noise of the systematic exchange of an unbearable worldview. The poet does not describe, but looks for a way out: There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, tis translucent & has many Angles But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven William Blake was not mad. And there has always been only one poetry: the poetry of paradise. The principle is that there is something in art (the essentially creative element) that is disgusted by that which, unlike art, does not aim for the supreme. Wonder is not supreme, tranquility is not supreme, beauty is not supreme. Even amusement is not supreme! The supreme is supremely open, “das Einfache,/ Das Schwer zu machen ist” 1 : paradise. That is abstract. Literally. For me it is not about a concrete imagination, an idyll or utopia. There is no doubt a need for that, but it is not so much the supposed lack of imagination or ideals (human rights are ideals), but a fundamental lack of desire (human rights are no desires) that we suffer from, and from which we do not need to remove Nietzsche’s label of “nihilism.” “We.” George Oppen: “ Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually exists.” What is less actual than humanity? Nowadays it appears as a lifeless ideology of cynical power politics. Or as what makes one think. It is a shame to be human. The event is the caesura that defines rhythm. Writing toward the event is not the description of the event, but marking an abstract and intense space in which the event may unfold and keep itself. It is a task. “Remember that thou blesseth the day on which I seized thee, because such is thy obligation.” The event is a contraction (or a series of contractions) with its own rhythm and unique qualities. It is more than an explosion or demonstration. But at the same time less. The endless repetition of images and stories in the media points to a fear for the indeterminate and indeterminable void of the event. In the end there is nothing to see. We do not live in disaster’s shade or miracle’s light, but rather in the rhythm, which is contracted time, having little to do with omnipresent representations. For this book I did not intend a rhythm of evental representations (a narrative rhythm), but a rhythm which would be an event itself , because it draws the border between artwork and history. My desire for a direct engagement with the “extra-textual reality” has nothing to do with the representation of “rumor in the streets.” (What has less street cred than representation?) Naturally, a poem is no historical event and does not change anything. But a poem is a part of history that wants to be repeated forever, constructed in such a way that it is worthy of repetition. It is a part of desire (composition) made consistent (durable). The “historical event” flares up and burns down, and has to burn down to be effective. The leftovers are images and stories (representations), History—no event. The artwork—that is the ambition— remains event (though monumental and inefficient/inoperable). (No wonder that a historical singularity, a revolution, reminds us of a work of art; the resurrection yearns for a judgment, an affirmation; everything depends on it.) Hence the title does not summarize the book, let alone contract its “content” into a quasi-transcendental signifier. The title is juxtaposed to the book, like everything else inside the book, and in that relation it precisely forms a part of it. The ideal work is an open whole, lacking nothing but to which everything may be added. I have been interested in this “everything,” the world, or as I said above: capitalism. “Everything” is not the space for “wonder”—a code word, a shibboleth for petty bourgeois imagination (I recognize myself in the strangest things, a speaking dog, a canal, a pond standing straight—oh my god). No. The world is a social world, not YOUR world, poet. Power is number one. I will call “Dutch,” or “shitty,” whatever denies this power. That hurts, but this pain is an expression of the desire in the world to write another world, or as Blanchot says, “the other of all worlds” 2 : the world. Not as what “is there,” but rather as that which urges for an escape from what “is.” This is a testament of how radical reality has become, for me—or rather, a writing body—in a having-been-written. I am not interested in the problem of “meaning” as misunderstood by literary scholarsi: “order” in “chaos,” “symbolization.” Bullshit. What is there, hop, hope, now: the meaning of the taste in my mouth. Bullshit. I am not interested in the frustration of interpretation; I am writing for readers who do not want to interpret. I do not know how many “professional readers” will hear the music of a paragraph like: Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I hope more than I would think. There is a suggestion (or rather, an actual production) of speed and infinitive owing to the absence of plosives, i.e. articulations such as /k/, /t/, or /p/. Can you hear the slick suaveness? Driving car dark, vocal chiaroscuro of the word “sushi.” The unstressed /i/ stands in the middle of dark vowels and thus acquires its own special out of focus , like a momentary flash or brilliance—an obscure light. It is not about recognizing a story, but about avoiding any story whatsoever: the car disappears in the glow, cars and raw fish have nothing in common except their articulation in a language that brings them together, blurring them. A world appears in its disappearance. For a moment, light is a metaphor for language, though it cannot be reduced to tenor. It is not necessary to be a linguist or philosopher to hear this—a “difficult” poem all too often becomes an allegory of its own impenetrable being-language. The only demand: leave your hermeneutical fetish at home. This was no interpretation. Most shit has been stolen etcetera. That is no longer interesting. You cannot shoot the body with information and let your lawyers reclaim the bullets. So every sentence has been stolen. Also the ones “out” “of” “my” “head.” Why would I be allowed to steal from myself and not from others? Man takes what he needs to move forward. Whatever he encounters, finds in front of him, “occurs” to him. The writer as text editor, or singing pirate. Nothing new here. Important difference with for example Sybren Polet’s 4 montage technique: anti-thematicism. Most of the time ferocious citation from whatever I was reading, listening to, ended up in, and so on. I wrote chapter 12 on my laptop while watching CNN. On the air instead of en plein air . I often employed search engines to generate material. Chapter 20 offers the purest example of this. Often I stop recognizing a particular citation after some time. It is not uncommon for a stolen sentence to conform itself to the paragraph in which it finds itself. Sometimes I nearly arbitrarily replace words. Arbitrariness as a guarantee for absolute democracy. It is a poetics of the non sequitur : a conclusion that does not follow from the premises, the strange element in the discourse. A discourse of strangers. No logical, narrative, thematic unity. There is unity in speed/flight. It has to be read linearly, but not necessarily (not preferably) from beginning to end. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but this line precedes every point. The middle, the acceleration, comes first. A point occurs where two lines cross. It has been written from up close, at the level of the tension between sentences. Nothing to be seen from a distance: no form except the exchange of form, no geometrical or mythical meaning. You have to get in, “groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again” (Stein). 5 In Dutch, experimental poetry has been mainly dense: a small rectangular form filled with a maximum amount of poetic possibility. But at the moment the poem starts to relax, the anecdotical content seems to increase. This is what is called “epic”: long, narrative. I believe that an epic is more than that, in fact something completely different. An epic is “a poem including history,” 6 a long poem tied up with the life of community, that as a whole does not need to be narrative. The American poets of the twentieth century (Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson, Silliman) have put the epic back on the map by interpreting the poem itself as a map, and writing it as navigation. They have invented the experimental epic, a genre that has generated little original following in “our” poetry. N30 is the middle part—“always start in the middle”—of a trilogy, the contours of which remain as of yet unclear, although each episode investigates one of the three “ecstasies of time”—past, present, future—concerning society X. N30 concerns itself with the PRESENT: not with the description of actual facts but of the rhythm and the intense depth in which facts appear to us. Where are we? We are camping in the desert. Sometimes we are looking at the stars. As opposed to maximum density and minimal tension (a characteristic of most (post-)experimental lyricism), I have sought a minimal density and maximum tension in this book, considered as a long non-narrative prose poem. On the one hand, the minimal density is obtained by the inherent formlessness of prose, on the other hand by the conscious refusal of any active (formal, non-rhythmic) synthesis: the poem tells nothing, shows nothing, has no theme. I did not seek maximum tension either by loading the quotidian with epiphanic radioactivity (“wonder,” confirmation from above), or by means of the intensity of the linguistic structure. I want an abstract tension, but social in its abstraction, in other words, not neutralized by and subjected to Form. Instead of form (transcendent): composition (immanent). The concept is series. Ideal: every unit is necessary for the efficacy of the others and the whole, their relation is purely linear, i.e. non-hierarchic, non-syllogistic, non-discursive, non-narrative. Sentence related to sentence like paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter; the whole means nothing and represents nothing. Inside the sentence: syntax (Chomsky’s tree, a type of parallel circuit), outside: parataxis (coordination, an asyntactic line through language and world). I consider duration—the energy of duration (rhythm)—to be the fundament of a poem, the temporal inclination to delimit a “space.” Being as consistency, its consistency. A spatial part of time is not merely a metaphor for an inevitable trajectory, an inescapable time, something like “our time.” Not merely—because rhythm comes from language and is not projected onto it; the poem derives from the world like a scent and a color and a life from a flower. A series, a sequence: nothing potential, but truly infinite—the movement of an infinitude. The infinite series = everything minus totality. That means that there is no container—no Form, no Self, no Image, no Structure, not even a Fragment—just “the prose of the world.” No representation, but also no staging of the impossibility of representation (the postmodern sublime). These are no fragments, no image of a fragmented world or personality, no cautious incantations around the Void. It does not exist. It is a movement. Buying bread, a flock of birds, a bomb falling—they do not depict or represent anything, not literally, not metaphorically. There is an Idea, which is however nothing more than a rhythm, in the same way that capitalism is nothing more than a pure function. Parataxis: the white space between two sentences stresses, which is nevertheless always there, also between words, even between