In their article, “The Rise of Citizen Science in Health and Biomedical Research,” Wiggins and Wilbanks (2019) discuss the rising role of a variety of traditional and newer citizen science models i...

The use of the term `honor killing' has elicited strong reactions from a variety of groups for years; but the recent Aqsa Parvez and Aasiya Hassan cases have brought a renewed interest from women's rights activists, community leaders, and law enforcement to study the term and come to a consensus on its validity and usefulness, particularly in the North American and European Diaspora. While some aver that the term `honor killing' is an appropriate description of a unique and particular crime, (...) others deem it as rather a racist and misleading phrase used to promote violent stereotypes of particular communities, particularly Muslim minorities in North America and Europe. This article works to lay the groundwork by presenting both sides of the debate over the term `honor killing' and analyzing the arguments various groups use in order to justify their particular definition of the term, and if and how they support its use in public discourse. I argue two main points: one, that `honor killing' exists as a specific form of violence against women, having particular characteristics that warrants its classification as a unique category of violence. Second, I show that while `honor killings' are recognized as such in many non-Western contexts, there is a trend among advocacy organizations in the North American and European Diaspora to avoid, ignore, or rebuke the term `honor killings' as a misleading label that is racist, xenophobic, and/or harmful to Muslim populations. This is a direct response to the misuse of the term mostly within media outlets and public discourse that serves to further marginalize Muslim and immigrant groups. (shrink)

After publishing his first collection of poems entitled Interrogation (1917), Pierre Drieu La Rochelle returned to writing on the First World War in La Comédie de Charleroi (1934). The writer examined the moral and political significance of the “last war” in a retrospective manner in this collection of autobiographical short stories that he published just before his conversion to Fascism. However, Drieu did not treat his experience of the war as a distant memory. On the contrary, his texts are (...) characterised by emotivity, as if he was attempting to relive the very moment of his war. From this point of view, we examine the style and narrative structure of “La Comédie de Charleroi”. In this short story which opens the book, Drieu created a poetic narrative by mixing narrative prose and lyricism, and thus undermined realistic chronology. By means of this poetic narrative, he wrote his memory of the “last war” and, at the same time, expressed his “cry” which was the leitmotiv of his first collection of poems. This literary experience seems to have had an ideological consequence, as shown in Socialisme fasciste (1934). (shrink)

Earp et al. (2024) sketch a thought-provoking potential use of generative AI to enhance supported decision-making for adults who have lost capacity/competence to make their own medical decisions. T...

First published in 2012, Doing Philosophy presents the basics of how 'to do' philosophy -- what philosophy is, how we can think, the nature of logic, some special terms -- in a straightforward and easy to understand style. Then, using questions and exercises as well as everyday examples, the author takes the reader on a wide-ranging tour of key philosophical topics which, as well as the 'standard fare' of logic, epistemology, mind, God etc., also includes ethical, social, scientific, cultural (...) and human issues such as time, cosmology, war, animal rights, euthanasia, abortion, genetics, evolution, and the meaning of life. The author's emphasis throughout is that philosophy is accessible to anyone keen enough to try and do it and that, as a subject, philosophy is practical, fascinating and exciting. By encouraging independent critical thinking and being succinct yet informative, the book involves the reader with the history, the breadth of subject matter, the skills of philosophising and the benefits that philosophy can offer to the enquiring individual. The book accesses major philosophical topics briefly, breaking them down into convenient points, with challenging questions throughout and exercise questions at the end of each chapter, whilst introducing major thinkers and their ideas. There is an extensive further reading list to help those who wish to take this absorbing subject further. (shrink)

Premiere traduction francaise etablie sur l'edition critique du texte latin, cet ouvrage rend accessible a un plus large public la Summa de anima de Jean de la Rochelle qui revet un triple interet. Elle offre d'abord une presentation magistrale de l'enseignement portant sur l'ame dans les annees 1230-1235 a Paris. Elle permet de la sorte d'evaluer l'etat de la reflexion sur l'ame a l'oree de du travail de reinterpretation de l'aristotelisme tel que le vehiculait la tradition greco-arabe par Albert (...) le Grand et Thomas d'Aquin. Elle constitue enfin une tentative, emanant d'un des premiers maitres en theologie franciscains, d'integration de la philosophie greco-arabe (notamment celle d'Avicenne, qui rencontre ici le Pseudo-Augustin, Augustin, Jean Damascene et Philippe le Chancelier) a la reflexion theologique. Ce texte prepare ainsi les grandes syntheses des Sommes posterieures au premier rang desquelles figure evidemment la Summa fratris Alexandri qui incorpore, au livre II, des chapitres entiers. (shrink)

