In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 717 the work of Arthur Danto. Here the stimulus to reflection is those elements in modern art which " make a farce of traditional art and art theories hy giving us artworks indiscernible from objects found on grocery shelves or in lavatories." If, as Danto suggests, whatever is to count as art is simply what an " artworld " decrees, then the distinction between artefact and artwork (...) can disappear completely (except in terms of somebody's bank balance). The trouble with the remaining essays in this collection is that their authors have not appropriated a truth given lapidary expression in Woods' essay on Kant: "Attention to the works of genius throughout the ages cultivates the sensus communis and establishes a community involved in the beautiful." Thus, while Ted Cohen is right to consider television a possible artistic medium, the objects of televisual appreciation he considers usually witness to a breakdown of a community involved in the beautiful, while the frequently nugatory objects discussed in John Brough's "Who's Afraid of Marcel Duchamp? " testify to the disintegration of the sensus communis concerned. Finally, if Paul Weiss is right in his "Creativity and Beauty" not only to designate beauty " the excellence pertinent to the creation of a work of art," but also to house it together with the quartet of truth, goodness, glory, and justice, then we can get a sense of how wisdom in both philosophy and artistic practice might he restored: through a re· discovery of the interdependence of the transcendentals. But perhaps only the Judaeo-Christian revelation now holds the key to this possibility. AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P. Blackfriars Cambridge, England Through the Tempest: Theological Voyages in a Pluralistic Culture. By LANGDON GILKEY. Ed. Jeff B. Pool. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991. Pp. xx + 252. Langdon Gilkey: Theologian for a Culture in Decline. By BRIAN J. WALSH. Lanham, MD: University Press of America/Institute for Christian Studies, 1991. Pp. xii + 324. $47.50 (cloth); $22.50 (paper). With the exception of two mid-1970s papers, Through the Tempest is a collection of some of the addresses and essays written in the 1980s hy Langdon Gilkey, Shailer Mathews Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Title and subtitle are meant to re· 718 BOOK REVIEWS fleet three elements of Gilkey's temper. First, the tempest corresponds to his dramatic vision of the twentieth-century world, with its wars, up· heavals, and destructive forces. Second, the preposition through expresses the sober hope that for all the darkness that surrounds our century, we are actually moving toward a destination beyond the turmoil. And third, his explorations and assessments of the many facets of contemporary culture are theological voyages. In these pages readers will find many of the themes Gilkey has tackled over the years, such as God, Jesus, Creation, Providence, spirituality, the function of symbols, ethics, suffering and death, Christianity and other religions, faith and science, church and public policy. Among the most original pieces are, to my mind, Ch. 10, on the different attitudes to ethics in Christianity and Buddhism, and Ch. 14, which clarifies many aspects of suffering. The general readership made up of those interested in religion will probably enjoy these lectures, while specialists in theology or human studies are likely to find them merely impressionistic and too vague both in their cultural analyses and in their conceptual discussions. Further, there is a discrepancy between Gilkey's assessment of the human predicament and :the theological solutions he puts forward. On the one hand, the mood and the content of his assessment is neo· orthodox (inspired by his master Reinhold Niebuhr). For instance, chapters 11 and 13, on evil and sin, are typical of an acute awareness of the dark side of human conduct. As he follows this vein, Gilkey raises pertinent, profound, and difficult questions. On :the other hand, his prescriptions do not match the depth of his diagnoses. Despite his efforts at overcoming theological liberalism, he often remains confined within the limits of the Western Enlightenment. For example, like most eighteenth-century thinkers, he rejects "a level of grace beyond nature " (54). What he repudiates is in all likeliness the modern separation between nature and supernature, and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Worth of Persons by James FranklinLouis GroarkeFRANKLIN, James. The Worth of Persons, New York: Encounter Books, 2022. 272 pp. Cloth, $30.99In The Worth of Persons, James Franklin, the well-known Aristotelian mathematician, sets out to provide an account of the very first principles of ethics and morality. Franklin argues that morality begins with an acknowledgment of the intrinsic worth of human persons, understood as beings possessing “dignity” or (...) “absolute inner worth.” As it turns out, we recognize naturally, without epistemic complication, that human beings have innate moral value.Although Franklin does not use the term “personalism” and does not discuss that specific philosophical tradition, he traces his own account to a familiar source: Kant’s personhood formulation of the categorical imperative. He has, however, little use for Kant’s rigid absolutism and prefers something much closer to a natural law formulation of ethical obligation, in large part because it allows for casuistry, a negotiation of the messy circumstances of everyday life that confront us with moral dilemmas and competing duties requiring some kind of moral calculation.But Franklin’s book is not so much about normative ethics. It is an exercise in metaethics, an attempt to make sense of morality as a root cause of value in the world. Franklin wants to secure an epistemological basis from which we can “deduce” moral principles. He is particularly impressed with contemporary discussion of “supervenience” or “metaphysical grounding” as a bridge over the alleged is–ought gap that has preoccupied analytic philosophers following in the footsteps of David Hume [End Page 349], G. E. Moore, and J. L. Mackie. Franklin shows, very effectively, that similar “gaps” can be found in logic, mathematics, linguistics, computer science, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and so forth. As examples of supervenience, he mentions the way necessary mathematical concepts supervene on the physical, the way the meanings of words are added to spoken or written symbols, the way logical inference arises from premises and conclusion in an argument, the way social organization emerges from a collection of individuals, and the way the identity of a statue of Hercules arises from its disposition of physical parts. The point is that an empiricist fundamentalism that reduces reality to perceptible facts without any higher (or “emergent”) identities provides an overly narrow account of the metaphysical content of human experience.If ethical value supervenes on some nonethical base, it does not follow that moral judgments and obligations are a human fabrication without any grounding in the world. If we can intellectually access the moral worth of human beings the way, for example, we intellectually access necessary mathematical concepts, we can deduce moral obligations from the worth of persons in a way that preserves the epistemic status of morality against noncognitive challenges. Once we recognize that individual humans have worth (because of the potentialities inherent in their natures), we can, for example, infer moral axioms such as “human beings must be respected” and, further, infer that murder is morally wrong because it involves the wanton destruction of human beings. Franklin does not focus on the normative content of specific actions, duties, obligations, or virtues. His basic point is that moral knowledge is possible once we rationally access (through understanding) the first principle of morality: that human beings are (to use Kantian terminology) ends in themselves, beings that rational agents will value as loci of dignity and moral value.This is a thorough treatment. Franklin is moderate, cautious, careful, diligent; he adds together technical points in present-day academic discussion to produce a well-rounded worldview. He writes in an accessible manner, with good examples and flashes of wit throughout, referring to a wide range of issues and authors: Pseudo-Dionysius, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Husserl, Moore, Wolterstorff, Mackie, Oderberg, MacIntyre, Midgley, Finnis, Korsgaard, Dworkin, Baier, Williams, Singer, Murdoch, and so on.The book includes eight chapters that discuss contrary positions, ethical concepts, supervenience, moral personhood, aesthetic worth, the value of animals and ecosystems, moral epistemology, and metaphysical systems compatible with a realist view of morality. There is a useful index, a modest bibliography, and a full section of notes, which contains many further references.The treatment seems a... (shrink)

