Politics and the Religious Imagination is the product of a group of interdisciplinary scholars each analyzing the connections between religious narratives and the construction of regional and global politics, combining a set of theoretical and philosophic insights with several case studies that represent varied geographies and religious customs. The past decade has seen increasing interest in the links between religion and politics, and this edited volume seeks to take religion seriously as a motivator of action. Few studies have attempted to (...) bring together the multi-disciplinary work in this burgeoning field of study and this work takes a global perspective, using a variety of contexts including East-West relations to analyze the following key themes: the constructive and destructive hermeneutics of religious stories the relevance and importance of religion as a dominant political narrative the rise of new stories among groups as agents of change the way that religious narratives help to define and constrain the Other the manipulation of religious stories for political benefit This work argues that it is insufficient to judge the relationship of religion and politics through mere institutional or quantitative lenses, and this collection proves that while this promise of the narrative part of the social imaginary has been recognized in political theory to a certain extent, its influence in the realm of empirical political science has yet to be fully considered. Combining the work of a wide range of experts, this collection will be of great interests to scholars of politics, philosophy, religious studies, and the literary influence of religion. (shrink)

Kant’s philosophy of science takes on sharp contour in terms of his interaction with the practicing life scientists of his day, particularly Johann Blumenbach and the latter’s student, Christoph Girtanner, who in 1796 attempted to synthesize the ideas of Kant and Blumenbach. Indeed, Kant’s engagement with the life sciences played a far more substantial role in his transcendental philosophy than has been recognized hitherto. The theory of epigenesis, especially in light of Kant’s famous analogy in the first Critique, posed crucial (...) questions regarding the ‘looseness of fit’ between the constitutive and the regulative in Kant’s theory of empirical law. A detailed examination of Kant’s struggle with epigenesis between 1784 and 1790 demonstrates his grave reservations about its hylozoist implications, leading to his even stronger insistence on the discrimination of constitutive from regulative uses of reason. The continuing relevance of these issues for Kant’s philosophy of science is clear from the work of Buchdahl and its contemporary reception. (shrink)

Is helping those whose subsistence needs are not meet a matter of charity or an obligation? What role should ordinary citizens of developed nations play? In a globalized world, the causes, connections, and responsibilities become complicated. Agriculture subsidies that keep food prices low for many in relatively rich countries may, for example, negatively impact poor farmers in developing countries. Students in Ethics/Philosophy 352 report on their project examining whether, and to what extent, a true obligation to aid exists.

Ankersmit's articulation of a postmodern theory of history takes seriously both the strengths of traditional historicism and the right of historians to decide what makes sense for disciplinary practice. That makes him an exemplary interlocutor. Ankersmit proposes a theory of historical "representation" which radicalizes the narrative approach to historiography along the lines of poststructuralist textualism. Against this postmodernism but invoking some of his own arguments, I defend the traditional historicist position. I formulate criticisms of the theory of reference entailed in (...) his notion of "narrative substance," of his master analogy of historiography with modern painting, and finally of his characterization of historical hermeneutics. In each case I find him guilty of the hyperbole which he himself cautions against. While it is true that historical narratives cannot be taken to be transparent, in taking them to be opaque Ankersmit puts himself in an untenable position. Finally, Ankersmit seeks to buttress his theoretical case by an interpretation of the new cultural historical texts of authors like Davis and Ginzburg. While this is a concreteness heartily to be welcomed in philosophers of history, I cannot find his construction of this new school's work plausible. (shrink)

The article discusses Albert Einstein’s unique ability to devise, pursue, and exploit imaginary physical situations: his dreams. Although such thought- or gedanken-experiments were always based on commonly held premises, Einstein was able, over and over, to use gedankenexperiments to capture the barest physical essentials of a situation, and to proceed from those essentials to their inescapable consequences, no matter how astonishing, no matter how remote from previous conventional wisdom. The paper describes and discusses the thought-experiments that Einstein used in achieving (...) his most notable successes, the Special and General Theories of Relativity. It discusses the origins of each, their physical meaning, and some of the ways in which the principles embodied in the thought-experiments contributed to his subsequent discoveries. The paper concludes by contrasting Einstein’s Special and General Relativity campaigns with his search for a theory describing gravity and electromagnetism as part of a greater whole, a Unified Field Theory. In almost thirty years of trying, he made little or no progress. Notably, Einstein never reported devising a thought-experiment to motivate or guide him in this, the longest effort of his career. (shrink)

The notion of Trieb, constitutive for Blumenbach’s greatest conceptual intervention, the Bildungstrieb, intentionally separated it from the other Bildungskräfte that had been identified in the physical world. This discrimination proved decisive for Kant. Thus we must endeavor to reconstruct the source and the significance of Blumenbach’s conceptual departure. My argument will be that in his turn to Trieb, Blumenbach drew upon the pioneering work of Hermann Reimarus. Thus, my argument will have three components: first, the conceptualization of Trieb in Reimarus; (...) second, the introduction of that term into Blumenbach’s own theorizing, in the notion Bildungstrieb; and, finally, how that figured in the reception of Blumenbach by Kant. (shrink)