Au cours des trente dernières années, la critique a eu l’occasion de souligner l’importance de la religion dans la pensée de Benjamin. En particulier, elle a pu mettre en évidence l’influence du judaïsme dans sa critique de la métaphysique telle qu’on la trouve illustrée dans la notion chrétienne de grâce. Benjamin retourne l’idée d’une libération de l’individu par rapport à l’histoire et la remplace par celle d’une rédemption dans laquelle le passé historique est sauvé par le présent. Pourta...

Teaching Joe Kincheloe is one of a handful of important recent books posthumously pushing Kincheloe's work further into the twenty-first century. Written and edited by former students and colleagues, the book underscores the depth and breath of his extraordinarily productive career. The text offers students and educators alike invaluable insights into transformative ways of seeing conducive to challenging the technocratic, imperialistic purpose of dominant forms education in an era marked by ruling elite desperation as U.S. power wanes globally. Through this (...) and other projects, Kincheloe would surely have been pleased to see his many postformal contributions counter-hegemonically providing critical pedagogy the theoretical and practical strength to contribute to the global uprising currently challenging the imperialist project of wealth extraction and cultural domination from Cuba; Venezuela; Peru; Chiapas, Mexico; Tunisia; Libya; Egypt; Yemen; and Iran, to regions in the United States. Teaching Joe L. Kincheloe will surely gain relevancy as the global movement against authoritarianism and domination intensifies and citizens begin to search for new ways to better understand their worlds and how those contexts interrelate with the historical development of their own identities. (shrink)

Males are often found to outperform females in tests of mathematics achievement and it has been proposed that this may in part be explained by differences in cognitive style. This study investigated the relation between Wholistic-Analytic and Verbal-Imagery cognitive style, gender and mathematics achievement in a sample of 190 Australian primary school students aged between 8?11?years (M?=?9.77, SD?=?1.05). It was hypothesised that males would outperform females in mathematics achievement tests, and that gender would interact with cognitive style (...) on mathematics performance. A significant gender/cognitive style interaction was found. Boys with an Analytic/Imagery style achieved significantly higher results than the girls with an Analytic/Imagery style, supporting the contention that certain cognitive styles affect boys and girls mathematics performance differently. Implications of results and strategies for improving mathematics achievement among girls are discussed. (shrink)