Contemporary commentators such as Rosalind Hursthouse misconstrue Aristotle’s doctrine of the ethical mean. They propose a monist account of his moral psychology, explaining each virtue in terms of the presence or absence of a single psychological trait. In contrast, the author argues that Aristotle depicts virtue as a balancing of two opposed psychological inclinations that push and pull in different directions. Each inclination is a positive force in its own right; neither is mere privation. This dualistic account of moral psychology (...) is a more specific application of a recurrent explanatory model one finds elsewhere in Aristotle’s wide-ranging philosophy. In discussing the virtuous mean, moral success can be attributed to the human agent as composite whole or to the indivisible soul. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NOTE ON THE IDEA OF RELJ!GIOUS TRUTH IN THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION HE FOLOWING PAGES claim to be no more than provisional attempt to define a problem of considerble complexity within the Christian tradition. In this introductory note I shall meTely outline how the notion of the truth conveyed by faith soon,after it was established in the New Testament, developed a synthesis with Greek philosophy, at first Platonic, later Aristotelian. (...) In the nominalist crisis this synthesis broke down and two modes of " religious truth " emerged: one within faith with relatively little support from reason, and one of faith within a philosophy henceforth detaiched from theology. Since the nineteenth century we notice that philosophy and theology are moving towards a rapprochement while maintaining their relative aiutonomy. Philosophy appears more inclined to accept religious truth on its own terms without reducing it to an unsuccessful formulation of truth as defined in modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant. Theology, from its side, has increasingly stressed the unique experience implied in faith itself, thus allowing philosophy to include it in its own, general reflection on experience. In a more comprehensive study, to appear in a collective work edited by Daniel Guerriere, I intend to review actual and possible overtures in recent philosophical theories of truth which would rendeT such a rappmchement fruitful. First a word about the biblical context in which the New Testament idea emerged. The earliest articulation of truth in the Bible basically consists in a relation of faithfulness (emet) or :firmness-1a moral quality. Not surprisingly, truth also appears as a correspondence between word and fact-a relation that even to the uncritical mind appears problematic from the start. Thus in Prov1 erbs rn, 17 we read: " He who utters the truth affirms that which will stand; but a lying witness that 499 500 LOUIS DUPRE which will bring dis1a.ppointment." 1 But the more fundamental truth consists in God's steadfastness toward his people and in their participation in it by fidelity to a divinely revealed law.2 In some of the Psalms (such as Ps. 119) the correlation between the law and truth appears particulady clear: the law reveals to us God's fidelity (His truth) and its observance enables us to share in that 3 With the idea that truth requires entrusting one-self to a higher authority, a cognitive quality joins the moml one. We remain in the truth to the extent that we heed the revelation of God's truthfulness as expressed in His commands, and that our deeds, values and attitudes correspond to that divine disclosure. The idea of correspondence, then, which came to dominate the later cognitive discussion started out as a morral-practical one. The same could be said about the idea of coherence. Trust in God's providence and obedience in the Covenant unite all aspects of communal and individual exfatence. The sapiential literature in particular stresses the harmony of a life guided the law. The emphasis upon trust, obedience, and receptivity in the attainment of truth distinguishes the biblical conception from that modem one according to which truth originates in the knowing subject.4 Yet more and more tihe idea of truth as disclosure, that 1 Of course, some of the olcler wisdom literature appears to have consisted of a series of maxims considered useful for promoting a career in Court administration -a relatively" secular" affair. 2 Martin Buber identified the original meaning of faith as steadfastnesseven more than trust in a person. He sees this symbolically represented in the story of Moses' prayer during the battle with Abimelek. As long as his hands remained steady Israel retained the upper hand, but the hands of faith always grow weak and need support. a Ignace de la Potterie relates truth and law in a causal way. "La verite est un concept plus large, plus enveloppant; elle clesigne la r·ev·elation meme de la volonte divine et du mystere de Dieu; par contre la loi, les commanclements, les paroles de Dien, sont autant cl'expressions concretes de la volonte divine." La verite dans Saint Jean (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1977), p. 152. 4 Even when revived in the Reformation the older... (shrink)

This article concerns the ways in which authors from various fields conceptualise the ethical issues arising in the conduct of research. We reviewed critically and systematically the literature concerning the ethics of conducting research in order to engage in a reflection about the vocabulary and conceptual categories used in the publications reviewed. To understand better how the ethical issues involved in conducting research are conceptualised in the publications reviewed, we 1) established an inventory of the conceptualisations reviewed, and 2) we (...) critically assessed them. We found that the publications reviewed mostly showed examples of descriptive ethics, in that most authors describe ethical issues without reflecting much on them, which could be explained both by 1) a lack of ethical education in research contexts, and 2) by the fact that we do not know what researchers know (or do not) about ethical issues. Additionally, the definitions identified in the publications are scarce and at times imprecise, but this seems more to point out the ethical vocabulary’s difficulties in certain contexts. Further, very few authors offer proper conceptualisations of the ethical issues arising in conducting research. When dealing with vast arrays of ethical issues to conceptualise, perhaps one ought to remember that some typologies already exist that could guide further reflection and help understand other realities for which the current ethical vocabulary may be lacking. We believe that combining the reviewed typologies, both with other well-developed typologies and critical reflection, could help support better ethical practice in conducting research. (shrink)

FROM VARIOUS THINKERS and in different languages we have been receiving an identical message: the philosophy of the subject initiated by Descartes' cogito has reached a definitive impasse. Critical reactions range from attempts to dispose of the subject altogether to efforts to restore pre-Cartesian theories. The authors here presented adopt positions different from either of those extremes. Fully aware of the modern predicament they advocate neither a return to a pre-Cartesian past nor do they dismiss outright the post-Cartesian subjective starting (...) point. Theoretical attitudes once adopted cannot simply be discarded: philosophy has to work its way through them. Still, the proposed answers vary substantially. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty advocates abandoning traditional truth claims in favor of a rational "conversation" carried on between incommensurable positions. Francis Jacques's Différence et subjectivité reverses the traditional priority of subject to relation. In Généalogie de la psychanalyse Michel Henry attempts to reclaim a theory of "pure" subjectivity from the wild growth of its objectivist deviations. Alasdair MacIntyre exposes the disastrous moral consequences that have resulted from the primacy of an autonomous, isolated subject and proposes a program for a socially and historically more integrated ethical reconstruction. No idea has of late more consistently come under fire than that of the subject as sole source of meaning and value. Heidegger attributed it to Descartes, and three of the studies show the direct impact of his reading. Yet similar tendencies had been at work in analytic philosophy. Rorty presents pragmatic anti-subjective interpretations of language going back to Wittgenstein; Francis Jacques supports his attack by Russell's theory of relations. (shrink)

This game3 was designed to investigate protocols and strategies for resourcebounded disputation. The rules presented here correspond very closely to the problem of controlling search in an actual program. The computer program on which the game is based is LMNOP. It is a LISP system designed to produce arguments and counterarguments from a set of statutory rules and a corpus of precedents, and applied to legal and quasi-legal reasoning. LMNOP was co-designed by a researcher in AI knowledge representation and by (...) a trained computer scientist who was an editor of Washington University Law Review at the time. LMNOP is based on the idea of a non-demonstrative or defeasible rule: i.e., a rule that admits exceptions. It adopts a representational convention that supposes there is an implicit preference of more specific rules over less specific rules. In fact, it automatically adjudicates between competing arguments when one argument meets the broader criterion of being more specific than another. The convention is based on an idea origianlly presented by David Poole [85], and is embedded in a system of determining which arguments are ultimately warranted, which originally appeared in the literatures of epistemology and ethics, by Pollock [87]. This system evolves from work by the first author since 1987; the full statement of the theory is in [92]. Prakken [92] is one example of the idea’s application to the legal domain. LMNOP also draws heavily on the model of legal reasoning and analogical reasoning put forward by Edwina Rissland and Kevin Ashley [89, 90]. Similarities to their legal casebased reasoning program, HYPO, are no accident; LMNOP seeks to improve on HYPO. A description of LMNOP is forthcoming. (shrink)