A veritable tidal shift in Herder scholarship has taken place over the last quarter century, primarily but not exclusively in German. This review essay seeks to evoke the richness and vitality of this revival with the hope of persuading American academics that some ill-founded opinions still circulating concerning Herder's "irrationalism" and chauvinistic, even racist nationalism, and his philosophical naivety and literary effrontery, might at last be put to rest. The recent revival has brough sharply to the fore two crucial aspects (...) of Herder. First, there is the contribution of Herder's thought to the emergent cultural and social sciences. Second, for Herder the "science of man" was also a natural science: the division between the humanities and the natural sciences that has been such a hallmark of the age from Kant until very recently did not exist for Herder. (shrink)

Reconstructions of Kant are prominent in the contemporary debate over naturalism. Given that this naturalism rejects a priori principles, Kant's anti-naturalism can best be discerned in the “critical turn” as a response to David Hume. Hume did not awaken Kant to criticize but to defend rational metaphysics. But when Kant went transcendental did he not, in fact, go transcendent? The controversy in the 1990s over John McDowell's Mind and World explored just this suspicion: the questions of the normative force (...) of reason and of the ontological “space of reasons” vis- -vis the world. “Bald naturalism” appears to “extrude” rationality both ontologically and epistemologically from the natural world. Kant sought to discriminate a transcendental middle ground, safe from either extrusion. But was Kant's notion of the autonomy and spontaneity of reason as metaphysically innocent as McDowell's critics would have it? Situating Hume and naturalism in the eighteenth-century German context can help us understand the “critical turn” more accurately. While Hume recognized procedural proprieties for reflection, he did not believe in their a priori necessity. Initially, Kant shared that view. What assimilating Leibniz and Locke in the late 1760s garnered for Kant—the simultaneous spontaneity and self-transparency of reason—seemed to provide a means for overcoming Hume's skepticism and establishing a new foundation for metaphysics. Accordingly, all of the efforts of modern Kantianism notwithstanding, there is more than a whiff of the transcendent in Kant's transcendentalism. (shrink)

The two theories that revolutionized physics in the twentieth century, relativity and quantum mechanics, are full of predictions that defy common sense. Recently, we used three such paradoxical ideas to prove “The Free Will Theorem” (strengthened here), which is the culmination of a series of theorems about quantum mechanics that began in the 1960s. It asserts, roughly, that if indeed we humans have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of this valuable commodity. More precisely, if (...) the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus in a certain measurement, then the particle’s response (to be pedantic—the universe’s response near the particle) is not determined by the entire previous history of the universe. Our argument combines the well-known consequence of relativity theory, that the time order of space-like separated events is not absolute, with the EPR paradox discovered by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen in 1935, and the Kochen-Specker Paradox of 1967 (See [2].) We follow Bohm in using a spin version of EPR and Peres in using his set of 33 directions, rather than the original configuration used by Kochen and Specker. More contentiously, the argument also involves the notion of free will, but we postpone further discussion of this to the last section of the article. Note that our proof does not mention “probabilities” or the “states” that determine them, which is.. (shrink)

In this book, John H. Smith investigates the influences of classical and humanistic rhetoric on Hegel's theory and practice of philosophical representation. Smith focuses on Hegel's concept of Bildung (roughly, education, development, or formation) which occupies a central position in his philosophy.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Machiavelli’s Moses and Renaissance PoliticsJohn H. GeerkenWithin the almost Dantesque array of humanity that populates the pages of Machiavelli’s canon, Moses occupies a special place. He first appears in chapter six of The Prince concerning those who acquire new princedoms by dint of their own virtù and military self-sufficiency. He last appears in the Discourses as one who was forced to kill a host of envious opponents. There is (...) some irony in these representations: in The Prince, with its tyrannical overtones, Moses appears as God’s friend; but in the Discourses, with its republican associations, Moses is an executioner. Machiavelli captures some of the ambiguity that attends on Moses when he declares that “Moses should not be discussed, since he was a mere executor of things laid down for him by God, nevertheless he ought to be exalted, if only for the grace that made him worthy to speak with God.” 1 Are we to exalt Moses, but not discuss him? Then, too, why bother with either God or Moses? Why complicate the search for the effectual truth of things by invoking metaphysical elements or inimitable biblical figures? How are we to understand these references? Are these ironic as sometimes asserted?But what are the heuristic possibilities in a non-ironic approach? If Moses had so great a teacher, what was his curriculum? Since no other figure in the Machiavellian census is so associated with slavery, was Moses a vehicle for making an assertion about slavery and liberation, or about politics and religion, or about the morality of politics? Then, too, how did Machiavelli’s Moses compare to the Moses who was so prominent in Renaissance iconology? These are the questions which this study addresses.I. Of the several references to Moses, the most telling is the last one in the Discourses. Machiavelli writes: “He who reads the Bible intelligently [sensata-mente] [End Page 579] sees that if Moses was to put his laws and regulations into effect, he was forced to kill countless men who, moved by nothing else than envy, were opposed to his plans.” 2A great deal is compressed into this passage: the confrontation of Moses’ virtù with the necessity imposed by his opposition, the need to use violent means to achieve lawful ends, and the implied sanction of sacred Scripture. But the Bible, Machiavelli asserts pointedly, must be read intelligently—presumably not in a devotional, liturgical, or exegetical manner, but in effect politically. Machiavelli wrote that he himself read in order to learn the reasons for human actions. 3 Indeed, one of his reasons for writing history was to convey his conviction that “[i]f any reading is useful to citizens who govern republics, it is that which shows the causes of the hatreds and factional struggles within the city, in order that such citizens having grown wise through the sufferings of others, can keep themselves united.” 4In a word reading can be political. References to biblical figures in his works indicate that for Machiavelli the Bible was not exempt from a political reading; it, too, could yield the reasons for human actions and the causes of hatred and factionalism. 5 We can assume, therefore, that he read the Book of Exodus with these concerns in mind even as he invited his own readers to read the Bible. What, therefore, can the Book of Exodus show us?II. The Book of Exodus records at least forty-three conversations between God and Moses, thirty-three of which were initiated by God in order to instruct, command, announce, predict, threaten, remind, warn, and legislate. It records God’s determination to rescue his convenanted people despite pharaoh’s sustained resistance. 6 It records as well the instructional conversations dealing with the plagues, the sacrifices, the Passover, the plundering of Egypt, the escape routes and the encampments. 7 And of course there is the account of the crossing of the Red Sea which no Egyptian pursuer survived. 8Noteworthy, too, is the fact that, for his part, Moses initiated ten conversations with God, declaring his personal doubts and inadequacies, offering his excuses, complaining about the hardships of his mission, reporting on the grumbling... (shrink)