letters: the out of focus of idle talk, the gutter, the irreducible Mallarméan mist which renders even the seemingly most transparent text legible. The white space suggests a neutral medium for free signification, a substance of language. A non sequitur is an element from a foreign discourse, which stresses the white space as space, and problematizes freedom for supra-sentential signification. I start by withdrawing material, leaving the initiative to the sentences. In general a word presupposes less often a discourse than a sentence. What discourse is presupposed by “dog”? We could think of several, but why would we? It is more probable that, when faced with the naked word, we think of its naked (dictionary) meaning, of its denotative signified. By means of two simple interventions we may also write the word as sentence: Dog. In no way this suggests the discourse from which this sentence originates, but in any case we’re presupposing one. This is shown by questions like: “Whose dog? Who’s a dog? What kind of dog?” Etc. (Sentences are question marks.) A sentence implies/is a microcosm—a subject, a verb, an object, and so on. Even an incomplete or ungrammatical sentence does so. My main fascination while writing this book is the worldly and social aspect of language, an aspect that often becomes invisible, or rather, transparent in narrativity—the stretching of sentences into stories. Narrativity organizes a new discourse and a new world, and places a sometimes all too dispersing relation of transparence in between. The conventional novel is the brothel of being. I do not intend to prohibit brothels, and I have certainly not intended to write an anti-novel (THIS IS A POEM), but I do consider narrativity (in general, in poetry, in the news, in daily life) to be ontologically secondary with regard to an immediate being in the world through sentences, also if the latter have been withdrawn from a narrative or otherwise externally structured discourse (which in that case would therefore be chronologically primary ). Naturally, two or more sentences are always in danger of telling stories or arguing, just like the world is always in danger of becoming an objective representation, facing us, strangers. That is why need to wage war—against representation and against the interface, against interaction. AGAINST THE “READER.” To the extent that a sentence is worldly, writing is a condensed global war, and in so far as there is ultimately only one world and one open continuum of languages, it is a global civil war. Nice subject for an epic. The elaboration of a singular problem—prose as the outside of poetry, the form of the novel as purely prosodic composition scheme—“expresses” the universal problem: capitalism as Idea of the world vs. poetry as language of an (im)possible community. The paragraphs are blocks of rhythmically contracted social material. By choosing the sentence as the basic compositional component, an abstract whole may contain social sounds, without telling a story or showing an image. Composition is subrepresentative —a rhythmic, passive synthesis, or rather: a synthesis of syntheses. I never write large blocks of prose in one sitting, because there is no obvious organizational vector —plot, theme, conscience—outside the inherent qualities of the material itself. Usually I write down one sentence, sometimes two, but rarely more than three. Those sentences are usually placed in the text which I am editing at the time. In fact, there is no original composition, new chapters split off from chapters which became too long during the editing process. (Revision mainly consists of adding and inserting, displacing and dividing; only during the last phase, when the text has gained enough consistency, there may be subtraction to tighten the composition; each chapter requires a season of daily revision). This constant revision, accompanied by a continuous influx of collective background noise (to speak with Van Bastelaere), 7 makes every chapter a block condensed (“historical” and “personal”) time. The block itself is a-personal and a-historic; it is ontologically autonomous. If there is such a thing as a spirit of the times, I do not try to offer an image of it, but rather to cancel something of it by erecting a monument of its own excrement within its own boundaries. Tuning and dis-tuning , “in de taal der neerslachtigen een eigen geluid doen klinken,” 8 in other words, desiring in an Elysian way. In this sense I have intended to be able to write a political poetry. The ultimate political poem is the epic, “the tale of the tribe.” I consider N30 to be a prolegomenon to a future epic (of which it in the end will form a part a structural moment, as introduction-in-the-middle), an extended pile on top of an epic as narrative, a question of the tribe and question of its history. I was burdened by too much satire, too much bullshit. But: satire willy-nilly = the only justifiable satire. Against the abstract universalism of the market (“globalism”): concrete disgust, a positive way of saying “No.” Moreover, disgust is a specifically total attitude, which ultimately concerns the world as a whole. I hate this or that, but I am disgusted by EVERYTHING (when I am disgusted), and so it appears that satire is in fact related to the epic, in so far as it concerns society, the cosmos, history. Maybe it is no coincidence that the Dutch literary canon knows no great poet of disgust; what could be more fearful to us than society, the cosmos, and history? The T-tendency (T from Tollens 9 ) clearly points into the direction of the small, friendly, ironic, melancholic, acquiescent, wondrous, and so on. The anti-political, anti-cosmic, anti-historical. (Why am I so philosophical? To scare away the Dutchies.) And most of all: the “poetical” (the pseudo-mysticism from the backyard). Yes, the N in N30 also stands for the Netherlands (just like 30 indicates the number of chapters). I was not in Seattle, I do not live in Iraq. But is not the whole world bleeding to death on Dutch paving stones? Let’s hope that we mowed away something with this total satire, also “in myself.” The arrogant stupidity that definitely thinks to know the essence of freedom (the free development of esthetic needs inside the void), that cannot take anything serious, only believes in the disciplined bestiality of the individual (“norms and values”) and the mere functioning of a social factory which finds no justification whatsoever outside its functioning (“get to work”)… Who knows. A certain aimed destruction leaves grooves and craters, mapping out a next adventure. Pound’s periplum : sailing while mapping the coasts. Immanent orientation. The terrain changes with the map, history changes with the poem. Maps never merely organize the chaos, transcendent schemes imposed on a formless Ding-an-sich . They organize from within, surfing. But they are most of all routes back into the chaos or forward to paradise (final identity of chaos and paradise; Schlegel: “ Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos aus der eine Welt entspringen kann ”10). A poem is not only a piece of history, it is also a flight from history. Maps give chaos to the form of reality , open escape routes, break through representations, make us shivery and dazed. Paradise is immanent to a fleeting desire. History is the history of labor—this is Adam’s curse—and the poet works too: For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, school masters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world 11 But: the poet works in paradise. The paradox of the artwork, the work that is no work, the piece of history that cannot be reduced to History—this is explained by The Space of Literature , a virtual space, an autonomous rhythm, not outside, but in the midst of the noise, a piece of paradise in hell, a postcard from the vale of tears addressed to paradise, to X. Political poetry means: a poetry that dares to think about itself, about its language and about its world and about the problematic relation between both, which is this relation as problem. A poetry that thinks at all, articulates its problem. It has nothing to do with journalism or morality or debate, let alone the law or the state. It has nothing to do with “criticism” if this means the replacement of incorrect representations by other, more correct representations. It has something to do with ethics in the sense of learning to live. It has something to do with the community and the language of the community (whichever that may be) and the role of the poet regarding the community. It concerns justice without judgement or measure. In the end the just word is just a word , to paraphrase Godard: it is from a future that is unimaginable. It Is no rational engagement, but an aversion against everything that obstructs life, and love for everything what is worthy of having been loved. The world is engaged with me, not the other way round. First Exodus, then Sinai. A desire does not start with an agenda. To answer the question whether I am really so naive as to want to change the world: “We only want the world.” Justice is the world appealing to us to liberate it from all possible chains, from each organization and inequality, to be it, smooth, equal, under a clear sky—a desert and a people in a desert. That moment between Egypt and the Law. It is not a revolution, but the sky above the revolution. Poetry = the science of escape. There is no art that we already know. The weakness of modernistic epic poetry seems to me to be the unwillingness to completely abandon narrative as a structural principle, in favor of a composition “around” or from an event. The China Cantos and Adams Cantos are the low point, and the Pisan Cantos the high point of Pound’s poetry. Two types of research: archival representation of the past vs. ontology of the present (which virtually presupposes the entire history). Presupposing an event means that it is impossible for the poet to stage his own absence, but in no way makes the work personal. An event is the unknown, the new invading into the business as usual, so also the personal. The question heading this research is not: “Who am I?” but “What is happening?” The book is as little illegible as Mondrian’s work is invisible. Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation. Ron Silliman So no formalism, but what it means to live in this world and to have a future in it. I want something that holds together that’s not smooth. Bruce Andrews The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech— William Carlos Williams If my confreres wanted to write a work with all history in its maw, I wished, from the beginning to start all over again, attempting to know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand. Ronald Johnson NOTES 1) “The easy thing/ that is difficult to make.” Bertold Brecht, Lob des Kommunismus . (All footnotes are the translator’s) 2) Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature , trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press (1989), 75. 3) Mettes uses the word “Neerlandicus,” which refers to scholars of Dutch language and literature. 4) Dutch poet. 5) Gertrude Stein. “Composition as Explanation.” A Stein Reader . Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (1993), 495-503. 6) Ezra Pound. 7) Flemish poet. 8) “Resounding an original sound in the language of the despondent.” A. Roland Holst, De afspraak . 9) Dutch poet. 10) “Only such a confusion is a chaos which can give rise to a world.” 11) W.B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse.&rdquo. (shrink)