This collection of original papers, entitled "The beginning and end of the universe: scientific, philosophical, and theological perspectives", derives from an interdisciplinary conference, that had been organized jointly by the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Vatican Observatory. The conference consisted of two sessions of one day each, held at the Pontifical Gregorian University during the academic year 2014-2105. The first day focused on scientific, philosophical and theological questions concerning the beginning of the universe and the second day on questions concerning (...) the end of the universe. The richness of this book derives not only from the variety of academic perspectives but also from the different heuristic methods adopted by the researchers. For the book’s final version, more contributions were added, the entire collection was reviewed by all authors for constructive criticism and mutual evaluation, and the style and content of each contribution were adjusted to ensure that the book presents a satisfactory degree of unity. After a survey of what some current astronomical theories say about the beginning and end of the universe, the philosophical topics treated include the idea of first cause, the finality of the universe, and the Heideggerian idea of world. The theological topics include some current accounts of "creatio ex nihilo", and the relation between theological eschatology and the results of the cosmology of the far distant future. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 133 The Foundations of Mysticism. Vol. I of The Pl'.esence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. By BERNARD McGINN. New York: Crossroad, 1991. Pp. xxii and 49. Index and bibliography. $39.00 (cloth). With this work Bernard McGinn delivers the first of a projected four volume History of Western Christian Mysticism. The Foundations in· cludes, as one might expect, the Scriptural tradition, Neoplatonic phi· losophy, early (...) Greek Fathers who influenced the Latins, as well as the early "Founders" Ambrose and Augustine. Judged by the quality of its start, this work promises to become a standard history for years to come. The author displays a stunning acquaintance with the sources of a subject that extends over full twenty centuries. Though " spe-·cialized " in the spirituality of the high and late Middle Ages (he has written substantial studies on Joachim de Fiore and Eckhart), the Chi· cago professor has admirably succeeded in mastering the mass of per· tinent literature of this early period, as the 150 pages of notes and bibliography testify. His ideas are clearly presented, his evaluations of others critical yet generous, his overall judgment impressively balanced. Moreover, he ventures well beyond the usual territory. His work in- -eludes subjects rarely discussed hut often alluded to in the history of.early Christian spirituality: e.g. Gnosticism, which appears here not as a " heresy ", but as a spiritual movement in its own right. The thorough discussion of Philo together with the introductory chapter on 4 ' The Jewish Matrix" (somewhat improperly entitled since it deals only with the Hebrew Bible) display an unusual appreciation of the underestimated influence of Jewish mysticism. One would have been happy to read more about Marius Victorinus, hut is grateful to find him present at all. A historical survey of this scope may easily degenerate into an enumeration of titles and trends, whereby ideas are treated as facts. Professor McGinn has judiciously avoided that. Entire sections of his history are rich monographs about spiritual systems treated for their intrinsic interest rather than as transitory moments of an indifferent history. The sections dealing with Origen, Evagrius, and Ambrose in particular deserve to be read as independent treatises. The long concluding chapter on Augustine also presents a marvelous synthesis, though one primarily written from the point of view of its later impact. In a study of this nature the definition of its formal object presents.a unique problem. Before the late Middle Ages the concept of a purely private spiritual experience remained largely unknown in Christian 134 BOOK REVIEWS spirituality and until the seventeenth century even the substantive " my,;· ticism ", referring to a separate activity, did not exist. H what we now take to be characteristic were to serve as normative concept, almost all spiritual writers of the :first Christian millennium and a good many after that would he excluded. Moreover, the subjective mystical ex· perience remains inaccessible to the historian. McGinn has wisely confined his subject to the spiritual text in its social and ecclesiastical context. But this choice leads to a further, equally difficult question: What constitutes a mystical text? Obviously not all religious or theo· logical writings are mystical. Protestant theologians of the nineteenth century tended to consider a genuine Christian faith incompatible with mysticism, while prominent students of mysticism in this century (such as Underhill, Butler) :remained highly suspicious of speculative theology, including the so-called "mystical" one, But friend and foe of mysticism agree that the mystical, however conceived, cannot simply he identified with the religious. Some scholars, such as von Hiigel, distinguish the mystical from other aspects of religion, but leave its positive content vague and controvertible. Avoiding a precision which the nature of the subject precludes, McGinn nevertheless goes to the heart of the matter in :referring to the mystical as to the dynamic power that drives the religious mind toward the experienced presence of God, without necessarily bringing it to the state of full union. The author's position appears in the felicitous choice of the general title: The Presence God. All religious life aims at entering into the presence of God. But " mystical " religious texts speak of a particular mode of divine presence, not ordinarily... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the 12th Century, volume two of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. By BERNARD MCGINN. New York: Crossroad, 1994. Pp. xv + 630. $49.50. This second volume of the History of Western Mysticism covers the period from the sixth through the twelfth century, from Gregory the Great to the Victorines. It fully lives up to (...) the high expectations raised by the first part and displays the same skill in presenting the fruit of enormous learning in a clear, comprehensible manner. The compact section of notes, occupying onethird of the volume, shows how well the author has succeeded in mastering the abundance of sources, primary and secondary, the current Renaissance of medieval studies has rendered available. Undaunted by the mass of recent literature McGinn's established and constantly renewed acquaintance with the original texts enables him judiciously and critically to compare interpretations and judgments. Method and balance mark this work as much as learning and erudition. Its unadorned but easy style, the language of the lectern, renders his work accessible to a wider public, even if the casual tone does not always reflect the intensity of its subject. The author has structured his study around four major figures: Gregory the Great (sixth century), Scottus Eriugena (ninth), Bernard and William of Saint-Thierry (twelfth). They form the centers of three spiritual epochs of the early Middle Ages. Each one of these periods is introduced by informative chapters on the general conditions of spiritual life. The study concludes with a chapter on visionaries who belong to none of the schools represented by the key figures and a chapter on Victorine writers that already prepares for the next volume on the high season of Christian mysticism. The simple structure allows each of the great ones to be given a full chapter. Rather than drowning his survey in an abundance of forgettable names as encyclopedic histories tend to do, McGinn has accommodated the minor figures in his transition chapters where general headings dominate individual characteristics. By devoting so much space to the great ones, the author has transformed much of what could have remained a mere survey into a series of monographs. It enabled him to highlight the unique significance of at least two previously neglected figures in the rather arid span of time that separates the patristic period from the flowering of the twelfth century: Scottus Eriugena and William of Saint-Thierry. Eriugena's intellectual importance has been established for some time, yet mainly with historians of philosophy and Neoplatonist thinkers. Here he appears as the key thinker who transmits 475 476 BOOK REVIEWS Dionysius's negative theology to the Latin West and who prepares the new mysticism of the divine image that was to culminate in Eckhart and Ruusbroec. Was Eriugena a mystic? The question returns us to the provisional definition given in the general Introduction and consistently maintained throughout volume one and most of volume two. There we learned that "mystical" refers to any belief, system, or practice conducive to the experience of God's presence (vol. I, p. xvii). This definition happily replaces the one adopted through much of the modem period of exclusively private, mostly exceptional, experiences and the unusual expressions (visions, raptures, etc.) that often accompany them. Professor McGinn presents a more objective and more controllable criterion. He extends the mystical to a more or less direct consciousness of the divine presence as evident in texts that witness of, or are conducive to, such a consciousness. This sensible change enables him to include a great many theological texts of the first millennium without having to worry about the degree of their authors' subjective awareness of God's presence and to avoid the predicament to which all attempts to ascertain another person's private experience lead. Before the twelfth century almost no reports of private experiences exist and the ones that do exist, such as Augustine's "vision" of Ostia, so closely follow an established Neoplatonic pattern that they leave us wondering about their private nature. His more objective approach also dispensed the author from having to be overly concerned about the fine, in the early... (shrink)

