. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 RECORDER'S PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (...) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 THE DISCUSSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.. (shrink)

One of the principal aims of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, especially of the Doctrine of Virtue, is to present a taxonomy of our duties as human beings. The basic division of duties is between juridical duties and ethical duties, which determines the division of the Metaphysics of Morals into the Doctrine of Right and the Doctrine of Virtue. Juridical duties are duties that may be coercively enforced from outside the agent, as by the civil or criminal laws, or other social (...) pressures. Ethical duties must not be externally enforced (to do so violates the right of the person coerced). Instead, the subject herself, through her own reason and the feelings and motives arising a priori from her rational capacities -- the feelings of respect, conscience, moral feeling and love of other human beings, must constrain herself to follow them (MS 6:399-404).1 Among ethical duties, the fundamental division is between duties to oneself and duties to others. Within each of these two main divisions of ethical duty, there is a further division between duties that are strictly owed, requiring specific actions or omissions, and whose violation incurs moral blame, and duties that are wide or meritorious, the specific actions not strictly owed, but deserving of moral credit or merit. Kant treats these latter as ‘duties’ (eschewing any category such as ‘supererogation’) because the actions in question are conceived as fit objects of self-constraint – things we can make ourselves do through the exercise of reason and the moral feelings arising from the application of practical reason to our faculty of desire. Regarding duties to oneself, this division is between ‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect’ duty; regarding duties to others, the strict or narrow... (shrink)

This book explores Kant's views on the concept of God and on the attempt to demonstrate God's existence as a means of understanding Kant's work as a whole and of achieving a proper appreciation of the contents of Kant's moral faith.

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that internally generated images and thoughts were driven by meaning complexes, a construct which reflects a synthesis of semantic meaning and personal salience . Experiments 1 and 2 contrasted the mutual inhibition between encoding words and non-words on: the frequency that thoughts and images unrelated to the task were experienced and on the intensity of images generated from long-term memory and maintained under dual task conditions, which whilst familiar were not of particular personal salience . (...) Experiment 3 examined the physiological arousal associated with the experience of TUT in a semantic encoding task. Evidence suggested that, in general, internally generated images and thoughts, irrespective of the personal salience, were suppressed by the co-ordination of information in working memory. In addition, only the experience of spontaneous images and thoughts of personal salience interfered reliably with the encoding/retrieval of semantic information from memory. Finally, in Experiment 3, physiological arousal, as indexed by mean heart rate, was associated with a high frequency of TUT. The results of all three experiments support the notion that the maintenance of spontaneously occurring images and thoughts is simultaneously influenced by both the semantic content and the personal salience of the information held in working memory. (shrink)

The structure and style of philosophy has evolved in response to philosophy's confrontation with its own limits. Are these limits real or are they just phantoms haunting the philosophical project? How do philosophy and philosophers attempt to overcome these limits, or at least come to terms with them? In "Philosophy at the Limit" David Wood pursues this theme in modern philosophers from Hegel to Derrida including Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Gadamer. He focuses on questions of philosophical style, problems with (...) dialogue and in direct communication, the structural closure of philosophical texts, and performative strategy in philosophy. "Philosophy at the Limit" is an accessible discussion of some of the complex issues that empower continental philosophy. It may appeal to students of philosophy and contemporary thought at every level, and to the general reader interested in the heart of the current debates in European thought. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida's prolific output has been the delight of philosophers and literary theorists for over twenty years. His influence on the way we read theoretical texts continues to be profound. No serious contemporary thinker can fail to come to terms with deconstruction and there have been a number of monographs devoted to his work. Very few, however, have combined a critical edge with a detailed knowledge of his writing. The contributors to this volume were each asked - in the most (...) positive sense - to take just such a critical approach. There are substantive papers by Jean-Luc Nancy, Manfred Frank, John Sallis, Robert Bernasconi, Irene Harvey, Michel Haar, Christopher Norris, Geoff Bennington, John Llewelyn and an introduction by David Wood. (shrink)

Rachel Carson begins her revolutionary book Silent Spring with a quote from E.B. White that reads ‘we would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively’. While White's advice can account for an instrumental relationship towards nature, I believe that the more important relationship offered in his recommendation is one of appreciation or gratitude. But how are we to understand gratitude as appreciating Nature non-instrumentally when it has traditionally always been understood (...) as a response to a benefit received? My motivation is to modify our traditional conception of gratitude alongside Simon Hailwood's account of the ‘Otherness of Nature’ to see how we can truly show gratitude for Nature rather than simply reflecting on how Nature serves human interests. (shrink)