Robert Stern has argued that Levinas is a kind of command theorist and that, for this reason, Løgstrup can be understood to have provided an argument against Levinas. In this paper, I discuss Levinas’s use of the vocabulary of demand, order, and command in the light of Jewish philosophical accounts of such notions in the work of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emil Fackenheim. These accounts revise the traditional Jewish idea of command and I show that Levinas’s use of this (...) vocabulary is also revisionary. I show that in light of this tradition of discussion, Levinas’s use is not susceptible to the interpretation Stern proposes and thus that the Løgstrup-style argument cannot be used against Levinas. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyse how neuroscientists come to the conclusion that the brain 'decides' what we will do. I do so by focusing on a recent study on free won't, from which it is concluded that the decision to veto is not free. First, I argue that assumptions about voluntariness and freedom that underlie this and other Libet-style experiments are more stringent than assumed by other critics. Second, I claim that these assumptions lead to an experimental setting in (...) which the conclusion that the brain 'decides' is almost unavoidable. This is because the only decisions subjects are allowed to make in these experiments are spontaneous decisions that are not based on reasons. Even if the subjects acted for reasons or deliberated about what to do it would not be interpreted as such. Because of this, alternative definitions of voluntariness and freedom are necessary for neuroscientific experiments to provide a valuable contribution to the debate on free will. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kendall L. Walton FICTION, FICTION-MAKING, AND STYLES OF FICTIONALITY Both objectsandactions are said to have styles. Styles eire attributed to works of art, bathing suits, neckties, and automobiles. But we also think of styles as ways of doing things. There are styles of teaching, styles of chess playing, styles of travel. The primary notion of style is the one which attaches to actions. When we speak of die (...) style of a poem or a portrait or em automobile we do so with reference to an action or actions associated with the object, usually the action or actions which appear to have been performed in die making of it. I will not argue now for this claim about style except to note that style attributions eure peculietrly alien to objects which are not products of human action. What is the style of a tulip, or an alpine meadow, or a pristine lake in the high Sierras? Are the Grand Canyon and Yosemite Valley in the same style or different ones? Sunsets in the tropics are very different from sunsets in the arctic, but is die difference a stylistic one? We might allow that in unusual cases natured objects can have styles. A chorus ofchirping birds might, just conceivably, chirp in the style of Haydn. But die notion of style here is obviously parasitic on diat which is applied to man-made eirtifacts. To think of an object as having a style is to mink of it as a product of human action.1 If actions are the primary possessors of style, to understand styles of fictionality we must look at die action of fiction-meddng emd its relation to works of fiction. I will concentrate on the very basic question ofwhat fiction is, what it is for something to be a work of fiction, and on attempts to answer this question in terms of die action offiction-making. It has been especially fashionable to utilize die notion ofspeech acts introduced by John Austin in tackling this problem. The fictional status of a work is, supposedly, to be accounted for by what illocutionary actions were or were not performed by the artist producing it, or by connections between what the artist did and certain illocutionary actions. My assessment of mis program will be mostly negative. Speech-act theory is remarkably unhelpful in explaining what fiction is. We have here something ofa "Have dieory, will travel" syndrome. There is a tendency for theorists, when 78 Kendall L. Walton79 faced with a new problem, to dust off an old theory which they know emd love, one devised with other questions in mind, shove it into die breach, and pray mat it will fit. In this case it does not fit, and the result is confusion radier dian illumination. Lest I step on toes other man the ones I am aiming at, let me empheisize that my present concern is not with the viability of speech-act theory as a dieory of language. Nor do I mean to deny that speech-act theory can be used fruitfully to illuminate important features of literary fictions. I am now addressing only die basic question of what fiction is, how works of fiction are to be differentiated from odier things. Whatever the other merits of speech-act theory, its applications to this question have been distinctly infelicitous. From our discussion of such applications em even stronger conclusion will emerge, the conclusion that the nature of fiction is not to be explicated in terms of acts of fiction-making at all. The notion of fiction is in diis respect contrary to that of style, and certain consequences about styles of fictionality follow. I Speech-act theory has been brought to bear on the problem of the nature of fiction in a number of rather different ways. I will look at four of them. The first is the idea that works of fiction are simply texts (or other representations ) which are not vehicles of illocutionary acts. It is true mat in writing fiction an author typically does not perform the illocutionary acts that a person who uses the setme words in a nonfictional setting is likely to be performing... (shrink)

Smokers impose a terrible cost on all of the rest of us. Those who choose to smoke are more likely than nonsmokers to suffer from cancer, heart disease, and a host of other diseases that require intensive and expensive medical intervention. Although they may suffer these diseases, we all pay for their habit through higher healthcare costs, which are reflected in higher insurance premiums, higher taxes, and fewer healthcare resources available for nonsmokers. It is simply unfair for smokers to impose (...) this cost on the rest of us; they should bear this self-induced cost themselves. (shrink)

The present study investigated whether individual differences between psychologists in thinking styles are associated with accuracy in diagnostic classification. We asked novice and experienced clinicians to classify two clinical cases of clients with two co-occurring psychological disorders. No significant difference in diagnostic accuracy was found between the two groups, but when combining the data from novices and experienced psychologists accuracy was found to be negatively associated with certain decision making strategies and with a higher self-assessed ability and preference for a (...) rational thinking style. Our results underscore the idea that it might be fruitful to look for explanations of differences in the accuracy of diagnostic judgments in individual differences between psychologists (such as in thinking styles or decision making strategies used), rather than in experience level. (shrink)

May discovered Diderot's copiously annotated copy of this anti-materialist tract by Hemsterhuis, known to many contemporaries as "the Dutch Plato"; this edition contains May's interesting introduction, a facsimile of the original text, and a transcription of all of Diderot's comments. The comments bear on infelicities of style as well as of thought, though the latter preponderate: the Lettre is not, alas, the product of a first-rate philosophical intellect. Diderot's strong objections to Hemsterhuis' crude theory of a moral organ can (...) be taken as complementing his Refutation of Helvetius, which dates from the same period.—W. L. M. (shrink)