Recent financial events, especially the subprime and the sovereign debts crises, have revived debate on debts, the necessity of debt repayment and the eventuality of debt cancellations. A milestone in this debate was reached by David Graeber’s Debt (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011), but despite the richness of this essay, many normative questions remain unanswered. Should debt always be repaid? Who should repay it? Should government deficits be allowed or even encouraged? Alexander Douglas’ recent book aims to provide an answer to (...) all these questions. The main endeavour of the book lies in applied philosophy, that is in finding general principles able to answer such questions and to reconcile our possibly conflicting intuitions about debt and credit. However, the analysis is largely nourished by history, linguistics and economics, which makes the book highly original and multidisciplinary. The author’s general thesis is that. (shrink)

Problem: While the elaboration and framing of constructivist epistemologies in keeping with the “currents of contemporary scientific epistemology” can be attributed to Jean Piaget, their development under the banner of radical constructivist epistemology is a result of the epistemological work of Ernst von Glasersfeld. The development of this epistemological paradigm, pursued over the last 40 years with the objective of “linking knowledge to action and situating the subject and the object on the same, multiple levels,” warrants further exploration and contextualization (...) within the framework of current scientific activity. Results: In what amounts to a historical coincidence, von Glasersfeld discovered the work of Piaget in 1973, the same year that the author of this article first began to read Piaget’s Epistemological Studies; this coincidence provides a starting point for describing the epistemological itinerary that led the author from a reading of Piaget in 1973 to a somewhat tardy reading of von Glasersfeld in 1988 (the same year of the translation of his “Introduction to Radical Constructivism” into French). He then explicates the subsequent developments of this paradigmatic conjunction over the last 30 years, interpreting them in the contexts of contemporary developments of scientific and operational interdisciplinarity as well as in terms of historical roots extending from Leonardo da Vinci to Paul Valéry. Implications: The paradigm of constructivist epistemologies (working from a phenomenologically-based gnoseological hypothesis) can be presented and supported with arguments that are at least as solid and legitimate as those invoked in favor of alternative paradigms of realist and post-positivist epistemologies (working from an ontologically-based gnoseological hypothesis). (shrink)

In Passion and reason, acclaimed social psychologist Richard Lazarus and co-author Bernice Lazarus attempt a project they say is unique. Their goal is to provide a popular account of the emotions for the lay reader which is comprehensive, does not over-simplify, and can serve as a guide to greater self-knowledge and understanding. The book is intended to strike a balance between the naive `formulaic genre' of typical self-help books on the subject, while at the same time avoiding the complexity and (...) technical jargon typical of academic treatises. The theoretical basis of the book is Lazarus's own work on emotion, of which Emotion and adaptation (Lazarus, 1991) is the most recent and thorough expression... (shrink)

Treatises on Indian philosophy have multiplied in the last thirty years, in the “West as well as in India itself. And in spite of the demanding nature of this subject—it exacts, so to speak, a uniform presentation; it entails a whole succession of systems, each one of which is elaborated in a more or less independent manner—this abundance is nonetheless profitable. Each author makes his contribution in the detailed account of new views and strives to rejuvenate a somewhat refractory material, (...) even if this involves the taking up of old views, discarded or neglected by the new generation of scholars. (shrink)

This book presents an analysis of global legal history in Modern times, questioning the effect of political revolutions since the 17th century on the legal field. Readers will discover a non-linear approach to legal history as this work investigates the ways in which law is created. These chapters look at factors in legal revolution such as the role of agents, the policy of applying and publicising legal norms, codification and the orientations of legal writing, and there is a focus on (...) the publicization of law. The author uses Herbert Hart's schemes to conceive law as a human artefact or convention, being the union between primary rules of obligations and secondary rules conferring powers. Here we learn about those secondary rules and the legal construction of the Modern state, and we question the extent to which codification and law reporting were likely to revolutionize the legal field. These chapters examine the hypothesis of a legal revolution that could have concerned many countries in modern times. To begin with, the book considers the legal aspect of the construction of Modern States in the 17th and 18th centuries. It goes on to examine the consequences of the codification movement as a legal revolution before looking at the so-called "constitutional" revolution, linked with the extension of judicial review in many countries after World War II. Finally, the book enquires into the construction of an EU legal order and international law. In each of these chapters, the author measures the scope of the change, how the secondary rules are concerned, the role of the professional lawyers and what are the characters of the new configuration of the legal field. This book provokes new debates in legal philosophy about the rule of change and will be of particular interest to researchers in the fields of law, theories of law, legal history, philosophy of law and historians more broadly. (shrink)

With the third volume Wilfrid Desan completes a trilogy begun in 1961 and continued with the 1972 Macmillan publication of the two first volumes together. Georgetown University Press has reissued the earlier volumes--A Noetic Prelude to a United World and An Ethical Prelude to a United World--as well. The author, a respected interpreter of Sartre's thought, has written a work of enormous scope and daring originality that ventures into the human future far beyond the expected or even the provable. His (...) multiple vision--for we are dealing with a sustained, philosophically articulated vision rather than with a methodic argument--centers around the idea that the perfect consists in the totum. The reader is reminded of Hegel's "The true is the whole." But Desan rejects the Hegelian reconciliation of opposites. Instead he proposes a complementarity of irreconcilable standpoints. For explaining the current condition of society he considers Hegel's dialectic of reconciliation at once too optimistic and not sufficiently radical. Hegel's political structure culminates in the state, which for Desan is no more than a fragment of the future world order. We detect other influences: Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason to which the author devoted an earlier volume, but also Teilhard de Chardin's work which Desan was one of the first to introduce to American readers. But there are also unexpected similarities. The remarkable chapter eight of volume 1, "God and the Human Totality," develops a vision of the totum-as-transcendent that evokes Whitehead and process philosophy. Even more surprising is the presence of ideas remindful of the cabalistic fragmentation of a primeval unity. This gnostic touch holds a symbolic significance in that the author here uses mythical language--down to the very terminology of "contraction" and "distention"--for what he feels occasionally to surpass the capacity of methodic discourse. (shrink)