(Ak 10:74).[1] During the so-called ‘silent decade’ of the 1770s, when Kant was working on the Critique of Pure Reason, he promised repeatedly not only that he would soon finish that work but also that he would soon publish a “metaphysics of morals” (Ak 10:97, 132, 144).[2] Yet it was not until four years after the first Critique that Kant finally wrote a work on ethics, and even then he merely laid the ground for a metaphysics of morals by identifying (...) and establishing the supreme principle on which a system of duties would be based (G 4:392). Three years later, in the Critique of Practical Reason Kant once again dealt entirely with foundational questions in moral philosophy. Kantian ethics is primarily known, especially among English-speaking philosophers, through these two ethical works of the 1780s, neither of which contains anything like a ‘metaphysics of morals’. (shrink)

The Free Development of Each collects twelve essays on the history of German philosophy by Allen W. Wood, one of the leading scholars in the field. They explore moral philosophy, politics, society, and history in the works of Kant, Herder, Fichte, Hegel, and Marx, and share the basic theme of freedom, as it appears in morality and in politics.

This paper examines three propositions: “First to arise within intellectual awareness is the notion of Being”; the human being is defined as “the rational animal”; and knowing involves “the complete return of the subject into itself.” Its starting point is an examination of what seems trivial: the letter ‘F’ in ‘First.’ It involves eidetic recognition of the alphabet and is identically the same, not only in different times and places and in different type-faces or hand-written form, but in differing media: (...) visual, audile, tactual. And eidetic recognition is also involved in the terms into which the letters or sounds or embossings enter, each of which is definable in terms of other terms which, in turn, are definable in other terms until we see that the whole itself is articulated in terms of the interlacing of meanings. What grounds such recognition is the openness to the whole introduced by the notion of being. The unrestrictedness of the openness is paralleled by the coemergence of the principle of noncontradiction which governs coherent discourse. In both sensory presentation and intellectual apprehension we are outside our spatial inside, with the things manifest in the environment and in terms of the world of public meaning expressed in language. The second part of the paper traces the various options for understanding the notion of being in the history of Western thought: Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Scotus, Spinoza, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. (shrink)

The formation of the modern state, the rise of capitalism, the Renaissance and Reformation, the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment have all been attributed to the “early modern” period. Nearly everything about its history remains controversial, but one thing is certain: it left a rich and provocative legacy of political ideas unmatched in Western history. The concepts of liberty, equality, property, human rights and revolution born in those turbulent centuries continue to shape, and to limit, political discourse today. (...) Assessing the work and background of figures such as Machiavelli, Luther, Calvin, Spinoza, the Levellers, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, Ellen Wood vividly explores the ideas of the canonical thinkers, not as philosophical abstractions but as passionately engaged responses to the social conflicts of their day. (shrink)

A Society of the Friends of Difference would have to include Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Saussure, Freud, Adorno, Heidegger, Levinas, Deleuze, and Lyotard among its most prominent members.

Wood reiterated his previous papers of view - "For Marx, economic, trade or social system of justice or not depends on its mode of production with the established relationship" that Hussami the "justice is not only determined by the mode of production and determined by class position, "the view attributed to Marx is a misconception that Marx was a capitalist from the standards of justice to go after the critique of capitalist society, it is a misreading of Marx's text. (...) In his view, Marx's critique of capitalism is based on the analysis of the overall critique of social production, the criticism is based on freedom, community and self-realization and other non-moral good criticism, and not based on moral rights or justice, good criticism. (shrink)

This paper is a critical examination of one central theme in Jon Elster's Making Sense of Marx; Elster's defense of ?methodological individualism? in social science and his related critique of Marx's use of ?functional explanation?. The paper does not quarrel with Elster's claim that the particular instances of functional explanation advanced by Marx are defective; what it criticizes is Elster's attempt to raise principled, philosophical objections to this type of explanation in the social sciences. It is argued that Elster's philosophical (...) critique of functional explanation rests on a caricature of this kind of explanation, just as his critique of Marx's use of teleology in the philosophy of history rests on a caricature of the kinds of teleological claims Marx is concerned to make. The paper ends with a brief discussion of a recently published passage from Marx's notebooks of 1861?1863, where Elster claims to have found Marx explicitly criticizing capitalist exploitation as an injustice to the workers. (shrink)

It is well known that Hegel contrasts the “Moral standpoint” or “morality” with the higher standpoint of “social ethics” or “ethical life”, and that he regards Kant’s ethical theory as an expression of the moral standpoint. Hegel finds many shortcomings in the moral standpoint, but probably the most famous of Hegel’s criticisms of Kantian moral theory is the charge that Kant’s theory is an “empty formalism,” incapable of providing any “immanent doctrine of duties,” The Kantian moral law, says Hegel, has (...) no content; its only criterion of morally right action is non-contradictoriness, and that proves to be no criterion at all, because it is a criterion which even the most immoral actions are able to satisfy. (shrink)