Purpose. Based on the study of philosophical anthropological concepts, to highlight the project of personality in different historical periods, to reveal the meaning of humanistic issues in the postmodern epoch, to identify the essential features of the image of human of the second half of the XX the beginning of the XXI century. Theoretical basis. The methodological basis of the article is the principles of historicism, integrity, objectivity regarding the mastery of the issue of person’s image in postmodernism. The research (...) applied comparative-historical, culturological, analytical, axiological approaches to reveal the problem of individuality in the second half of the XX the beginning of the XXI century. The theoretical basis of the article consists of scientific works in the field of philosophical anthropology, history, cultural studies, and aesthetics. Originality. The author revealed the peculiarities of transformation of the personality model from antiquity to postmodernism, specified the image of man of the second half of the XX the beginning of the XXI century. Conclusions. The analysis of anthropological ideas of Western philosophy of different ages shows the variety of views about understanding the nature of the person, its complexity and ambiguity. In the epoch of postmodernism humanistic issues are of particular relevance, which is connected with social and political uncertainty, domination of mass consciousness, loss of national and cultural identity. The image of a person of this period is deprived of a solid foundation, it is blurred and relative. The destruction of faith in the absolute in the context of the second half of the twentieth century contributed to the formation of confidence in the interdependence of all things, raised the problem of the personality image to a new ontological level. Orientation in the achievements of European civilization, perception of its anthropological experience, intercultural dialogue contribute to the productive use of the achievements of mankind in order to understand the modern person and to form its adequate image. In its essence, postmodernism does not set the goal to realize a retrospection of subject type. However, separating from the cultural memory the excerpts of ideas about a person, by certain styles and directions, it builds on their formations its own eclectic image of the individual. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the problem of changing stylistic paradigm in the Persian poetry of XVI-XVII centuries and reflection of this process in self-consciousness of outstanding authors of the period. Parallel with preserving stable norms of traditional poetics literary practice demonstrates flexibility and forms new range of popular poetic strategies. New aesthetic criteria if ideal poetic language, expressed with epithet ‘colourful’, appears alongside with criteria of previous period, expressed with epithet ‘sweet’ and step by step gets leadership. Lyric poetry (...) of three famous authors of the period of formation and golden age of Indian style served the object of analyses. The phenomena of visualization of imagery connected with perfect poetic language illustrated by examples of ‘Poet and Poetry’ motifs located in ‘frame text’ in end of the qhazal. These motifs serve one of the regular contexts of author’s name and show author’s attitude to his creation, including stylistic preferences. Refinement of poetic fantasy being declared basic condition of creating perfect poetry described visually as coiling lasso, poetry itself as flourishing garden, fountain or European house decorated with painting. Such characteristic of word creation has analogies in the works of Baroque style theorist Giambattista Marino. (shrink)

Recent studies claim that having an analytical cognitive style is correlated with reduced religiosity in western populations. However, in cultural contexts where social norms constrain behavior, such cognitive characteristics may have reduced influence on behaviors and beliefs. We labeled this the ‘constraining environments hypothesis.’ In a sample of 246 Muslims in Turkey, the hypothesis was supported for gender. Females face social pressure to be religious. Unlike their male counterparts, they were more religious, less analytical, and their analytical scores were (...) uncorrelated with religiosity. We had predicted an analogous effect for the comparison between monolingual and bilingual students, since English-proficient students are exposed to a wider social environment. The bilingual students were less religious than the monolingual students, yet they were also less analytical. Thus, being analytical was not the path to lower religiosity for the bilingual students. Cognitive styles need to be studied along with social norms in a variety of cultures, to understand religion-cognition relationships. (shrink)

Duncan traces the renewed interest in the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Marvell, and others, among poets and critics during the past century and a half.--L. S. F.

The language specificity of modern media texts and the aspects of studying it in the courses ‘Language and style of modern mass media‘ and ‘Modern mediatext‘ are considered in the article. The language specificity of contemporary media texts is connected, on the one hand, with the subjectivization of the text, enforcement of personality, democratization and with the increase of proportion of a foreign word, intertexuality, intellectualization of the text on the other hand. Subjectivization of the text is connected with (...) the personality enforcement, is determined by the influence of social processes - freedom of speech declaration - and demonstrates itself in the actualization of the author, in a high level of evaluation, emotionality, abundance of metatextual means. Democratization in the modern mass media texts shows itself in the joint functioning of means of different styles: bookish, substandard, jargon. Intertextuality is opposed to the excessive subjectivization of the text and demonstrates itself in the increased usage of foreign words, it is realized with the help of precedent phenomena. Intellectualization shows itself in the active usage of the means of indirect communication by the journalists: tropes, wordplay. Unnecessarily liberal usage of language means for the expressive-evaluating and wordplay on purposes is often contiguous to speech aggression. Consequently studying modern media texts allows students to not only detect and characterize the main features of the modern mass media language and style, structural-semantic peculiarities of a modern mediatext, but also to give its socio-ethical evaluation. (shrink)