A literary historian might very well characterize the eighties as the period when race, class, and gender became the holy trinity of literary criticism. Critical Inquiry’s contribution to this shift in critical paradigms took the form of two special issues, ”Writing and Sexual Difference,” and “‘Race,’ Writing and Difference.” In the 1990s, however, “race,” “class,” and “gender” threaten to become the regnant clichés of our critical discourse. Our object in this special issue is to help disrupt the cliché-ridden discourse of (...) identity by exploring the formation of identities and the problem of subjectivity.Scholars in a variety of disciplines have begun to address what we might call the politics of identity. Their work expands on the evolving, anti-essentialist critiques of ethnic, sexual, national, and racial identities, particularly the work of those post-structuralist theorists who have articulated concepts of difference. The calls for a “post-essentialist” reconception of notions of identity have become increasingly common. The powerful resurgence of nationalisms in Eastern Europe provides just one example of the catalysts for such theorizing.Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of Assertion and Conditionals, Truth in Semantics, and Necessary Questions, has also published a novel, Avenging Angel, and a collection of essays, In My Father’s House. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry was “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is coeditor of Transition, a quarterly review, and the author of Figures in Black, The Signifying Monkey, and Loose Canons. His latest contribution to Critical Inquiry was “Critical Fanonism”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:136 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY man felt two needs :"the theoretical need for guaranteeing a priori the subsistence of an ethical sphere against the Enlightenment's emphasis on happiness, and the political and practical need for guaranteeing individual freedom against an enlightened absolutism" (p. 71). Owing to this double need, Kant seems to be against himself and consequently the most critical and dialectical interpretation of Kant's thought is opposed to the (...) formalistic absolutism used by the Kantian jurists, who reject the most vital and profound critical philosophy for a metaphysical framework which confuses everything as though all were homogeneous. In fact, what appears more valid in Kant's philosophy is the continuous tension between formalism and dialectics, a tension which, even though it is never definitively overcome in a dialectical sense by Kant himself, nevertheless reveals the need for a legal dialectic rather than a formalism. It shows "the destiny of legal right to cease being a coercive apparatus, and of being transformed into rules for human society taken from civil society" (p. 390). Of course, this dialectical perspective suggests new horizons and also new problems and a wide plan of work. However, I agree with the author that the uncertainties which will inevitably emerge in this work must be met urgently and radically. For we know that "on the other scale-pan there are in fact the raw metaphysics of legal positivism, the conservatism of the jurists, and at best the formalistic, paralyzing ascetics" (p. 390). The merit of Negri's book seems to me to lie above all in the lively problematical tension with which he examines the Kantian thought. Following in the paths of G. Gurwitch, Metzger and Goldmann, as well as of Luk~s' History and Class Consciousness, he appreciates and understands the interpenetration of ethical motivations with the social and cultural environment. This historical and philosophical awareness of problems is particularly lively in the pages where the author notices the begging of principle in Kantian thought; a begging of principle consisting in the fact that "the definition of limit presupposes a limit to the principle itself, but the examination of this presupposition is neglected" (p. 77 ft.). Because of this critical and historical tension, Negri's book can be of great interest to the jurist, the philosopher and the historian. And if this ensues, it is because the conception of legal right which the author seeks to assert throughout his theoretical tension is deep-rooted humanly, dialectically, concretely. It is most needed by those who really want to make of law and right not a formal science but a human science. ANTONELLA GUARALDI Bari, Italy The Narrow Pass: Kierkegaard's Concept of Man. By George Price. (New York, Toronto, London: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1963. Pp. 5-218.) Selon hombre de ses commentateurs, Kierkegaard seralt un ehrdtien passionnd; pour d'autres, il serait une sorte d'incroyant; pour George Price, nous devrions lui accorder une unitd complexe, unitd de production, qui s'exprime directement par la suite de ses oeuvres, unitd d'intention, une vue religicuse qui repose sur une certaine conception de l'homme, un th~me fondamental aussi qui est au centre des diverses discussions sur le pdchd, la foi, la raison, la morale, la subjectivitd et le "paradoxe", tous ces probl~mes qui paraissent se poser et se reposer sans cesse pour Kierkegaard, toujours de mani~re assez nouvelle. L'homme est i~la fois une synth~se de son corps et de son moi, des causes qui ont d'abord faeonnd son ~tre, et de qu'il y a en lui d'original et qui ne sera jamais rdpdtd, ce que son esprit a fait par un effort crdateur. Et d'abord une premiere remarque pour simplifier les vues de Kierkegaard. II n'y a pas ici de substances conjointes, il n'y a que des dvdnements corporels et spirituels. L'influence de Fichte apparait par l'importance accordde au devenir, un devenir qui se poursuit selon un module et qui reste fragile, si la volontd de se rdaliser ne se maintient pas. L'homme dolt se passionner pour son existence, it dolt devenir lui-m~me. La chute de l... (shrink)

Reprint of the first edition. This incisive critique was written around 1807 by Tracy [1754-1836], a French philosopher and path-breaking psychologist who was a friend of Jefferson [1743-1826]. Jefferson saw the Commentary when it was still a manuscript and was so impressed that he took pains to have it printed. He even helped with the translation and corrected the page proofs. Although the translation was published anonymously, we can identify the author and translators through a letter by Jefferson dated January (...) 26, 1811. Elsewhere in this letter he commends it for correcting the Spirit of the Laws. While other studies had merely "nibbled only at its errors...This want is now supplied, and with a depth of thought, recision of idea, of language and of logic, which will force conviction into every mind. I declare to you, Sir, in the spirit of truth and sincerity, that I consider it the most precious gift the present age has received.": The Writings of Thomas Jefferson V:566-571. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:846 BOOK REVIEWS Marx's Socwl Critique of Culture. By Loms DUPRE. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Pp. ix + 299. $30.00 (cloth) and $9.95 (paper). Modernity has produced in equal measure material abundance and critical disdain. Its critics may he roughly divided into two groups. Negative critics deny all value to modernity and long for a glorious past or a perfect future; the romanticism of an Othmar Spann (...) or the utopian anarchism of a Mikhail Bakunin provide excellent examples of this type. Of more interest to political theory, however, are the dialectical critics who both affirm and deny the modern project; Rousseau and Marx are the greatest thinkers in this category. Louis Dupre is certainly a critic of modernity. The nature of his complaint remains to he determined. I should begin by saying that Dupre's hook neither condemns nor worships Marx. From the start he sets for himself the unfashionable task of understanding his author before passing judgment on his ideas. Hence, Dupre explicitly distinguishes interpretation from critique and devotes most of this hook to elucidating Marx's ideas. Some readers would perhaps agree with Hahermas that interpretation is always critique, hut I find that Dupre generally maintains this distinction in these pages. I turn first to his reading of Marx. This is not a hook about what might he called high culture, a civilization 's achievements in expressing the human spirit. Dupre relies little on Marx and Engel's scattered reflections on art and society, and he spends relatively few pages on the Frankfurt School and their critique of contemporary popular culture. Dupre is rather a philosopher using Marx to think about culture in a fundamental way. His subject is modernity itself and particularly Marx's criticism of the essentially modern separation of culture and activity. The first part of the hook focuses on Marx's conception of alienation. For almost half a century questions about the unity of Marx's early and late writings have accompanied explications of Entfremdung. Dupre sides with those who see a unity of purpose in the works of the young and the old Marx. Although the idea of alienation appears rarely in Das Kapital, Dupre argues that Marx continually attacked bourgeois society for separating subject and object. Culture thus becomes in capitalist societies an object of exchange value that stands in opposition to its producers, a commodity like all others. The second chapter pursues Marx's belief that alienation must he understood socially and historically. Here Dupre provides a subtle interpretation of Marx's conceptions of base and superstructure. He concludes that Marx rejected the logical extremes of determinism and voluntarism BOOK REVIEWS 847 in history. Instead, the rational will of the proletariat was viewed as the culmination of social development. Yet, as Dupre notes, Marx's belief in the general principle that history is progressive turns on his specific analysis of the spread of capitalism; the generalization about history depends in the end on unproven assumptions about the development of capitalism. Dupre devotes his third chapter to a broad and learned discussion of the role of the dialectic in Marx and Marxist political theory. Marx himself did not provide a complete and clear account of dialectical contradiction; any tension that might lead to the destruction of capitalism fell within Marx's understanding of contradiction. Dupre's conclusion that Marx ultimately founded his dialectical method on an undefended teleology will, I think, ring true to most students of the subject. His discussion of the realist interpretation of the dialectic will occasion controversy largely because Dupre believes Engel's methodological ideas in Anti-Dukring can he legitimately associated with Marx's views. This is an important and damning link, for, of course, the scientism enunciated in Anti-Dukring took Marxism a long way toward both the relatively benign orthodoxy of the German Social Democrats and the horrible monism of Stalin. For Marx, however, the dialectic was more than anything else a way of positing the loss of social and culture unity and of foreseeing their reintegration. His exposition of Marx's atempt to unify economic and social activity contains a thoughtful reconstruction of the concept of value in classical economics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.4 (2000) 635-655 [Access article in PDF] The Mystery of Truth: Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin's Enlightened Mysticism David Bates "... what truth! and what error!" --Goethe on Saint-Martin 1It is hardly surprising that Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803), the philosophe inconnu of late Enlightenment Europe, remains almost completely unknown outside of the marginalized and exotic disciplines of esoterism, theosophy, and mysticism. Although influential (...) in certain circles, Saint-Martin failed to penetrate the mainstream of Enlightenment thought, and what influence he did have in philosophy was largely felt outside of this period altogether, revealing itself in figures such as Maistre, 2 Lamartine, 3 and German Romantics like Franz von Baader. 4 In his own lifetime Saint-Martin was met with incredulity by the forces of rationalism. Voltaire was given a copy of Saint-Martin's 1775 text Des erreurs et de la vérité by a friend of d'Alembert. Voltaire later commented to the mathematician, "I don't believe anyone has ever printed anything more absurd, [End Page 635] more obscure, more crazy, and more stupid." 5 In the Tableau de Paris, Mercier described Saint-Martin and his martinist followers as a sect which turned its back on the paths opened up by sound physics, chemistry, and all natural history in order "to run headlong into an invisible world only they perceived." Saint-Martin taught that the objects we see around us are only "fantastic and deceptive images" and that the truth lies precisely where we cannot see it, Mercier explained. "Physical experiences," the cornerstone of the dominant sensationalist doctrine, were for the martinists only "errors," an "eternal source of folly and deception," wrote Mercier. 6 One review of Saint-Martin's works described their effect as analogous to that of a "pyramid covered in hieroglyphs, erected by an unknown man in a public square," in other words, completely mystifying. 7 The revolutionary Barnave would link martinism with all the other "metaphysical follies," which were, he believed, the result of an overly speculative tendency in eighteenth-century thought. 8For his part Saint-Martin rejected what he considered to be the anti-spiritual tendency of Enlightenment thought. Responding (as a mature student) to the professor Garat, one of the idéologue followers of Condillac, at the École normale in 1795, Saint-Martin wrote: I always admire how you protect youself from materialism by endorsing... the teachings of Condillac. Although I read little, I have just gone through (very quickly, it is true) his Essai sur les origines des connaissances humaines and his Traité des sensations. Whether I have poorly grasped it, or I haven't your secret, I have come across almost no passages which do not repel me; and, I can say, have not encountered one which attracts me. His statue, for example... seems to be a mockery of nature... For me, each of the author's ideas appears to be an attack against man, a veritable homicide. 9Mystic thought, it seems, must oppose Enlightenment. At best, mysticism during the period of Enlightenment will be seen as its "underside" 10 or as the [End Page 636] preparation for coming anti-Enlightenment Romantic doctrines. 11 Indeed, the end of the Enlightenment in France saw a marked interest in esoteric thought and a mystic sensibility. 12 However, the attempt to link mysticism and Enlightenment has almost always been a critical attempt to discover the "superstitious" core of eighteenth-century rationalist thought. In this perspective the study of mystic thought in its own terms can only have antiquarian value, for the mystic approach to truth is, it is claimed, always in the form of a secret, revealed knowledge that can never withstand disciplined analysis. Saint-Martin finds his way into history as either a footnote in large books on Romantic thinking, or as the protaganist in largely incomprehensible ones examining esoteric thought. 13Here, I do not want to claim that Saint-Martin should be "included" in the Enlightenment, but a sympathetic reading of this complex... (shrink)