Western Political Thought in Dialogue with Asia is a unique collection of essays that examines the exchange of political ideas between Western Europe and Asia from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. The contributors to the volume call for globalizing the scope of research and teaching in the history of political thought.

PREFACE WORD -/- Hilmi Ziya Ülken was born in Istanbul during the last period of the Ottoman Empire, was educated during this period and worked in many areas of the intellectual life of the newly established Republic. Although he was interested in many fields of social sciences, he gained fame in philosophy, sociology, history of thought and literature. Again, he undertook important tasks in revealing and introducing medieval Islamic thinkers and post-Tanzimat Turkish thought, and due to his (...) deep knowledge of Eastern and Western philosophies, he made comparative studies in these fields and tried to reveal the similarities and differences in both cultures. Many graduate studies, book chapters and articles have been written about such an important thinker whose works are also recognized abroad. Among the thinkers of the Republican Era, Ülken is one of the most studied names. In this study, Ülken's biography, his intellectual adventure, his understanding of philosophy and his ideas about the life of thought are discussed panoramically, and the bibliographic information obtained about his articles and other works that have not yet been fully revealed has been added to the study. Another important document added to this study is Ülken's biography written in his own handwriting. Our hope is that with the completion of the information missing in this study, a complete portrait of Ülken will be revealed. When Ülken's works are taken into consideration, it is understood that he wrote works in many fields of social sciences. The fact that he did not concentrate on a certain field but worked in many fields has been a frequently criticized aspect of him. In this sense, we think that the phrase "A Thinker of Mütebahhir", which we wrote as a subtitle to the title of our study, defines him very well. Many names have used the adjective mütebahhir, which means ocean and depth in Ottoman Turkish, about Ülken. While Necati Öner used it in a positive sense, names such as Cemil Meriç (1916-1987) and İsmail Tunalı (1923-2015) used it in a sense that includes negative connotations, such as saying words in every field, his knowledge is unlimited but formless and non-systematic, and Salâh Birsel (1919-1999) wrote on every subject. On the other hand, scholars such as Kurtuluş Kayalı and Ali Utku, who have recently conducted competent studies on Ülken, have emphasized that Ülken - contrary to popular belief - thought and worked within a system and was very sensitive about his system of thought. When Ülken's works are examined in general, it is seen that many of them were formed by turning lecture notes into books, and this situation caused many problems. This situation led to problems such as the disorganization of his works, the lack of a certain systematization, the lack of the necessary methodological sensitivity in footnotes and citations, and the use of some terms in their original language instead of their Turkish equivalents. When we look at the life stories of important thinkers in the history of thought, we observe that they were not only influenced by the social, political, economic, etc. conditions of the period in which they lived, but also that they influenced these conditions in the period in which they lived. The best example of this situation among the thinkers of the early years of the Republic is Ülken. When his works are examined in chronological order, it is noticeable that his ideas constantly changed, that he had to defend the ideas he criticized from time to time, and that he was in a constant search. He explained his works in many fields by saying that he wrote works that would be a source for his own works and that he served as a bridge to the past. The fact that he was a doyen in many fields of social sciences despite having a Mülkiye education can be explained by his self-education. Ülken, who set an example for academics and thinkers with his hard work, diligence, and lifestyle of constantly reading, researching and writing, carried out very important works in his 73 years of life. As Öner, a student of his who knew him closely, says: "In his daily life, Ülken was either reading, writing or philosophizing." Again, Tunalı says about his diligence that "when he was finishing a book, he would have written another book!" It can be said that one of Ülken's efforts was to establish a tradition of sociology and philosophy in Turkey by recognizing the disconnect in our world of thought. Ülken expressed this to his student Necati Öner by saying, "We are a quarter in philosophy, you will be half, and then we will be complete!" While the influence of philosophers and sociologists who came to our country with the educational reforms was quite limited, Ülken succeeded in establishing a tradition in Istanbul Sociology and Ankara Theology. For this reason, important sociologists and philosophers of our country, such as Baykan Sezer (1938-2002) and Kurtuluş Kayalı (born 1949), admitted that "we are students of the Ülken tradition" even though they were not his direct students. Ülken provided an important opening in the social sciences with his methodology that analyzed the problems he dealt with in depth, tried to deal with all aspects of the issues and made synthesis attempts between different ideas. In addition, with the newly established Republic, he made great efforts to collect and translate sources in many fields, especially philosophy, and to carry out activities on a philosophical basis. The fact that his works continued to attract attention in every period after him and were reprinted and read again and again reveals the centrality of his role in the intellectual life of the Republican period. In this study, in which the life, philosophy and thoughts of Hilmi Ziya Ülken, whose valuable contributions to Turkish-Islamic thought are undeniable, have been tried to be presented in general terms, the articles and book chapters I have written about Ülken in various journals and book chapters and whose titles I have given in the bibliography and bibliography section have also been utilized. I hope that this monographic study will make a small contribution to the studies on Ülken, who deserves to be remembered with mercy and gratitude. -/- . (shrink)

Susan Moller Okin. AFTERWORD or greater weighting of these over “masculine" values. For how are women to continue to assume all of the nurturing activities that allegedly both follow from and reinforce their “naturally” superior virtues, and  ...

Westerners seem united in the belief that China has emerged as a major economic power and that this success will most likely continue indefinitely. But they are less certain about the future of China's political system. China's steps toward free market capitalism have led many outsiders to expect increased democratization and a more Western political system. The Chinese, however, have developed their own version of capitalism. Westerners view Chinese politics through the lens of their own ideologies, preventing (...) them from understanding Chinese goals and policies. In Contemporary Chinese Political Thought: Debates and Perspectives, Fred Dallmayr and Zhao Tingyang bring together leading Chinese intellectuals to debate the main political ideas shaping the rapidly changing nation. Investigating such topics as the popular "China Model", the resurgence of Chinese Confucianism and its applications to the modern world, and liberal socialism, the contributors move beyond usual analytical frameworks toward what Dallmayr and Zhao call "a dismantling of ideological straitjackets." Comprising a broad range of opinions and perspectives, Contemporary Chinese Political Thought is the most up-to-date examination in English of modern Chinese political attitudes and discourse. Features contributions from Ji Wenshun, Zhou Lian, Zhao Tingyang, Zhang Feng, Liu Shuxian, Chen Ming, He Baogang, Ni Peimin, Ci Jiwei, Cui Zhiyuan, Frank Fang, Wang Shaoguang, and Cheng Guangyun. (shrink)

Within the Western tradition we can find important and interesting philosophical differences between the continental European and the Anglo-American ethical and political outlooks towards biotechnology. The Anglo-American attitude appears based on naturalistic and empiricist views, while continental European viewpoints are built on idealistic liberal humanism. A Northern European view integrates both of the above-mentioned liberal traditions. The main problem is that although these different outlooks can be said to be liberal in their common promotion of equality, autonomy, (...) and individual rights, they still tend to conflict. I purpose to explicate the main differences of these liberalisms and to analyze how they affect the ethical views towards biotechnology in the Western world. Secondly, I will search for the shared values involved in these approaches in order to find common ground for open discussion on the ethical problems involved in biotechnological development. (shrink)

Reflections on principle and prudence in the thoughts and actions of great thinkers and statesmen. Discussions of the place of moral principle in political practice are haunted by the abstract and misleading distinction between realism and its various principled or “idealist” alternatives. This volume argues that such discussions must be recast in terms of the relationship between principle and prudence: as Nathan Tarcov maintains, that relationship is “not dichotomous but complementary.” In a substantive introduction, the editors investigate Leo Strauss’s (...) attack on contemporary political thought for its failure to account for both principle and prudence in politics. Leading commentators then reflect on principle and prudence in the writings of great thinkers such as Homer, Machiavelli, and Hegel, and in the thoughts and actions of great statesmen such as Pericles, Jefferson, and Lincoln. In a concluding section, contributors reassess Strauss’s own approach to principle and prudence in the history of political philosophy. “Principle and Prudence in Western Political Thought contains a series of first-rate essays on a—if not the—central problem of political thought: how should and can abstract and general principles inform contingent, particularistic political life.” — Catherine H. Zuckert, coauthor of Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy. (shrink)