Del Giudice's examination of sex differences in reproductive strategy within an attachment context is well taken. Sex has been studied as behavior within romantic relationships, but attachment styles should also be reflected in strategic behavior within relationships that are sexual. This seems particularly true within adolescence, and sex differences may be better reflected as differences in correlation patterns of process variables than as main effects models.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Implicit Soul of Charlie Kaufman's AdaptationDavid L. SmithI don't know what else there is to write about other than being human, or, more specifically, being this human. I have no alternative. Everything is about that, right? Unless it's about flowers.—Charlie Kaufman 1There are some things that cannot be observed directly, even in principle: a single quark, the present moment, ones own eye. What Richard Rodriquez calls the "one (...) subject" of literature—"What it feels like to be alive" 2 —is perhaps another one of those things. A writer struggles to be true to something central about life—to catch it on the fly, to get it right. Some have reified this "something" as "the soul" or "the human spirit." Today, though, we mainly rely on placeholders: "it," for example, as in "do you get it?" or "what's it all about?"—a usage that flirts with the vanishing "it" of "it is raining," implying a source or substance behind phenomena in which we do not really believe but without which we cannot do justice to experience. In any case, the writer's attempt to represent this elusive heart of things is typically frustrated, done in by the slipperiness of words, the cludginess of the conventions of communication, and the waywardness of the imagination. Writing inevitably falls short of its deepest aims.Nevertheless, there is something deviously affirmative in this state of affairs. For if life is a thing that refuses to be observed, then isn't the very failure of literature, if consciously acknowledged, a way of staying true to it? Isn't the writer's disappointment an especially telling feature of "what it feels like to be alive?" Emerson, more clearly than most, understood how this trick is turned: "We grant that human life is [End Page 424] mean; but how did we find out that it was mean? What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim?" 3 As noted above, "the soul" is a disposable term here. If you prefer, say simply "the human," "life," or "it." The point, in any case, is that the elusive subject which cannot be stated or represented directly may nevertheless be implied. If the human cannot be caught in a formula, it may be embodied or enacted in the ongoing work of creation.Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation is both an argument for and an example of this implicit realization of the human in art. Many viewers and even reviewers might see it as a poor candidate for humanistic interpretation along these lines. Most, in fact, have seen the film as little more than a clever postmodern puzzle-box, albeit one with great acting, deft direction, and a generous sense of humor. Its theme, after all, is the representation of representation. A book is being rewritten or adapted to become the film we are watching. The subject of that film is its own author's struggle to create it. The film further calls attention to its own artificiality by changing the rules of representation on us midway through. Its tone, style, and basic genre conventions shift when the author/protagonist begins to rethink his original purposes, undermining the credibility of all representational schemes in the process. Adaptation, in short, seems to be what the graduate-educated a decade ago might have felt comfortable calling "an endless play of simulacra," a text absorbed in its own textuality, a snake that eats its own tail. 4All of this is true enough, but it is not the whole story. The point of Adaptation, I will argue, is not simply the pleasure it takes in playing with issues of representation, but its clear sense of the human issues at stake in that play. Adaptation, that is, is not only about the way words tend to float free of the world. Rather, it is also a demonstration of the way a writer's basic goal can survive the wreck of her intentions, or the way that failed attempts to be true to life... (shrink)

Gratitude has been promoted as a beneficial emotional experience. However, gratitude is not universally experienced as positive. The current work examines whether an autonomous interpersonal style is associated with differential experience of gratitude. Study 1 found an inverse relationship between trait autonomy and both trait gratitude and positivity of response to receiving a hypothetical benefit from a friend. Study 2 replicated the finding that those higher in autonomy report less trait gratitude, and also demonstrated an inverse relationship between autonomy (...) and valuing gratitude. Study 3 found that those higher in autonomy had more self-image goals and reduced compassionate goals in relationships, and that valuing gratitude mediated the relationship between autonomy and relationship goals. These results show a consistent inverse relationship between autonomy and the experience and valuing of gratitude, suggesting that degree of autonomy is one determinant of whether gratitude is experienced as positive. (shrink)