This note corrects a lemma in the recent paper 1] of one of the authors by rst correcting problems with Poole's rule for speci city of arguments. It also responds to the criticism of Touretzky, et al. 9].

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself, and: Maimonides and His HeritageLouis E. NewmanLove Thy Neighbor as Thyself Lenn E. Goodman New York: Oxford, 2008. 235 pp. $55.00.Maimonides and His Heritage Edited by Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Lenn E. Goodman, and James Allen Grady Albany: SUNY, 2009. $24.95.Perhaps no principle is more central to Western religious ethics than that of “loving your neighbor as yourself.” It is at the heart of the (...) Hebrew Bible’s ethic [End Page 196] of caring for others, especially those most marginalized, both within and outside of the Israelite community. It is rooted in the belief that all humans are created in the divine image, and its implications extend to a myriad of specific injunctions designed to secure the rights of individuals as individuals as well as to ensure the just distribution of goods within society. It has been the subject of extended reflection by generations of Jewish and Christian philosophers (among many others), has spawned multiple versions of the Golden Rule, and has received modern philosophical expression in Kant’s categorical imperative. It should not surprise us, then, that any treatment of such a far-reaching religious–moral principle will require a scholar whose reach extends from the Bible to contemporary moral theory.Lenn Goodman demonstrates in this book that he is more than equal to the task. First given as two of the 2005 Gifford Lectures (the others that year were given by a Christian, a Muslim, and a secular philosopher), these chapters explore the ways in which love of neighbor is at the very heart of biblical ethics, as well as the theory of ethical obligation that it implies. Goodman’s erudition is on full display here as he moves easily from Aristotelian virtue ethics to medieval Jewish Bible commentators to contemporary natural law theorists.Following the long line of commentators who read “as thyself” as a gloss on “neighbor”—namely, that we love the other because she is a person, like oneself—Goodman writes that “our first obligation to one another is respect for subjecthood” (14). All other biblical injunctions with respect to moral behavior are merely corollaries of the notion that all persons are of equal worth insofar as they are equally created in God’s image and so entitled to equal consideration. Goodman takes pains to emphasize that this commandment, though, cannot be reduced to the sum total of positive injunctions; it aims to inculcate an attitude (“love”) that both motivates our moral behavior and extends its scope to encompass the infinite task of emulating God.The most philosophically interesting part of Goodman’s discussion comes in his treatment of monotheism’s contribution to ethics. After all, the command to love our neighbor is presented to us both as a command from God and as a command to love God by loving God’s creatures. How are our idea of God and our relationship with God correlated with our understanding of the nature of moral duty and the scope of moral life?As Goodman sees it, monotheism asserts that “God... is not just a judge but an ontic principle, the greatest reality, highest good and source of all goods, which are conceived as God’s work, expressions of his generosity and wisdom” (45). At the same time, he eschews any simple divine command theory of morality according to which the good is determined by God, either verbally or ontologically. For, “It’s not just that we know the right because we know God’s will. We also know God’s will because we know what is right” (51). This dialectical understanding of God and the good is best captured in Goodman’s claim that “we bring our moral notions, suasions, customs, instincts, attitudes [End Page 197] and intuition to the Law, and they enter into dialogue with what we read, informing our hermeneutic, as scripture itself and the conception of the God encountered in scripture, inform them in turn” (53).Goodman acknowledges that such a view runs headlong into the problem of divinely sanctioned mass murder (see the book of Joshua) and, most famously, the injunction to utterly destroy the Amalakites (Deut. 25:17... (shrink)

ETHICS: DISCOVERING RIGHT AND WRONG, 8E is a conversational and non-dogmatic overview of ethical theory. Written by one of contemporary philosophy's top teachers and revised by a best selling author, this textbook even-handedly raises important ethical questions and challenges readers to develop their own moral theories by applying them. This revision also presents an even broader presentation of various positions, featuring more feminist and multicultural perspectives as well. ETHICS: DISCOVERING RIGHT AND WRONG, 8E begins with easy to read chapters that (...) introduce questions of meta-ethics and major moral theories. Later chapters address special topics in personal and religious ethics as well as the most recent developments in moral theory, including a new chapter on Biology and Ethics. Study questions for each chapter, along with useful bibliographies, make grasping the material more accessible than ever. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version. (shrink)