Cosmopolis A Review of Cosmopolitics -/- 2015/3-4 -/- Editorial Dominique de Courcelles & Paul Ghils -/- This issue addresses the general concept of “spirituality” as it appears in various cultural contexts and timeframes, through contrasting ideological views. Without necessarily going back to artistic and religious remains of primitive men, which unquestionably show pursuits beyond the biophysical dimension and illustrate practices seeking to unveil the hidden significance of life and death, the following papers deal with a number of interpretations covering a (...) wide field extending from belief to theory, from emotions to concepts, from the wisdom of personal experience to the most sophisticated doctrines. Spirit and spirituality are indeed many-faceted notions. They may refer to the intricate world of the interacting spirits which inhabit living beings in animistic traditions, without excluding a “grand force” linking human beings within a dynamic whole on which their very existence rely . They also bear upon more atomistic and either/or approaches of Western philosophy, which have become embodied in Cartesian dualism against a monotheist background, to the point of freezing the essence of individuals and culminating in the extreme individualism that characterizes our contemporaries. However, this equally refers to the opposite conception of materialism, across times and cultures, from ancient India and Greece (Cārvāka, originally known as Lokāyata, or some Buddhist doctrines for the former, Democritus or Lucretius for the latter) to more contemporary materialistic schools, whether modern or postmodern. -/- The following papers look at the contrasting forms of the philosophy and spirit of the human factor set into a whole, with no artificial disjoint between the psychical and the physical levels, as Wittgenstein put it: “And how can a body have a soul?”. This approach is not unrelated to the notion of anthropocene examined in a recent issue of Cosmopolis, with provides another comprehensive framework open to a spiritual life emerging from the very environment that generated it. -/- *** The first section of this issue was edited by Dominique de Courcelles, director at the National French Research Centre (CNRS), whom we wish to thank for collecting relevant studies relating to the religious and political questions, with a view to focusing on the war of ideas inevitably waged behind images, concepts and perceptions, taking an asymmetrical approach. To the extent that they are mindful of global/local interactions and include representations, opinions and beliefs, such disciplines as philosophy, philology, history and social sciences can provide useful studies accounting for new practices in geopolitics and a fair diplomacy. -/- In her introduction, Dominique de Courcelles first poses the question of how the religious and political spheres interrelate, with their corresponding religious demands and humanistic values. She then suggests that the right question today may be breaking with the philosophy of human rights concerned with the defense of human beings against the hazards of arbitrary politics or the instrumental use of religion, in favour of a fair philosophy of humankind, a new humanism. This would consist in recognizing a common loyalty of all towards one interhuman, not only interstate community, to protect it from both the autonomy demanded by individuals and the instrumental use of minorities. -/- Considering the fact of diversity, so important today in terms of both politics and religion, Abdelhai Azarkan looks at the conditions under which tolerance could obtain the double status of right and duty. He revisits to two philosophers, John Locke and Voltaire, who thought about it from the historical reality of religious wars. The former made tolerance into a right, basing his analysis on the political-legal level, while the latter saw tolerance as a duty, from an analysis based on ethical-political criteria. -/- Mathieu Guidère examines what he calls semantic denominationalism, a term which implies religious attributes and identities, whichever national loyalties or personal belonging they may have at the same time. Since the early 2000s, thie phenomenon has expanded tremendously, compounded by the “war on terror” and the over media-oriented terrorist actions. Denominational expressions act as formal names for ordinary and high-profile players in domestic and foreign policies of democratic states. These systems reveal a receding secularization, while the powerful comeback of religious identities signals the failure of nation-states and the weakening of the humanist spirit. -/- Barbara De Poli retraces the history of a contemporary jihadism claiming its Islamic essence and asserting the truth of genuine coranic principles via the war on infidels, with a view to restoring the Caliphate. After defining the term jihad, she shows that even if this contemporary jiadism is spreading in the Muslim world, it radically departs from Islamic law and the received use of the term jihad, in so far as it is rooted in the early radical thinking of Islamic ideologues in the 20th century, starting with with Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. This current has been fueled by by international conflicts since the outbreak of the war in Afghanistan, in which the so-called Western countries bear a major responsibility. -/- Abderrazak Sayadi starts from the Tunisian experience to ask the question of humanist values and democracy within the relationships between the religious and political spheres. As a historian of religion, he is brought to demystify certain islamic principles and to paying attention to the reform of law, seeing the separation of religion and politics as a precondition to a successful democratic gamble and the establishment of a renewed humanism. -/- Dominique de Courcelles reminds us that getting a better knowledge of narrations and words makes it possible to better understand how logical and rhetorical thinking works for those who wage an asymetriccal war, re-enchanting and mystifying the world to better take control. As soon as 1932, an exchange of letters between Einstein and Freud made it clear that, in order to free man from fatality and war, education understood as culture was fundamental. Such illustrations as the exécution of Oussama ben Laden and the Caliph’s speech in Mossoul show that a premiminary analysis of images and words is essential to a fair diplomacy conducted by people from civil society, whose culture and wisdom allow justice and force to speak together and better resist war. -/- Marcel Boisard thinks that on the day the guns fall silent, exhausted by war, we will not return to the state borders that have prevailed for a century as an outcome of the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. It is time to prepare the “day after”, which will be a huge challenge. To this end, a summit of Middle-East nations is urgently needed to globally decide the fate of those peoples. On the condition that we know who the enemy is and accept to name it, to understand the history of the countries, groups and alliances, and to question any false or self-interested sense of certainty. -/- *** In the second section, Paul Schafer provides the author’s experiences to explain how culture, from the artistic to the biological, has the power to to open the doors to spirituality, from the inner self to the global environment. He asks himself whether a relative permanence of spirituality can arise from the specific moments that characterize it. Laurent Ledoux synthesizes the conclusion of a symposium held on 22 January 2015 on the links between philosophy and management, on the basis of the spiritual dimension conceived as “natural” and the answers it may suggest to the issues that face the organizations in a “contemporaniversal” world. Jacques Rifflet makes that question in a secular perspective, based on the wellsprings of personal commitment before it can be caught by any religious creed or scientific theory. In this sense spirituality, in alliance with reason, both inspires human consciousness and illuminates its destiny. Sami Aldeeb asks himself whether Islam can be reconciled with human rights. Caught between the belief in an absolute and final Word descended from the sky, and evidence showing that any religion is the creation of a given culture and a society situated in time and space, the Makkan and … contexts et médinois call for differentiated, if not opposite answers and exegeses. Bernard Carmona provides the outline of a dialogical framework, which is known to be a feature of debates between the various philosophical schools of classical India, exemplified here by the transdisciplinary perspective of debates within a Buddhist context. *** The articles not focused on the previous topic include a study by Landry Signé on China’s strategy, competing with the United States to control African resources. The author deals with the specific case of China’s rapprochement with Southern Sudan since Sudan was broken up. In the last paper, Goran Fejić and Rada Iveković, return to the essential role that women should play, and comments upon the role of some international legal instruments related in particular to the elimination of all forms of discrimination. The perspective is transnational and transethnic and is based on secular criteria, as regards nation-building and more generally society-building. Considering the persistence of widespread violence, whether in times of armed conflict or in times of peace, the question remains whether it is possible to fully implement rights and justice instruments. (shrink)

This is a significantly expanded edition of one of the greatest works of modern political theory. Sheldon Wolin's Politics and Vision inspired and instructed two generations of political theorists after its appearance in 1960. This new edition retains intact the original ten chapters about political thinkers from Plato to Mill, and adds seven chapters about theorists from Marx and Nietzsche to Rawls and the postmodernists. The new chapters, which show how thinkers have grappled with the immense possibilities (...) and dangers of modern power, are themselves a major theoretical statement. They culminate in Wolin's remarkable argument that the United States has invented a new political form, "inverted totalitarianism," in which economic rather than political power is dangerously dominant. In this new edition, the book that helped to define political theory in the late twentieth century should energize, enlighten, and provoke generations of scholars to come. Wolin originally wrote Politics and Vision to challenge the idea that political analysis should consist simply of the neutral observation of objective reality. He argues that political thinkers must also rely on creative vision. Wolin shows that great theorists have been driven to shape politics to some vision of the Good that lies outside the existing political order. As he tells it, the history of theory is thus, in part, the story of changing assumptions about the Good. In the new chapters, Wolin displays all the energy and flair, the command of detail and of grand historical developments, that he brought to this story forty years ago. This is a work of immense talent and intense thought, an intellectual achievement that will endure. (shrink)

Plato's Republic has proven to be of astounding influence and importance. Justly celebrated as Plato's central text, it brings together all of his prior works, unifying them into a comprehensive vision that is at once theological, philosophical, political, and moral. These essays provide a state-of-the-art research picture of the most interesting aspects of the Republic, and address questions that continue to puzzle and provoke, such as: Does Plato succeed in his argument that the life of justice (...) is the most attractive one? Is his tripartite analysis of the soul coherent and plausible? Why does Plato seem to have to force his philosopher-guardians to rule when they know this is something that they ought to do? What is the point of the strange and complicated closing Myth of Er? This volume will be essential to those looking for thoughtful and detailed excursions into the problems posed by Plato's text and ideas. (shrink)

Over the last few decades the study of Shīʿī Islam has witnessed a growing interest in specific aspects and perspectives of Shīʿī philosophers and theologians. The monograph authored by Sayeh Meisami focuses on the views of two of the most influential thinkers in Shīʿī, namely the eleventh century Ismāʿīlī thinker Ḥāmid al-Kirmānī and the Twelver mystic and thinker Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, better known as Mullā Ṣadrā. Throughout the five chapters, the textual comparative analysis of their thought shows how multifaceted (...) epistemological and cosmological keys are transmitted from al-Kirmānī to Mullā Ṣadra, and ultimately become interwoven with their respective theories about the legitimacy of the Imām. Epistemology, cosmology, and political theory thus become, in the author’s analysis, the fil rouge that characterize the development of Shīʿī mystical and political philosophies up to the advent of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Republic of Iran. (shrink)

Presents an illuminating interpretation of key 18th- and 19th-century European political thinkers' accounts and assessments of the societies and political institutes of the non-Western world. This book is of interest to students and scholars of both political philosophy and thought as well as historians of this important period of history.

This article interprets demokratia and arete as dynamically related terms of political thought in ancient Greek culture, from Homeric times to the end of the classical era. It does so selectively, identifying three stages in which this relationship is developed: from the Homeric to archaic eras; fifth-century Athenian democracy, in which demokratia and arete are posed as complementary terms; and the fourth century era in which philosophers used virtue to critique democracy. Relying mostly on evidence from writers who (...) have become benchmarks in the history of Western political thought, the argument emphasizes the inherently political dimension of arete during this period of ancient Greek culture. Noting different ways in which arete is related to political power in general and democracy in particular, it also illustrates the manner in which arete is neither philosophically pristine nor merely an instrument of practical power. The effect of the research contradicts traditional and recent readings of democracy and virtue as inherently antagonistic. The aim of the article is to identify ancient Greek contributions to understanding the potential, contingencies and dangers of the relationship between democracy and virtue — one which may benefit both democracy and virtue. (shrink)

This paper interprets the British legislative process that initiated the first comprehensive national regulation of embryo research and fertility services and examines subsequent efforts to restrain the assisted reproduction industry. After describing and evaluating British regulatory measures, I consider successive failures to control the assisted reproduction industry in the US. I discuss disparities between UK and US regulatory initiatives and their bearing on regulation in other countries. Then I turn to the political and social structures in which the (...) assisted reproduction industry is embedded. I argue that regulatory bodies are seldom neutral arbiters. They tend to respond most readily to special interests and neglect strategies that could more effectively meet the health needs of the people they represent. Neither national nor international bodies have aggressively pursued policies to harness the industry, reduce infertility rates, or meet the needs of people whose fertility is threatened by substandard healthcare and environmental neglect. In conclusion, I consider recent initiatives by activist groups to mount an alternative response to the industry's current practices and build a transnational reproductive justice movement. (shrink)