The paper investigates inaccessible set axioms and their consistency strength in constructive set theory. In ZFC inaccessible sets are of the form Vκ where κ is a strongly inaccessible cardinal and Vκ denotes the κth level of the von Neumann hierarchy. Inaccessible sets figure prominently in category theory as Grothendieck universes and are related to universes in type theory. The objective of this paper is to show that the consistency strength of inaccessible set axioms heavily depend on the context in (...) which they are embedded. The context here will be the theory CZF− of constructive Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory but without -Induction . Let INAC be the statement that for every set there is an inaccessible set containing it. CZF−+INAC is a mathematically rich theory in which one can easily formalize Bishop style constructive mathematics and a great deal of category theory. CZF−+INAC also has a realizability interpretation in type theory which gives its theorems a direct computational meaning. The main result presented here is that the proof theoretic ordinal of CZF−+INAC is a small ordinal known as the Feferman–Schütte ordinal Γ0. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. By IRIS MURDOCH. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane; New York: Viking, 1992. $35.00. Dame Iris Murdoch is familiar to most people as a witty and en· gaging novelist whose twenty-four hooks of fiction can he read on a variety of levels. They are wonderful stories, hut the philosophically acute reader will also enjoy Murdoch's judgments, polemics, and inhouse jokes about philosophers and philosophical (...) views. Comparatively few people are aware of Murdoch's previous scholarly studies: Sartre, Romantic Rationalist, The Sovereignty of the Good, The Fire and the Sun; and Acastos. Even so, those familiar with these hooks will recognize the profound impact she has had on debates within moral philosophy. She has been at the forefront of the move· ment that has rehabilitated the central importance of such notions as goodness, the Good, virtue, and the moral life as a journey. So it is not surprising that Murdoch has returned to the genre of philosophical argument to advance her views on the relationship between metaphysics and morals. But it is surprising that her argument exhibits neither the clarity of thought characteristic of the analytic philosophy in which she was trained nor the dramatic narrative of her novels. Indeed the hook reads like a collage of lecture notes, complete with extensive quotations from other people's thoughts with minimal com· mentary. Further, the chapter titles (e.g., " Fact and Value," " Schopenhauer," " Consciousness and Thought-I," " Derrida and Struc· turalism," " Consciousness and Thought-II," "Notes on Will and Duty," " Axioms, Duties, Eros," " Void ") shed little light on the overall structure or argument of the hook. One cannot help hut have the impression that Murdoch spent less time crafting the argument of this hook than she does in crafting the story line and characters of her novels. This is not to say, of course, that there is not much to he learned from Murdoch's perspective. She is remarkably erudite, and her discussion of various themes, figures, and issues often yields fascinating insights. But the whole is considerably less than the sum of its often interesting parts. I have already suggested that this is partly because of the structure and style in which the hook is written. But the hook 687 688 BOOK REVIEWS is also disappointing, and perhaps more determinatively, because of the overall perspective she seeks to deploy and defend. Readers of Murdoch's work have heretofore often wondered about the relationship between her avowed Platonism and her interest in Christianity. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals has the virtue of clarifying that relationship, hut the result is unpersuasive. At the heart of Murdoch's Platonism is her recasting of the allegory of the cave from The Republic. The moral life is an arduous struggle to ascend from the cave (represented, as in her earlier works, by " the fat, relentless ego ") by a dispossession of the self so that we can apprehend a little less imperfectly the perfect form of the Good. As Murdoch puts it, Plato assumes the internal relation of value, truth, cogmtion. Virtue (as compassion, humility, courage) involves a desire for and achievement of truth instead of falsehood, reality instead of appearance. Goodness involves truth.seeking knowledge and ipso facto a discipline of desire. ' Getting things right ', as in meticulous grammar or mathematics, is truth-seeking as virtue. Learning anything properly demands (virtuous ) attention. Here the idea of truth plays a crucial role (as it does also in Kant) and reality emerges as the object of truthful vision, and virtuous action as the product of such vision. This is a picture of the omnipresence of morality and evaluation in human life (p. 39). Such a depiction ought to resonate quite deeply with Christians, something not lost on Murdoch when she writes a few pages earlier: "There are innumerable points at which we have to detach ourselves, to change our orientation, to redirect our desire and refresh and purify our energy, to keep on looking in the right direction: to attend upon the grace that comes through faith " (p. 25). But Murdoch's "grace" and her "truth-seeking as virtue," among other themes, involve something quite different from what Christians... (shrink)