Recent writings about Thomas More have questioned his integrity and motivation and have challenged the long-held view of him as a humane, wise, and heroic "man for all seasons." This new book responds to these revisionist studies by closely and persuasively analyzing More's writings as well as Holbein's portraits of More and his family. "Martz cuts down the revived charge of More as a bloodthirsty hunter of heretics, a furious, sexually repressed, and frustrated man.... This penetrating rebuttal of the revisionists (...) deserves high commendation."—_Choice_ "Martz draws a compelling picture of More's attempts during his lonely imprisonment to adjust to his human fear of death and to see his own plight in the perspective of the universal human condition. In these essays More's voice and personality speak to us from his own literate and humorous prose."—M. Edmund Hussey, _Antioch__ Review_ "In his gracefully written _Thomas More: The Search for the Inner Man_, Louis L. Martz provides a sharply different account of the 'dark side' of More.... [He] lays out the case for a more complex, ironic construction of More's texts."—Stanley Stewart, _Studies in English Literature_ "This... book is a gemstone."—Terence R. Murphy, _History: Reviews of New Books_ "Correcting the view of Thomas More as a cold-blooded prosecutor of heresy, Martz here considers the gentle, affectionate, yet upright man pictured in Holbein's family portraits and implicit in More's prose."—Judith Fair, _Theological Studies_. (shrink)

Empathy remains poorly understood, under-theorized, and subject to conflicting and opportunistic uses. Its systematic role in human experience has not been analyzed and interpreted from top to bottom. In this book, the author attempts to provide such an analysis in the philosophical traditions of hermeneutics, phenomenology, analytic philosophy of language, and psychoanalysis. applying his interpretation of empathy to the philosophical issues of intentionality, the emotions, and the checkered transformations of empathy itself. In doing so the author aims to rescue empathy (...) from the margins of intelligibility and reveal its central role in our understanding of the emotions, the integrity of our relations with others, and human community (“intersubjectivity”). -/- The work draws on both the Anglo-American (“analytic”) tradition of ordinary language philosophy and the continental ones of phenomenology and hermeneutics. This work follows the movement of empathy from the periphery of ethics, aesthetics, and theory of mind to a key place in establishing and maintaining the integrity and emotional equilibrium of dynamic interrelations with other individuals. Beginning with the philosophical infrastructure of the hermeneutics of empathy, this work thoroughly explains the complex architecture of empathy, tracing it downward through the levels of authentic human interrelations, empathy with unexpressed emotions, the empathic penetrability of cognitively impenetrable affect, the first-ever intentional analysis of both the empathizer and the “empathasand” in interrelation, and the hermeneutic infrastructure. The consequences of empathy are exposed in the context of the emotions, cognitive impenetrability, empathy and altruism, and the intentionality of empathy as accessed through language and story telling. Drawing on the multi-method approach of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and story telling, this work demonstrates that empathy forms the foundation for community in ways not clearly appreciated in the on-going debate. In a bootstrap operation that is guided by Heidegger’s call for a “special hermeneutic of empathy,” this work achieves a delicate balancing act of unpacking the rich intellectual traditions from which empathy - the phenomenon itself, not the concept - emerged historically. The result is an exposure of the deep structure of empathy as a fundamentally human capability for creating possibilities of community and human relations. (shrink)

Recently, some authors have claimed that, from a republican perspective, market relations are dominating. However, _prima facie_, this idea does not fit within the (neo-)republican conceptualization of domination, which models domination on the master-slave relation. The aim of this article is to twofold. First, I try to argue that market relations can be seen as dominating. Second, I attempt to show that this can be done through an extension of the (neo-)republican conceptualization of domination. I try to achieve this by (...) comparing the master-slave relation with the accounts of those authors who maintain that market relations entail domination. This comparison reveals that there are fundamental similarities between the master-slave relation and the dynamics within market relations that are identified as dominating. What they have in common is the specific harm of domination, which I call the ‘logic of domination’. However, where the master-slave relation and market relations diverge is in the characteristics of the relation that causes the logic of domination to materialize. I argue that Pettit’s concept of discursive control allows us to extend his account of domination in such a way that we can conceive of market relations as dominating. (shrink)

Research in experimental philosophy has increasingly been turning to corpus methods to produce evidence for empirical claims, as they open up new possibilities for testing linguistic claims or studying concepts across time and cultures. The present article reviews the quasi-experimental studies that have been done using textual data from corpora in philosophy, with an eye for the modeling and experimental design that enable statistical inference. I find that most studies forego comparisons that could control for confounds, and that only a (...) little less than half employ statistical testing methods to control for chance results. Furthermore, at least some researchers make modeling decisions that either do not take into account the nature of corpora and of the word-concept relationship, or undermine the experiment's capacity to answer research questions. I suggest that corpus methods could both provide more powerful evidence and gain more mainstream acceptance by improving their modeling practices. (shrink)

A major source of latter-day skepticism about necessity is the work of David Hume. Hume is widely taken to have endorsed the Humean claim: there are no necessary connections between distinct existences. The Humean claim is defended on the grounds that necessary connections between wholly distinct things would be mysterious and inexplicable. Philosophers deploy this claim in the service of a wide variety of philosophical projects. But Saul Kripke has argued that it is false. According to Kripke, there are necessary (...) connections between distinct existences; in particular, there are necessary connections between material objects and their material origins. In this paper I argue that the primary motivation for the Humean claim, Hume's datum, also motivates the key premise in an argument for the necessity of origins. The very considerations that the Humean takes to show that necessary connections between wholly distinct things would be mysterious and inexplicable indicate that there must be some such necessary connections. Thus, in the absence of alternative support, there is no reason to believe the Humean claim. (shrink)

This is a chapter on the history of ideas related to recovery. Moral treatment was a novel approach to caring for mentally ill patients that arose towards the end of the eighteenth century in Europe, and then spread to North America. It is most famously associated with the names of William Tuke in York, and Philippe Pinel in Paris. These two very different men—Tuke was a wealthy English Quaker businessman and philanthropist, and Pinel was a famous French medical author and (...) doctor—formulated two quite different approaches to the care of the mentally ill. Yet there are also important similarities in their approaches. The concept of “recovery” plays a fundamental role in both Tuke's and Pinel's conceptions of the care and treatment of mental illness. It is interesting, and important, to consider the underlying premises of their respective clinical approaches as we consider the nature and origins of the concept of “recovery” today. (shrink)

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

The central claim of Kant's political philosophy is that rational agents sharing a territory can justifiably be forced to live under a state; they have, in Kant's words, a duty of right to leave the state of nature. Perhaps something along these lines is entailed by any theory of state legitimacy, but the point raises special difficulties for Kant. He believes that rational agents have a right to freedom; that is, he believes that a rational agent's external freedom - her (...) ability to set and pursue ends for herself without being subject to the choices of others - can justifiably be restricted only for the sake of external freedom itself. To establish that human beings can be forced to join a civil condition, it will therefore not do to show that the state promotes security, prosperity or any other such value: Kant has to show that human beings living side by side need a state to be free. (shrink)

Philosophers have spilled a lot of ink over the past few years exploring the nature and significance of grounding. Kit Fine has made several seminal contributions to this discussion, including an exact treatment of the formal features of grounding [Fine, 2012a]. He has specified a language in which grounding claims may be expressed, proposed a system of axioms which capture the relevant formal features, and offered a semantics which interprets the language. Unfortunately, the semantics Fine offers faces a number of (...) problems. In this paper, I review the problems and offer an alternative that avoids them. I offer a semantics for the pure logic of ground that is motivated by ideas already present in the grounding literature, and for which a natural axiomatization capturing central formal features of grounding is sound and complete. I also show how the semantics I offer avoids the problems faced by Fine’s semantics. (shrink)