PREFACE WORD The Tanzimat period, which was the starting point of reform movements in many areas such as social, political, economic, military, etc., in which steps were taken towards Westernization, is considered to be an important milestone in drawing the fate of the Ottoman Empire. In this longest century of the empire, when many things were rushed, education partially received its share of change and reform. However, since the field of education was under the control of religious institutions such (...) as the Şeyhülislâmlık and the Nezâresi Evkâf-ı Hümâyun, the changes and reforms in this field remained limited. Regarding philosophy, which is the subject of our study, we can say in advance that philosophical movements in the West, the ideas of philosophers and philosophical education in the Western sense began to enter our country in the post-Tanzimat period. It is noteworthy that during this period when the Ottoman Empire became acquainted with Western philosophy, philosophy in the West experienced a period of crisis. In the period preceding this acquaintance, philosophy education in our country was carried out in a style loyal to the tradition of Islamic philosophy, and the break in this tradition occurred with the Tanzimat. One of the most widely debated issues from the Tanzimat to the present day has been whether or not a philosophical tradition unique to us can be established. Issues such as whether a philosophy built on our own culture and values can provide us with the opportunity to raise philosophers who are considered philosophers in the Western sense, and the level of competence and proficiency of Turkish in terms of creating a philosophical language on the way to realizing this opportunity, and efforts to establish a deep-rooted tradition continue to stand before us. In this study, from a holistic perspective, the changes in philosophical paradigms in certain periods from Tanzimat to the present day have been tried to be determined chronologically and problematically. The fact that the movements that emerged with Tanzimat were broken in certain periods, such as 1915, 1933 and 1960, and left their place to different movements, and the changes in our country in parallel with the change in the perception of philosophy in the world have been tried to be revealed in this study, and as a result of the study, results that have not been expressed so far have been reached. Again, whether the perception of philosophy has changed in society along with the change in philosophy in higher education is among the topics investigated in this study. For example, the fact that professors such as Mehmet İzzet, Niyazi Berkes and Necati Öner, who studied philosophy, regretfully admitted that it was embarrassing to say "I am studying philosophy", and instead took refuge in evasive answers such as "I am studying at the Faculty of Literature, I am studying at the Faculty of Language and History", clearly shows how the difficulty of doing philosophy in Turkey is at a high level with these prejudices. From the times when philosophy was identified with irreligion and atheism, and philosophers were seen as useless people who only criticized and did not produce solutions, to the present situation, the paths taken and the obstacles overcome make us hopeful for the bright future of philosophy in Turkey. In the Dârülfünun, which was de facto established in 1863 and opened and closed many times, philosophy courses were able to find a wide place in the curriculum after 1900 and especially after 1916. However, the contribution of philosophy courses and departments, which have been a significant part of the academy since 1916 both as a field of research and education, to the establishment and development of the longed-for original philosophical thought is currently the subject of a separate discussion. Indeed, philosophy departments have never escaped the criticism that they teach Western thought, transfer Western intellectual currents, ignore social values, and provide an exclusively Western and unproductive education. Our study, which deals with the processes of change and transition in philosophy education in Turkey and the debates on these processes, consists of three chapters and three appendices. In the first part, the studies in the field of philosophy from Tanzimat to the Republic are discussed theoretically and a general framework is tried to be drawn about the establishment of philosophy in Turkey. The topics covered in this section are mainly philosophy education until the establishment of the first university in 1863 under the name Dârülfünun and its closure and reopening in 1900 under the name Dârülfünun-ı Şâhâne. As is known, after a long period of trial and error, Dârülfünun was reformed under the name "Dârülfünun-ı Osmânî" in 1908 during the Second Constitutional Monarchy. Reforms in the field of education continued unabated, and with the university reforms in 1915 and 1933, philosophy departments also underwent significant change and transformation. Especially German faculty members, who were influential in these reforms, played an active role in the restructuring of the philosophy department. Apart from universities, philosophical activities were also carried out in non-governmental organizations, newspapers and journals. In particular, the philosophers who tried to become an association under the name of the Turkish Philosophical Society are today actively working under the name of the Philosophical Society of Turkey and the Turkish Philosophical Association. In this part of our study, in addition to these issues, the philosophers of the Republican period, which we have identified as four generations, and their philosophical attitudes and behaviors are evaluated together with the aspects reflected and not reflected in their works, and the interaction between the similarities and differences between the general characteristics of the generations and the philosophical atmosphere in the country is tried to be analyzed. The similarities and differences between the generations are analyzed since they are the main factors that determine and govern the course of philosophy in Turkey. The second chapter is devoted to "Philosophical Disciplines in Purgatory in the Republican Era". In this section, the disciplines of history of science, logic, Islamic philosophy and philosophy of religion, which we characterize as disciplines in limbo because their place in philosophy departments has always been controversial, are analyzed. In the third and final chapter, under the title "Philosophical Problems and Movements in the Republican Era", the problem of establishing the practical implications of the philosophical issues discussed in the first two chapters on the theoretical level, the question of whether Turkish can be the language of philosophy, Western philosophical movements in Turkey and their representatives are discussed. This chapter concludes with the main purpose of the study, which is to discuss the problems of philosophy in Turkey, suggestions for solutions and future perspectives. We have tried to enrich our research with three appendices that are considered to be complementary to these three chapters. The first appendix contains interviews with twelve senior professors who retired after teaching philosophy in Turkey for many years. These senior professors were asked questions about the changes in the view of philosophy in Turkey, philosophy education in higher education, their perceptions of philosophy, etc., and an important historical note was made with their answers based on their experiences. In this respect, we believe that these interviews will serve as an important source and reference for future generations and the social sciences community. Although the speeches of these professors contain many important discourses, messages and references, we have chosen one motto phrase to carry in the title. On this occasion, we would like to express our gratitude to our esteemed professors for sharing their vast knowledge and experience in the field of philosophy with us. In the second appendix, the short life stories and works of about a hundred professors in the field of philosophy in the Republican period are included. Although this information is sometimes easily obtained through the internet, biographical books or the works of the professors themselves, sometimes, after a very long and laborious work, original information has been reached, which is expressed for the first time in this study. Sometimes the capture of a very small detail required great efforts. In the third and final appendix, the names and periods of the senior philosophers of the Republican period are listed chronologically. (shrink)

Well known as a theorist of law as well as the main drafter of the 1920 Austrian Constitution, Hans Kelsen's contribution to political theory has been paid considerably less attention. Yet not only do his writings on politics offer a significant picture of the 1920s political dilemmas of both the German Weimar Republic and post- war Austria, they also can be of considerable importance for contemporary political theory in as far as Kelsen opens up new (...) perspectives on the links between ethical principles and political institutions. Political institutions rest on ethical principles that define the legitimate expectations that citizens nourish towards them. Such a relationship becomes manifest when claims are raised in public communication. The article aims to sketch the key aspects of Kelsen's political theory, to highlight the historical context in which it was developed, and to highlight the insights that it promises for current political research. (shrink)

Illustrating the collective power and relevance of feminist theory today, Mary Caputi and Patricia Moynagh have carefully selected a diverse international range of leading scholars and activists to critically assess key social and political challenges in the twenty-first century. This Research Handbook demonstrates a variety of feminist analyses that offer compelling insights into an array of topics, including police brutality, the carceral state, racial and sexualised violence, trans rights, climate change, and the denial of reproductive rights. With a (...) focus on the crucial role of feminism in envisioning a more equal world, chapters examine critical and care based approaches to feminist political thought; hostility to the feminist movement; and feminist attempts to unseat institutionalised power and violence. The lived experiences of women, variously situated in a host of cultural and geographic contexts, are explored. These experiences include the thematics of longing and bereavement, as well as different forms of feminist protest and political awakening. Ultimately, this Research Handbook illustrates the continuing need for reinterpretation and reconstruction in this vital field of feminist political thought. The Research Handbook on Feminist Political Thought will prove an essential read for students and scholars of feminist, political and postcolonial theory. Its real-world implications will mean it will additionally appeal to policymakers and activists, as well as academics of philosophy, political science, sociology, and gender and cultural studies. (shrink)

In ‘Listening to Music Together’, Nick Zangwill offers three arguments which aim to establish that listening to music can never be a joint activity. If any of these arguments were sound, then our experiences of music, qua object of aesthetic attention, would be essentially private. In this paper, I argue that Zangwill’s arguments are unsound and I develop an account of shared musical experience that defends three main conclusions. First, joint listening is not merely possible but a common feature (...) of our socially situated experiences of music. Second, when listening with others our experience of the music and our sense of community with our fellow listeners often reciprocally enhance one another. Third, how deeply and intimately we share a musical experience with others depends upon such factors as our respective backgrounds, interests, and levels of expertise. (shrink)

This book provides a clear, lively and highly readable introduction to the main themes of Plato's Republic. It covers Plato's social and political thought, his moral philosophy, his epistemology and metaphysics, and his philosophy of art and literature. Plato's theories in all these areas are presented in concise and straightforward terms. They are located in the context of the views of subsequent philosophers and critically assessed in the light of current debates. The contemporary significance of Plato's (...) ideas is emphasized throughout.Lucid and thought-provoking, this book succeeds in making a broad range of fundamental philosophical ideas widely accessible. It provides an ideal introduction to the Republic for students in courses in philosophy, political and social thought, classical studies, religious studies, literary theory, etc., as well as for the general reader.Key features* A clear, concise and highly readable introduction to Plato's Republic which covers all its main themes.* Lively and thought-provoking. Assesses Plato's ideas in the context of the history of philosophy and current debates.* Lucidly written. The ideal guide for students at all levels and for the general reader. * Full advice about further reading and extensive bibliography included. (shrink)