This two-part article examines whether Sartre's final interviews, recorded in L'Espoir maintenant [ Hope Now ], indicate a final turn to belief through an overview of his engagement with the idea of God throughout his career. In Part 1 we examine Sartre's early atheism, but note the pervasive nature of secularised Christian metaphors and concepts in his religion of letters and the centrality of man's desire to be God in Being and Nothingness . His theoretical writings seek to refute the (...) idea of God, but in doing so God is paradoxically both absent and present. In Part 2 we assess his anti-theism and consider his final encounter with theism in L'Espoir maintenant, arguing that it is part of Sartre's long-term engagement with the idea of God. (shrink)

Advertising spokespersons have been defending their industry against tobacco and alcohol advertising bans by claiming the bans will do no good. In mature categories, they say advertising does not attract new users, but merely causes people to switch brands. This article contends that such an argument is based on legal pragmatism and will eventually fail because the public does not believe it. It suggests an ethical defense based on the public's right to know.

This essay presents in outline of an argument for interpreting Zhu Xi’s (1130-1200) mature Daoxue 道學philosophy in terms of an architectonic of four configurative traits: form, dynamics, unification, and value. Further, it is proposed that Zhu’s Daoxue ought to be considered a form of axiology in terms of contemporary comparative global philosophical dialogue. It is important to try to present Zhu’s Daoxue or Teaching of the Way as a living philosophical option and not just a historical artifact; it is, as (...) David Hall and Roger Ames have explained, a fine example of ars contextualis or the art of the contextual as a form of relational axiology. One of the chief examples adduced to sustain this thesis is Zhu’s theory of cheng 誠 or self-realization. Further, there is also an extended discussion of the formative role of li 理 principle and qi 氣 vital force as critical elements of the structure of Zhu’s thought. (shrink)

Originally published in 1931, Muirhead’s study aims to challenge the view that Locke’s empiricism is the main philosophical thought to come out of England, suggesting that the Platonic tradition is much more prominent. These views are explored in detail in this text as well as touching on its development in the nineteenth century from Coleridge to Bradley and discussions on Transcendentalism in the United States. This title will be of interest to students of Philosophy.

This book advocates for the United States to abolish nuclear weapons, arguing its necessity in terms of the harmful consequences of nuclear deterrence. Kultgen's argument is based on conceptions of human rights and is couched in terms accessible to the disciplines that address human affairs in the social sciences, history, arts, and humanities.

Ritual behaviors of some form exist in every society known to anthropologists. Despite this universality, we have little understanding of how ritual behavior varies within populations or across the lifespan, nor the determinants of this variation. Here we test hypotheses derived from life history theory by using behavioral observations and oral interview data concerning participant variation in Fijian kava-drinking ceremonies. We predicted that substantial variation in the frequency and duration of participation would result from (1) trade-offs with reproduction and (2) (...) the intrinsic status differences between ritual participants. We demonstrate that when controlling for household composition, men with young offspring participated less frequently and exhibited greater variance in their time spent at ceremonies than men without young children. However, men with a larger number of total dependents in their household participated more frequently than those with fewer. Moreover, we found that men’s ascribed rank, level of education, and reliance on wage labor all significantly predict their frequency of attendance. We also found that the number of dependents a man has in his household is positively correlated with total food production, and the amount of kava he cultivates. In general, these results suggest that ritual participation is part of an important strategy employed by Fijian men for both achieving status and developing social alliances. Variation in participation in kava ceremonies by Fijian men therefore reflects the constraints of their current life history condition and their inherited rank. (shrink)