Though the study of grounding is still in the early stages, Kit Fine, in ”The Pure Logic of Ground”, has made a seminal attempt at formalization. Formalization of this sort is supposed to bring clarity and precision to our theorizing, as it has to the study of other metaphysically important phenomena, like modality and vagueness. Unfortunately, as I will argue, Fine ties the formal treatment of grounding to the obscure notion of a weak ground. The obscurity of weak ground, together (...) with its centrality in Fine’s system, threatens to undermine the extent to which this formalization offers clarity and precision. In this paper, I show how to overcome this problem. I describe a system, the logic of strict ground (LSG) and demonstrate its adequacy; I specify a translation scheme for interpreting Fine’s weak grounding claims; I show that the interpretation verifies all of the principles of Fine’s system; and I show that derivability in Fine’s system can be exactly characterized in terms of derivability in LSG. I conclude that Fine’s system is reducible to LSG. (shrink)

The Lonely Labyrinth winds the suggestion that "Kierkegaard was a profoundly sick man, and that the character of his sickness established a privileged perspective for the understanding of his work." In the light of this thesis, his "works turn out to be, not abstruse theologico-philosophical treatises or mysterious aesthetic essays, but successive moves in a complicated dialectic of therapy." They are "efforts... to find not truth but health." Part One of Thompson's book sketches the biographical, psychological, philosophical, and literary background (...) of Kierkegaard's authorship. Part Two--the major division of the book--offers readings of the pseudonymous works from Either/or through Concluding Unscientific Postscript. (shrink)

This review essay, concerning three collections of Shils’ essays published in 1997, focuses on Shils’ assertion of the importance of charisma or the sacred in the ties that bind a secular society together and enable it to function as it does, asks why Shils did not accept Polanyi’s views about intellectuals, and refers to aspects of the sacred attributed to universities and to our academic traditions.

Every day we are faced with moral dilemmas in both our personal and professional lives. The choices we make, the ways in which we behave, and our responses to these dilemmas are grounded in our personal understandings of ethics and morality. But this understanding is not black and white: What is deplorable to one person may be perfectly acceptable to another. In Moral Reasoning: Rediscovering the Ethical Tradition, author Louis Groarke guides readers through a honing of their critical skills (...) in moral analysis by providing a rich, deep, and far-reaching overview of the discipline. He offers a careful, in-depth introduction to the many schools of moral thought that have contributed to Western philosophy and to the teachings of great moral thinkers such as Confucius, Socrates, Epicurus, Aristotle, Jesus, Epictetus, Aquinas, Hobbes, Kant, Mill, and Kierkegaard. This wide-ranging text considers these many different perspectives on morality with the goal of building up one coherent, larger view. Text-wide inclusion of contemporary examples drawing on these classical ideas fosters critical reflection about today's important moral questions and encourages readers to develop their own considered views that go beyond peer pressure and ideology. (shrink)

Louis Painchaud | : Pendant près de deux millénaires, « faux-Judéens » et « synagogue de Satan » de Smyrne et de Philadelphie ont été considérés comme des « Juifs », membres des « synagogues » de ces villes, hostiles aux « chrétiens » qu’ils auraient même dénoncés auprès des autorités. Dans la deuxième moitié du xxe siècle, dans un contexte qui a suscité tout un courant de réflexion critique sur l’antisémitisme chrétien, plusieurs ont proposé de voir dans ces (...) « Juifs » des factions hostiles à Jean au sein des assemblées auxquelles il s’adresse. L’hypothèse qui est proposée ici est de voir, dans ces Judéens accusés de blasphème et taxés d’être de faux Judéens ou des Judéens menteurs, des membres de l’ethnos Judéens souillés, aux yeux de Jean, un prophète judéen sectaire, par leur intégration dans le tissu associatif de la cité. Quant à la « congrégation de Satan » qu’ils formeraient, elle ne doit pas être entendue comme la désignation d’une communauté judéenne ayant une existence réelle dans la cité, mais comme une pure construction de Jean, prophète de Jésus le Vivant qui ne se savait pas encore chrétien, visant à démoniser non pas tous les Judéens de ces deux cités, mais certains Judéens infidèles aux commandements et, donc, à leur identité judéenne. | : For nearly two thousand years, the Smyrneans and Philadelphians that the book of Revelation describes as “false Judeans” and as making up a “synagogue of Satan” have been taken to be “Jews,” members of the “synagogues” located in those cities, who were hostile to local “Christians,” to the point of denouncing them to the authorities. In the second half of the twentieth century, in a context in which Christian anti-Semitism was increasingly recognized and critiqued, many argued that these “Jews” were in fact members of the communities addressed by John, belonging to factions hostile to his message. In this paper, I will argue that the people whom John accuses of being blaspheming and false Judeans were members of the Judean ethnos who were seen by John — himself a Judean sectarian — as having become defiled through their integration into the social and professional fabric of the city. From this point of view, the “synagogue of Satan” is not to be seen as a real Judean community, but rather as the pure creation of John, a prophet of Jesus the Living One who did not know that later generations would consider him a “Christian.” Thus John does not intend to demonize all the Judeans in these two cities ; rather, his invective is directed at some Judeans, whom he sees as betraying the commandments and, hence, their own Jewish identity. (shrink)

Kit Fine, in "The Pure Logic of Ground", has made a seminal attempt at formalizing the notion of ground. Fine ties the formal treatment of grounding to the notion of a weak ground. Formalization of this sort is supposed to bring clarity and precision to our theorizing. Unfortunately, as I will argue, it's not clear what weak ground is. I review five alternative explanations of the idea, and argue that none of them are ultimately satisfactory. I close by outlining (...) a more complicated explanation of the notion that turns out to be more satisfactory. (shrink)

This rejoinder to J. Patrick Gray's and Linda Wolfe's 'The Loving Parent Meets the Selfish Gene' (Inquiry, this issue), which in turn was in response to the author's 'Human Tragedy and Natural Selection' (Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 4), briefly addresses their major objections and suggests that in many instances they have misunderstood the point of that paper. They argue that many of the traits referred to are more cultural than genetic. That this is not the central issue is made clearer (...) by stressing certain aspects of the view underlying the original article, chiefly concerning the extent of human irrationality and insensitivity. (shrink)

The concept of forgiveness is analyzed as a moral gesture toward the offender designed to help restore that individual's moral standing. Jewish sources on the conditions under which forgiveness is obligatory are explored and two contrasting positions are presented: one in which the obligation to forgive is conditional on the repentance of the offender and another in which people are required to forgive unconditionally. These two positions are shown to represent different ways of framing the offending behavior that rest, in (...) turn, on different ways of balancing the need for justice and for mercy respectively. In the final analysis, Judaism's two contrasting attitudes toward forgiveness are rooted in different theological assumptions and different ways of construing the very goals of the moral life. The author points out the merits and shortcomings of both positions and concludes with the suggestion that the two complement each other in important ways. (shrink)

This is a textual examination of Simone Weil's works which the author relates to classic Marxism and anarchism. It discusses Weil's critique of worker misery/alienation, imperialism, and the social systems of capitalism, Nazism and Soviet Communism.

This essay by the director of Washington & Lee University's applied ethics program for Society and the Professions argues that journalists must begin taking themselves seriously as members of a profession if journalism is to gain the respect it needs to function effectively in society. Journalism, argues the author, may not possess all the classical attributes of professionalism, but it does possess the most important ones. The essay maintains that professionalism in journalism is important for the welfare of both the (...) media audience and the journalist. Journalists are asked to look at journalism through the audience's eyes, to experience the reward of being true and humble servants of other human beings, and to help make people whole?in short, to be professionals, not mere technicians. (shrink)