Over the last decade, attention has crawled from out of the shadows into the philosophical limelight with several important books and widely read articles. Carolyn Dicey Jennings has been a key player in the attention revolution, actively publishing in the area and promoting awareness. This book was much anticipated by insiders and does not disappoint. It is in no way redundant with respect to other recent monographs, covering both a different range of material and developing novel positions throughout. The book (...) might have been called The Attending Self, since Jennings defines attention as mental prioritization controlled by the self. This invocation of the self is among her central innovations, and may prove to be the main source of controversy. I will highlight points of contention here, but want to emphasize at the outset that the book is essential reading for anyone interested in attention. Jennings also contributes to a range of other debates, which will help a broader audience appreciate the importance this topic.After a brief introduction, Jennings provides “a philosophical landscape” of attention (chap. 2), tracing the concept through history. This is an invaluable achievement that will be welcomed by both newcomers and veterans. Jennings exhibits enormous breadth, covering areas that contemporary philosophers of mind tend to neglect: medieval philosophy, Buddhist thought, and phenomenology, to name a few. We also get perspectives on attention from core figures in the Western canon, such as Descartes, Locke, and Kant, as well as thinkers who gave the topic a more political inflection: Mary Wollstonecraft and W. E. B. DuBois. Jennings surveys contemporary literature as well, locating recent work in these older lineages. Some authors get more treatment later in the book (e.g., William James and Wayne Wu). Overall, Jennings provides the best overview of this history I have seen. She proves that attention is not a new topic, but one with deep roots and one that can inform current debates; Jennings draws on these roots throughout. I would love to see a companion piece surveying scientific theories, including “gain control” and “biased competition,” which get little airtime in the book. Some recent philosophical theories are under-explored as well, including Chris Mole’s concept of cognitive unison (Jennings discusses other aspects of his view), Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haladjian’s exploration of attention’s diversity (we get a touch of this), and my own proposal that attention is a gateway to working memory (not mentioned here). That said, no extant survey is more complete.Chapter 3 begins with the empirical claim that attention is regulated by slow brainwaves, and then takes up two issues. The first is mental causation. Endorsing moderate emergentism, Jennings argues that slow brain waves are causally efficacious even though they are not reducible to lower-level processes. (The metaphysics and neuroscience are presented accessibly, aided by three appendixes.) Second, Jennings argues that these slow brain waves indicate that attention is controlled by the self. As someone who was never moved by the mental causation problem—I don’t think overdetermination threatens efficacy—I would have welcomed more development of this second issue. For one thing, in linking attention to subjective control, Jennings eschews the idea that there can be purely “bottom-up” attention driven by stimulus features alone. This goes against the orthodoxy in attention science, and makes it hard for her to accommodate phenomena such as “pop-out,” or the commonsense idea that attention can be “captured” by a sudden flash or loud sound. For another thing, I wanted to hear more on why Jennings relates slow brain waves to the self. Does this include the slow waves that occur during deep sleep? Is there even such a thing as the self? Is there one self or many? How do slow brain waves reflect our interests, projects, values, self-conceptions, autobiographical narratives, or social identities? Does the social self invoked by Wollstonecraft and DuBois gain a foothold here? The whole chapter campaigns against metaphysical reductionism, but arrives at a perspective on the self that will strike some readers as highly reductive.In the fourth chapter, Jennings sheds further light on her conjecture that attention involves the self by advancing the thesis that attention endows sensory information with meaning. On the face of it, this may sound implausible. Object recognition, reading, and many other meaning-involving processes can take place outside of attention and outside of consciousness. But Jennings has a richer notion of “meaning” in mind. She develops the idea of “subject unity,” which is imposition of structure on perception that reflects the interests of the perceiving subject. This, she claims, is what brings perception into the space of reasons. Along the way, she has interesting observations about binding, feature integration, and demonstrative reference. The material is highly original, and Jennings’s postulation of interest-based perceptual organization is compelling. At the same time, one might wonder whether interests are really relegated to the ambit of attentional control. Consider the cocktail party effect, wherein one’s own name captures attention. This implies a preattentive filter that reflects our interests. Emotionally charged words, facial expressions, and dangerous objects also work this way, and social biases can operate preattentively as well. If these reflect our interests, then meaning may arise outside attention.Jennings’s fifth chapter explores the relationship between attention and consciousness. Some authors have argued that attention is necessary and sufficient for consciousness. Jennings focuses primarily on the necessity claim. She does not systematically review the empirical literature here, but she addresses some of the key findings, and effectively rebuts studies that allege to find consciousness outside attention. She does not rest her case there, however. Instead, she identifies a new class of examples that purport to establish the possibility of consciousness without attention. Her central example she calls “conscious entrainment,” which is what we experience when engaged in habitual or skilled activities. Other possible examples touched on in the chapter include hypervigilance in individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), passive movie watching, dreaming, and “attentional neglect.” These states all involve intense focus, Jennings admits, but not attention. To some readers this may sound contradictory. Isn’t focus a kind of attention? Don’t these states of absorption involve stimulus selection and enhancement of relevant features, suppression of distractors, and other hallmarks of attention? Jennings says none of this is tantamount to attention. Recall that she thinks attention is controlled by the self. In these cases, we are invited to imagine that the self takes a passive role: control is either ceded to the world (movie watching) or to previously mastered routines (skills and habits). Thus, Jennings’s claim that there is no attention in these cases hangs on her contentious thesis that attention requires a controlling self. One might also push back by arguing that, in some of Jennings’s allegedly selfless examples, the self remains involved. Skilled activities and hypervigilance, for example, can reflect personal interests.Skills and hypervigilance get more airtime in chapter 6. There, Jennings turns to questions of responsibility—a neglected topic in attention research. The chapter begins with a manslaughter trial in which the teenage plaintiff was given a light sentence because the judge evidently believed that the teen’s ADHD compromised his ability to control his actions. The example may be a bit triggering for people who have a personal relationship with this diagnosis, but, putting that aside, Jennings uses it to introduce the important concept of attention-based control. With reduced control, Jennings argues, comes reduced responsibility. I am inclined to see ADHD as involving dysregulation of attention (difficulty disengaging and dividing attention, for example) rather than diminished attention, but that can still be characterized as an issue with control of attention; therefore ADHD still illustrates Jennings’s point that there is a link between responsibility and control of attention. This, it turns out, is only half of her story. Having argued for this link, one might expect Jennings to follow Wayne Wu, who contends that attention is necessary for action, and hence for responsibility. She does not. Instead, she says argues that responsibility can also arise in cases of “strategic automaticity.” This brings us back to skills. When skills are deployed, action is governed by learned pairings between stimuli and responses. The choice to exercise a skill requires attention, so attention is needed for being a responsible agent, but once a skill kicks in, attention is no longer required, and one can be held responsible for actions performed skillfully—thus attention is not required for responsibility tout court. Jennings addresses an opposing view (defended by Wu, Ellen Fridland, and Barbara Montero), according to which skills involve “automatic attention” rather than no attention. Jennings worries that this move will collapse the distinction between attention and other kinds of selection and filtering that occur throughout the nervous system, including the retina. She says that the attentional interpretation of skilled action is at odds with the lack of top-down reweighing of sensory inputs, regulated by lateral frontal cortex. These objections to automatic attention warrant response. My own view is that attention involves broadcasting to working memory, so retinal filtering is ruled out. Jennings’s insistence on top-down reweighing will not move those who believe attention can be purely bottom-up. For all that, I side with Jennings in wanting to allow for responsibility without attentional control. I think we can be responsible for implicit biases, for example. I also think attentional control is insufficient for responsibility, as when we act under duress.Jennings offers fresh perspective on the nature of attention, and its role in meaningful perception, consciousness, action, and responsibility. Each chapter can be read separately, but they hang together well, and each reflects her thesis that attention is essentially linked to the self. Though I am skeptical of that strong claim, we would do well to follow Jennings in regarding attention as interest-laden interface between mind and world. I look forward to a sequel in which attention is related to richer conceptions of identity, and where the political consequences of this link are actively explored. Meanwhile, one can hardly fault Jennings for covering too little. She tackles a remarkable range of topics, from metaphysics to ethics. Her arguments throughout demand response, repay careful study, and propel the field forward. (shrink)

As reports of genocide, terrorism, and political violence fill today’s newscasts, more attention has been given to issues of human rights—but all too often the sound bites seem overly simplistic. Many Westerners presume that non-Western peoples yearn for democratic rights, while liberal values of toleration give way to xenophobia. This book shows that the identification of rights with contemporary liberal democracy is inaccurate and questions the assumptions of many politicians and scholars that rights are self-evident in all circumstances (...) and will overcome any conflicts of thought or interest. _Rethinking Rights_ offers a radical reconsideration of the origins, nature, and role of rights in public life, interweaving perspectives of leading scholars in history, political science, philosophy, and law to emphasize rights as a natural outgrowth of a social understanding of human nature and dignity. The authors argue that every person comes to consciousness in a historical and cultural milieu that must be taken into account in understanding human rights, and they describe the omnipresence of concrete, practical rights in their historical, political, and philosophical contexts. By rooting our understanding of rights in both history and the order of existence, they show that it is possible to understand rights as essential to our lives as social beings but also open to refinement within communities. An initial group of essays retraces the origins and historical development of rights in the West, assessing the influence of such thinkers as Locke, Burke, and the authors of the Declaration of Independence to clarify the experience of rights within the Western tradition. A second group addresses the need to rethink our understanding of the nature of existence if we are to understand rights and their place in any decent life, examining the ontological basis of rights, the influence of custom on rights, the social nature of the human person, and the importance of institutional rights. Steering a middle course between radical individualist and extreme egalitarian views, _Rethinking Rights_ proposes a new philosophy of rights appropriate to today’s world, showing that rights need to be rethought in a manner that brings them back into accord with human nature and experience so that they may again truly serve the human good. By engaging both the history of rights in the West and the multicultural challenge of rights in an international context, _Rethinking Rights_ offers a provocative and coherent new argument to advance the field of rights studies. (shrink)

Legal and political theorist, common lawyer and parliamentary leader, historian and polyglot, John Selden was a formidable figure in Renaissance England, whose real importance and influence are now being recognized once again. John Selden and the Western Political Tradition highlights his important role in the development of such early modern political ideas as modern natural law and natural rights, national identity and tradition, the political integration of church and state, and the effect of Jewish ideas (...) on Western political thought. Selden's political ideas are analysed in the context of his contemporaries Grotius, Hobbes and Filmer. The book demonstrates how these ideas informed and influenced more familiar works of later thinkers like Burke. (shrink)

When parties and interest groups interact, they can do so in several ways which could be on an informal level, lobbying for a party candidate, or group representatives approach party leaders in the parliament to lobby them on an issue. There is a plethora of studies on the extent to which major political parties and major interests have related in the past and continue to relate or interact at the organizational level. Researchers have investigated to what extent parties (...) and groups had formal organizational ties, cooperated in elections, or worked in concert on developing and implementing policies. Factors that for decades have determined the relationship between political parties and interest groups in liberal democracies are political system and subsystem development, political culture and political ideology, centralization of government and policymaking, nature of the party system, political party dependence on interest groups, encompassing characteristics of the interest group system, interest group development, ideology, and leadership. However, the pandemic has influenced to a great extend the relationship between interest groups and politics. While Covid-19 crisis has consolidated power within governments, leaving opposition parties in a bind, on the other hand it has galvanized interest groups and businesses to mobilize. The pandemic has opened up the lobbying playing field to many new players. The paper aims to investigate to what extend the pandemic has influenced the relationship between political parties, government and interest groups and what strategies have these last ones used to get heard in a time when social distancing has reduced the opportunities for face-to-face lobbying. (shrink)

This ambitious volume compares the development of Western and Islamic political thought. Exploring how the two traditions have both converged and diverged over time, the volume throws light on why the West and Islam each developed their own particular kind of approach to government, politics and the state, and why these are so different today.