Central to Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society was the description and justification of the method adopted and advocated by the Fellows of the Society, for it was thought that it was their method which distinguished them from ancients, dogmatists, sceptics, and contemporary natural philosophers such as Descartes. The Fellows saw themselves as furthering primarily a novel method, rather than a system, of philosophy, and the History gave expression to this corporate self-perception. However, the History's description of their method (...) was not necessarily accurate. Rather, as will be argued below, by a combination of subtle misrepresentation and selective exposition, Sprat portrayed a method which would further the aims of social and ecclesiastical stability and material prosperity, essential for the Royal Society since its continued existence depended upon the creation of a social basis for the institutionalized pursuit of natural philosophy. Some link had to be forged between the activities of the Society and the intellectual and social aspirations of the Restoration. To understand the intent and meaning of Sprat's History and the method there portrayed, we must therefore look to the institutional needs which it fulfilled. (shrink)

This Element defends a reading of Kant's formulas of the moral law in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. It disputes a long tradition concerning what the first formula attempts to do. The Element also expounds the Formulas of Humanity, Autonomy and the Realm of Ends, arguing that it is only the Formula of Humanity from which Kant derives general duties, and that it is only the third formula that represents a complete and definitive statement of the moral principle as (...) Kant derives it in the Groundwork. The Element also disputes the claim that the various formulas are 'equivalent', arguing that this claim is either false or else nonsensical because it is grounded on a false premise about what Kant thinks a moral principle is for. (shrink)

A questionnaire on business ethics was administered to business professionals and to upper-class business ethics students. On eight of the seventeen situations involving ethical dilemmas in business, students were significantly more willing to engage in questionable behavior than were their professional counterparts. Apparently, many students were willing to do whatever was necessary to further their own interests, with little or no regard for fundamental moral principles. Many students and professionals functioned within Lawrence Kohlberg's stage four of moral reasoning, the law (...) and order stage. Individualism and egoism remain strong patterns in the moral reasoning of many professionals, but they influence moral reasoning patterns among students to a much greater degree. (shrink)

This essay, as the title suggests, is not just a reply to Richard Ashcraft -- although it is certainly that too. Its intention is to say something about the political theory of Locke, about his historical context and about the methodological question of contexts in general. About his political theory, I want to make two or three main points which, I think, have important consequences for our understanding of Locke: that he both appropriates and, on critical issues, deliberately neutralizes the (...) radical �discourses� of his time -- so that, for example, he adopts Leveller premises to arrive at something more like Cromwell's (or even more conservative) conclusions; and that he deprives these radical discourses of their most democratic implications less by excluding people from membership in the political nation than by restricting the rights of membership itself. This means, among other things, that the relevant debate is not the one that has so preoccupied Locke scholars -- namely, the controversy about who is a �freeman� or who belongs to the �people�. The decisive question is rather what political rights the �people� have. (shrink)

This volume collects for the first time in a single volume all of Kant's writings on religion and rational theology. These works were written during a period of conflict between Kant and the Prussian authorities over his religious teachings. His final statement of religion was made after the death of King Frederick William II in 1797. The historical context and progression of this conflict are charted in the general introduction to the volume and in the translators' introductions to particular texts. (...) All the translations are new with the exception of The Conflict of the Faculties, where the translation has been revised and re-edited to conform to the guidelines of the Cambridge Edition. As is standard with all the volumes in this edition, there are copious linguistic and explanatory notes, and a glossary of key terms. (shrink)

This book brings together three distinct research programs in moral psychology - Moral Foundations Theory, Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange and the Linguistic Analogy in Moral Psychology - and shows that they can be combined to create a unified cognitive science of moral intuition. The book assumes evolution has furnished the human mind with two types of judgement: intuitive and deliberative. Focusing on moral intuitions (understood as moral judgments that were not arrived at via a process of conscious deliberation), the (...) book explores the origins of these intuitions, examines how they are produced, and explains why the moral intuitions of different humans differ. Providing a unique synthesis of three separate established fields, this book presents a new research program that will further our understanding of the various different intuitive moral judgements at the heart of some of the moral tensions within human society. (shrink)

The recent decrease in public confidence in the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine has important implications for individuals and public health. This article presents moral arguments relating to conflicts between individual autonomy and collective responsibilities in vaccination decisions with a view to informing and advising health professionals and improving the effectiveness of education policies in avoiding resurgence of endemic measles. Lower population immunity, due to falling uptake, is hastening the need for greater public awareness of the consequences for the population. (...) Vaccination refusals go hand in hand with responsibilities owed to future generations and society in not knowingly contributing to preventable harms. Issues such as parents’ rights are considered and balanced against: collective responsibilities for public health; permissibility of ‘free-riding’; conflicting duties of health professionals; and possible enforcement of vaccination. It is suggested that the arguments may form a persuasive tool for the practice of health professionals involved in informing and supporting parents’ vaccination decisions. (shrink)

Explores the ethical and political possibilities of philosophy after deconstruction.