This paper distinguishes six elements in the Platonic concept of rationality as it appears in the Republic: (a) being fully informed; (b) thinking logically; (c) having the single correct ultimate end; (d) determining the appropriate means; (e) matching action to thought; and (f) promotingone’s own interest. The evidence linking the rational part of the soul (the logistikon) to each of these aspects is discussed. The philosopher-guardians are shown to exemplify full and complete “Platonic rationality”, whereas the unjust men (...) in books 8 and 9 exhibit different degrees of failure to conform to the six elements listed above. (shrink)

At Republic 462a-e, Plato provides an account of political unity summarized in the following claims: PU1 — Political unity is the sharing of pleasures and pains in common; PU2 — The unity of a polis resembles the unity of an individual; PU3 — Political unity is the greatest good for a polis. Aristotle criticizes the coherence of these claims arguing that if anything becomes completely unified it becomes an individual and ceases to be a state. Since (...) the greatest good for a city preserves it, a city cannot be unified as an individual is unified. Robert Mayhew has recently defended the philosophical significance of Aristotle’s objections. Mayhew is right. Aristotle’s objections are significant, but this is because they require a more thorough explication of the Platonic view. This paper reconstructs the Platonic view, shows that a more careful reading avoids the Aristotelian criticisms, and then shows that Aristotle endorses the reconstructed view. (shrink)

This article examines how Gregory of Nazianzus (Gregory the Theologian, ca. 330-390) constructs an image of the priest using political metaphor and vocabulary from previous traditions. The author chooses a specific text from ancient political thought that was close to his own understanding of Christian tradition (Plato’s Republic). In turn, the biblical material he uses comprises fragments that are highly political in nature (for example, criticism of the rulers of Israel by the prophets). Combining these (...) texts first of all leads to their transformation, and secondly allows him to piece together an image of the priest as ruler of the Church. The combination of these two traditions makes it possible to describe both the historical and contemporary legitimization of this image – one novel for Late Antiquity – and to define the main characteristics of its ethos. (shrink)

Positive Psychology Interventions as an Opportunity in Arab Countries to Promoting Well-being AbstractIn this perspective paper, we emphasize the importance of further research on culturally-sensitive positive psychology interventions in the Arab region. We argue that these interventions are needed in the region because they not only reduce mental health problems but also promote well-being and flourishing. To achieve this, we shed light on the cultural elements of the Arab region and how the concept of well-being differs from that of (...) Western culture. We review the research conducted in Arabia, briefly evaluate the quality of this research and list some adapted measurements. We furthermore propose guidelines and recommendations for future evidence-based positive psychology interventions research to align with the national culture in various sectors and community samples that contribute to the development of well-being in the Arab world.Introduction Extensive research on Positive Psychology Interventions (PPIs) - defined as activities focus on promoting positive feelings, thoughts, or behaviour (Sin & Lyubomirsky, 2009) - has shown their effectiveness in well-being and mental illness (e.g., Chakhssi et al., 2018; Hendriks et al., 2020). A recent review of 347 studies showed that PPIs have a significant effect on promoting quality of life and well-being and reducing anxiety and depression (Carr et al., 2020). However, the issue is that most of these studies (82%) remain narrow in focus only on Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic (WEIRD) countries (Hendriks et al., 2019). Therefore, they may not be effective for other countries such as the Arab countries where there are various cultural differences. This highlights the key role that culture can play in enhancing PPIs engagement, acceptability, and eventually, effectiveness (Hendriks & Graafsma, 2019). Recently, the field of PP in the Arab region has begun to grow (Basurrah et al., 2021; Rao et al., 2015). However, studies conducted in these countries are scant and of poor methodological quality. We have found humble quantity and quality of empirical studies. Yet, Arab countries, home to 5% of the world’s population, have a burden of mental health problems above global levels (GBD 2015 Eastern Mediterranean Region Mental Health Collaborators, 2018). Prevalent stigma, war and conflict were some of the contributors (Maalouf et al., 2019). Thus, to properly address this cultural stigma against mental health problems, PPIs could provide an additional role alongside traditional psychology approaches (e.g., Cognitive Behavioural therapy - CBT). Further, in light of the political conditions that some Arab countries are going through and the negative effects that they cause, it has become necessary to use the method of prevention that is the focus of PP and not only of treatment as a strategy for applications and practice. It has been noted that the mental health care system in the Arab region focuses highly on illnesses treatment and neglects the significant role that PP plays in enhancing human potential and well-being. We - here in Arabia –are becoming more influenced by many global issues particularly the COVID-19 pandemic and their impact on mental health and well-being (e. g. prevalence of stress, anxiety, depression among the general population during the pandemic (Salari et al., 2020). In response, Waters et al. (2021) have recently presented how positive psychological factors can play a significant role in buffering mental illness, enhancing mental health throughout the pandemic, and building positive processes and capacities that can help to promote future mental health.Here in this perspective paper, we highlight the cultural aspects of Arab countries. Specifically, we present previous PPIs research conducted in Arabia and briefly evaluate the quality of this research. Importantly, we discuss the need of developing an indigenous and culturally sensitive PP among the Arab region (Lambert et al., 2015).Arab Culture “Arab World,” which comprises 5% of the world’s population, refers to the Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Despite the increasing pace and progress of different businesses in many Arab countries, individual communities are still limited in certain prominent economic places. Arab people rather gather in collective communities. They generally share the same Arabic Islamic culture, speak the same language, and descend from the same Arab families when going back in history no matter what nationality they have nowadays. Yet, very many changes came to communities before borders were drawn between countries and after. For instance, geography, topography, demography, and socio-economic status affect peoples’ nature of jobs and lifestyles. For example, Arabs in the east, west, or the middle have similar tongues; however, almost every Arab country has its accent. Therefore, people need to go back to the formal Arabic language ‘Fus-ha’ or learn more about different Arabic dialects when communicating cross-countries. According to Hofstede’s model (2011) based on the individualism-collectivism dimension, the Arab countries (Eastern society) have been classified as a collectivist culture, where their identity and decisions are influenced by social systems. In contrast, the United States (Western society) has been classified as an individualist culture focusing on individual decisions. Although there are degrees of individualism among Arabs in certain countries, they still share collective common characteristics. Here, we explore the meaning of collectivistic conceptions of the self, emotions, values, and religion in Arab countries and how they differ from those in individual Western cultures. The Self Since the field of PP focuses on the development of self, it is vital to recognize that self-concept varies across cultures. Individualism generally emphasises the self-directed and autonomous individual (Realo et al., 2002). People in individualist countries focus primarily on their personal characteristics (e.g., motives, abilities) to build their self-concept. On the other hand, collectivism refers to several social structures that highly value the groups to which people belong, such as family and tribe (Realo, 2003). People in collectivist countries such as the Arab countries focus primarily on their relationships with others to build their self-concept (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Hence, research from Arab countries should focus on the core elements of collectivism when implementing PPIs to make a significant, meaningful impact. For example, people from a collective culture may experience a greater enhancement in well-being when practising interventions that are more prosocial and group-oriented such as compassion, performing acts of kindness, writing a gratitude letter, and using character strengths in everyday context including social context, compared with self-oriented interventions such as identifying character strengths. Emotions, value, and Religion Research shows that Western culture emphasises the goal of maximizing positive emotions, while Eastern culture emphasises embracing and balancing positive and negative emotions (Leu et al., 2011). To illustrate, culture plays an important role in influencing perceptions of happiness. People in individualist countries value happiness highly. In contrast, people from the collective countries value low arousal positive emotions (Leu et al., 2011) and exhibit a fear of happiness (Joshanloo & Weijers, 2014; Joshanloo, 2013). Hence, the influence of positive emotions plays a limited role in the mental health of Eastern society. Speaking of Value, for an Arab, the family is the centre of honour and the most important social unit. This loyalty has an impact on every part of an Arab’s life. Arabs honour their families and highly value their friendships. Therefore, future research could shed more light on group-oriented interventions (e.g., kindness) that focus more on the relationship with family, friends, and community. When it comes to religion, Arab society has a rich culture in values and believes that place a high emphasis on spirituality. Religion is the most important and distinctive aspect of Arab culture. Arab countries vary in terms of religion, with Islam being the predominant religion in most of them. Well-being (Hedonic and Eudaimonic) It is necessary here to clarify what is meant by hedonic and eudaimonic definitions of well-being. While the term ‘Hedonic’ is based on the pursuit of maximum levels of pleasure (feeling good), the term ‘Eudaimonic’, on the other hand, is based on meaning and the development of virtues (functioning well; Keyes & Annas, 2009). Research indicates that cultures are not equally supportive of hedonic and eudaimonic aspects (Joshanloo & Jarden, 2016). In comparison to collectivism, hedonism appears to be more congruent with individualism (Joshanloo, 2014). Pleasure and positive emotions are considered a way to pursue happiness in Western culture, while this method is not highly favoured in Eastern cultures (Lee et al., 2013); Because they consider suffering and negative emotions as contributing factors to spiritual development. Therefore, the eastern perspective is more in line with a eudaimonistic view which emphasises virtues, meaning, and feeling of belongingness. However, although we believe that both approaches can be found to a certain level in both cultures, the differences suggest that there are different routes to happiness. Positive Psychology in the Arab region Positive psychology - "the scientific study of what makes life most worth living" (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) - is one of the newest branches of psychology. It focuses on three main pillars: (1) positive subjective experiences (such as happiness and love); (2) positive individual characters (such as gratitude and compassion); and (3) positive institutions (for the application of positive principles within institutions and organizations; Seligman & Csikszentmiha lyi, 2000). Some of the main topics of interest in positive psychology include character strengths, gratitude, hope, happiness, mindfulness, optimism, positive thinking, and resilience. Within the applications of this science, various domains of well-being (such as happiness, engagement, positive emotions, and meaning) can be enhanced by practising positive psychology interventions (Sin & Lyubomirsky, 2009). Interestingly, these interventions have also produced benefits beyond well-being, such as reduced mental health issues (Chakhssi et al., 2018; Hendriks et al., 2020).Nowadays, PP is increasingly noticed in the Arab world (Lambert & Pasha-Zaidi, 2019; Rao et al., 2015). In recent years, there has been a great effort to explore the PP field across Arab countries. Several initiatives have emerged aimed at promoting well-being and flourishing. For example, the Middle East Journal of Positive Psychology published its first volume in 2015. On the International Day of Happiness in 2017, United Arab Emirates University launched its Emirates Center for Happiness Research. Meanwhile, Effat University in Saudi Arabia started the first Positive Psychology and Well-being Research Lab, the first symposium, and the first PP course. In 2019, Louise Lambert and Nausheen Pasha-Zaidi published the first regional text entitled “Positive Psychology in the Middle East/North Africa.” There are other efforts spent in the region as well; such as the work conducted in Egypt. Ibrahim Younus established the Arab Association for Positive Psychology https://www.psycholearn.com/en/associative.php which provides several courses on PP and also published a book entitled “The Power of Positive Psychology” (Younus, 2017). Despite this development, nothing can compare to the quantity and even quality of research in other countries. In light of our observations, the few PP studies may be attributed to the lack of awareness of the constructive approach and prevention compared to problem-solving. An Arab dentist once said: “people do not come to me until they are badly in pain.” In any case, many studies have taken place in Arab countries in the last decade, more of which are descriptive and less of which experimental. For example, Abdel-Khalek (2010) found positive correlations between quality of life, subjective well-being, and religiosity among students in Kuwait. Abdel-Khalek (2016) developed “the Arabic Scale of Religiosity,” which significantly correlated with PP variables among students in Algeria, Kuwait, and Egypt. Recently, empirical studies on PPIs have arisen in Arab-Islamic countries. More attention has been focused on promoting well-being and alleviating the high burden of mental health problems in the region (GBD 2015 Eastern Mediterranean Region Mental Health Collaborators, 2018). For instance, several studies examined the effectiveness of mindfulness among university students (e.g., Al-Ghalib & Slim, 2018; Awad, 2019; Thomas et al., 2016), parents of children with autism (Rayan & Ahmed, 2016) and addicted adults (Al-Rashidi, 2018). Such an intervention has positive effects. Participants who practised mindfulness reported reduction in stress and depression as well as improvement in well-being and resilience. Moreover, the results of a recent pilot study found positive impacts on enhancing emotional regulations and reducing stress among Arab teachers (Berkovich-Ohana et al., 2020). Some studies have also begun to examine various interventions targeting character strengths (Basurrah et al., 2020; Chérif et al., 2020), self-compassion (Elaiwah, 2017), positive thinking (Mohammed et al., 2014; Hadad, 2014), and hope (Zaki, 2016). Interestingly, a new finding considering the fear of happiness among people from collective countries has been examined. Lambert et al. (2019) provided evidence that a 14-week PPIs programme has an impact on reducing the fear and fragility of happiness beliefs among university students in the United Arab Emirates.Since Arab countries place great emphasis on spirituality, several authors have considered the aspect of religion when implementing PPIs. For instance, an empirical study by Al-Seheel and Noor (2016) found that expressing gratitude towards God “Allah” increases the happiness of the Muslim more than the usual gratitude intervention. Additionally, Al-Ghalib and Salim (2018) examined a religiously sensitive mindfulness-training programme with university students and found a positive effect on life satisfaction and a slight reduction in stress, depression, and anxiety. Hence, the role of religion is vital to make the interventions more relevant to Arab culture where people can connect Islamic philosophy with PP theories and practices. These studies reviewed here provide further support for the need for culturally sensitive interventions among the Arab population. More recently, the first systematic review of PPIs in Arab countries was conducted by Basurrah et al. (2021; the protocol has been published in BMJ Open and the final manuscript has been submitted for publication). Reviewing a total of 39 studies, the most commonly studied interventions were mindfulness, positive thinking, and resilience. Only a handful of studies examined gratitude, character strengths, forgiveness, self-compassion, savouring, or finding flow. Further analysis revealed that most studies from Arab countries have several methodological limitations. This included a lack of protocol guidelines, few well-designed randomized controlled trials (RCTs), blinding issues, small sample sizes, lack of active control groups, and lack of research into certain populations (e.g., teachers, employees, and people in distress in refugee camps). Discussion PP was founded on an individualistic framework (Christopher & Hickinbottom, 2008). To ensure that PPIs are culturally meaningful, this paper includes some cultural elements of the Arab region that should be considered to serve the needs of the Arab population. In the Arab world, some people may believe that PP is solely about happiness and being positive. If so, it is important to educate the public about the findings of rigorous studies evaluating PPIs such as gratitude, hope or flow on health, well-being and performance. To explain the value and effectiveness of these evidence-based approaches, examples might include studies linking gratitude with benefits for people with heart disease (Cousin et al., 2021), or how PPIs can promote quality of life in cancer patients (Casellas-Grau et al., 2014). There is some evidence about PPIs being effective in improving well-being in the Arab region, but research in this region is still in its infancy and little information is available regarding PPIs and the experience of Arabs participating in such interventions. Hence, there is still much more to investigate in this regard. Future research should empirically examine the effectiveness of various unstudied interventions such as savouring, gratitude, self-compassion, character strengths or finding flow. A combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches is required to provide an in-depth understanding of Arabs’ experience and impressions of PPIs and how and why they work. This may provide useful information to inform the appropriate design of PPIs to suit Arab culture and needs. Furthermore, while some research on PPIs has been carried out in the region, most of these studies have been of poor quality that suffered from small sample sizes, confounding factors, and a high degree of bias. To overcome these issues, future research should improve research quality, including protocol guidelines and well-designed RCTs. In particular, research should include randomization, allocation, blinding, power analysis to determine adequate sample size, active control groups to reduce bias, and follow-up periods of at least 12 months.Among the most popular resources that future PP practitioners may refer to are the International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA) and the International Positive Education Network (IPEN). Also, we recommend the Middle East Journal of Positive Psychology and the first regional book (Lambert & Pasha-Zaidi, 2019). To develop and/or adapt a multi-component PPIs, we would recommend referring to Character Strengths (Peterson & Seligman, 2004), the theory of well-being (PERMA Model: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment; Seligman, 2011), and the Five Ways to Well-being: Connect, Be Active, Take Notice, Keep Learning, and Give (Aked et al., 2008). Finally, single-component PPIs are based on theories like Broaden-And-Build (Fredrickson, 2004), Hope (Snyder et al., 2002), and Self-Determination (Deci & Ryan, 2012) can be also considered. Two other concepts that would be usefully applied are ‘Savouring’ (Bryant & Veroff, 2007) and Phillip Zimbardo’s Time Perspective (Stolarski et al., 2015). For instance, savouring has a positive temporal orientation to reminiscing the good memories from the past, enjoying the hedonic present moments, and willing proactively to make a better future. Now, what is even maybe more interesting for Muslims is “Transcendent Future” where all intentions, words and actions are devoted to that life after death. In addition, there is a model already prepared for the clinical purpose called Positive Psychotherapy (PPT). Tayyab Rashid and Martin Seligman published a PPT manual for clinicians in 2018. And for cross-cultural applications, including Muslim Arab culture, Rashid and Al-Haj Baddar (2019) have written a paper presenting PPT and its efficacy. PPT overview in detail shows sessions, themes, skills, practice, and cultural considerations where a mixture of PPIs based on PERMA, Strengths, and other PP concepts can be found. Regarding PP measurements, it is highly recommended to generate indigenous tools based on cultural backgrounds reviewed here in the article. An example of this is a tool for measuring Muslim well-being by including domains beyond what is found in Western literature. So far, in the Arab region, several attempts have been made to adapt PP tools. For example, Marei Salama-Younes (2018) validated the Arabic versions of different measures of well-being (e.g., satisfaction with life scale, the subjective vitality scale). Other validated scales as well include the self-compassion scale (Alabdulaziz et al., 2020), and the passion scale (Salama-Younes & Hashim, 2018). Conclusion This paper has discussed the cultural aspects of Arab countries and the need of developing culturally sensitive PPIs. The past decade has seen an increase in mental health problems in the Arab region. Stigma and lack of awareness have been always there. Among the issues are also wars, conflicts, and displacement in many Arab countries such as Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine (Hassan et al., 2016). These indicate an urgent need to prevent mental illness and promote well-being. Indeed, we highlighted the importance of integrating culture with PPIs, following the guidelines for the cultural adaptation of PPIs (Hendriks & Graafsma, 2019) and the ethical guidelines for PP practice (Jarden et al., 2020). Another significant contribution of this paper is to highlight the importance of improving the quality of research conducted in Arab countries. In brief, this paper has several practical implications. It is an open invitation for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners alike to be more exposed to PP; as well as to better conceptualising and adapting interventions and measurement tools to the local culture in different sectors to maximize their effectiveness. And as we consider it as an invitation for us too, here we are starting a PPIs practice guide in Arabic language and for Arab practitioners. The insights gained from this paper may be useful for placing well-being on top of priorities for achieving individual, organizational, and optimal national functioning in different sectors. There is also a need to change the stigma or negative beliefs about seeking health for psychological support, which is an issue for countries in the Middle East (Baess, 2018). (shrink)

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