If nations are sacred, then there is no warranting our having drawn the map of the Middle East to suit our needs rather than those of the peoples who populate those lands. If we have the right to draw world maps to suit our needs rather than those of the peoples who populate those lands, on the other hand, then there is no warranting the claim that nations are sacred. If patriotism is love of one’s nation, then patriotism’s being a (...) dangerous thing makes nations a dangerous thing. And if nations are a dangerous thing it would seem impossible to warrant the claim that they are sacred. But if nations are a sacred thing, then there would seem no warranting the claim that patriotism is a dangerous thing. If nations are things of the past, then there is no claiming that they are sacred, and if nations are sacred there is no claiming that they are things of the past. So the little church on Cedar Street begs us to ask terrible questions. Are we right in thinking that nations are a thing of the past? Or are they things to be protected, loved, and celebrated? Are nations sacred? (shrink)

This article analyzes the claim that “deliberate denial [of genocide] is a form of aggression that ought to be regarded as a contribution to genocidal violence in its own right.” Its objective is to demonstrate that the claim is substantially correct: there are instances of genocide negation that are genocidal acts. The article suggests that one such instance is contained in a letter sent to Professor Robert Jay Lifton by Turkey's ambassador to the United States. The article is divided into (...) three parts. In the first part, it delineates and discusses the unexpected contents of the letter to Lifton. In the second, it primarily deals with three topics: lying, genocide, and Austinian performatives. In the third part, it takes the points made in the second part and applies them to the contents of the letter to Lifton, and demonstrates that the letter is an instance of genocide negation that is genocidal. (shrink)

This article analyzes the claim that “deliberate denial [of genocide] is a form of aggression that ought to be regarded as a contribution to genocidal violence in its own right.” Its objective is to demonstrate that the claim is substantially correct: there are instances of genocide negation that are genocidal acts. The article suggests that one such instance is contained in a letter sent to Professor Robert Jay Lifton by Turkey's ambassador to the United States. The article is divided into (...) three parts. In the first part, it delineates and discusses the unexpected contents of the letter to Lifton. In the second, it primarily deals with three topics: lying, genocide, and Austinian performatives. In the third part, it takes the points made in the second part and applies them to the contents of the letter to Lifton, and demonstrates that the letter is an instance of genocide negation that is genocidal. (shrink)

One of the primary concerns of the Consolatio is to draw out many of the paradoxical conclusions concerning the relation between creation and God that stem from the premises of classical creationist metaphysics, and attempt to solve them. Once one accepts that God does exist, is omnipotent, omniscient, and simple, it becomes viciously difficult to explain: (1) how anything contrary to God’s will—evil—can exist; (2) how any cause can act independently of God’s will—human freedom; and (3) how “independent causes” can (...) relate to God through their own agency—human prayer. This naturally begs the question: why should we accept the premises of classical creationist metaphysics? This paper addresses this question by analyzing and defending two of the central premises of Boethius’s version of classical creationist metaphysics as they are addressed in Consolatio III,10: (a) that God exists, and (b) that God is simple. (shrink)

This paper regards the plausibility of rejecting the scholastic claim that the “good” is a transcendental property of being—that ens et bonum convertuntur—onthe basis of two claims: Stephen Cahn’s claim that evil worlds created by an evil God are intrinsically plausible—i.e., that it is plausible to think of evil as a positive and instantiable property; and the claim that “evil is a primitive”—that is, that evil is a primary or basic ontological property. It argues that if an “ontological primitive” must (...) be a property which has no basic constituents other than itself—or whose definition cannot invoke concepts or constituents other than the primitive itself—evil itself cannot be considered a primitive. Nor can it be considered a positive property. (shrink)

This article addresses one of the crucial metaphysical presuppositions of the contemporary problem of evil: the belief that evil is that which a good thing must eliminate, or to be more precise, that evil is that which God must eliminate. The first part analyzes J. L. Mackie’s atheological argument in “Evil and Omnipotence.” The second part analyzes the reasons why Saint Anselm rejected the claim that God must eliminate evil in his De Casu Diaboli. The article’s goal is not just (...) raise crucial questions with respect to contemporary approaches to evil. It is also to reflect with Saint Anselm upon one of the genuine aporiai posed by existing evils: how does one remove them? (shrink)

Intellectual receptivity is both the prerequisite for objective human knowledge and the condition of possibility for all human knowledge. My arguments are cast in Thomistic terms. In the first part, I review the most important arguments with which Aquinas defends the receptivity of the human intellect, especially the argument from intellectual media and the argument from actualization. In the second part, I attempt to resolve the apparent contradictions involved in the claim that the intellect is receptive, contradictions that stem from (...) the fact that the intellect is an active potency (since its proper act is to reason) and receptivity is the act of a passive potency. In the final part,I argue that knowledge of the proper object of the human intellect (material singulars) is possible if and only if the human intellect is receptive. (shrink)

This volume examines some of the most contentious social justice issues present in the corpus of Augustine's writings. Whether one is concerned with human trafficking and the contemporary slave trade, the global economy, or endless wars, these essays further the conversation on social justice as informed by the writings of Augustine of Hippo.

As the war in Syria and the destruction of the Calais camp in France in 2016 bitterly demonstrate, declarations of human rights and asylum devolve into empty promises without a common sense of solidarity and an implicit understanding that we share responsibility for the world and one another. Today’s refugee crisis demonstrates that many of the problems that Hannah Arendt identified during the first half of the twentieth century are still with us. National security and the state of exception increasingly (...) place refugees and migrants at the borders of international law. This article argues that Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace and Arendt’s postwar reflections on the stateless as modern pariahs continue to frame current debates on hospitality, human rights, and responsibility. Without a recognition of our common humanity and shared world, sovereign states will continue to find exceptions to the legal status of refugees and migrants, thus enabling their exclusion from political life and the very laws that should protect them. Falling outside human rights law and the rights of refugees leads to the uncertainty of the pariah. (shrink)

This book is a major intellectual and cultural history of intolerance and toleration in early modern and early Enlightenment Europe. John Marshall offers an extensive study of late seventeenth-century practices of religious intolerance and toleration in England, Ireland, France, Piedmont and the Netherlands and the arguments that John Locke and his associates made in defence of 'universal religious toleration'. He analyses early modern and early Enlightenment discussions of toleration, debates over toleration for Jews and Muslims as well as for (...) Christians, the limits of toleration for the intolerant, atheists, 'libertines' and 'sodomites', and the complex relationships between intolerance and resistance theories including Locke's own Treatises. This study is a significant contribution to the history of the 'republic of letters' of the 1680s and the development of early Enlightenment culture and is essential reading for scholars of early modern European history, religion, political science and philosophy. (shrink)

Representing the themes guiding the past forty years’ work of one of the foremost theologians and philosophers of the twentieth century, these extraordinary volumes, in twenty-nine, twenty-four, and twenty-six chapters respectively, trace the tensions or problems emerging from the origins of what defines the West: the questions posed by Jerusalem and Athens and the relations of each; the place of Rome or Christianity in that equation, as well as the theological-political problem deriving therefrom; and the principles of republican government. Until (...) now, Ernest Fortin’s pathfinding work on these questions has been scattered either in articles appearing in diverse compendia or academic journals, or else in two books published in France and difficult to obtain, on the fifth-century debate between the neoplatonic philosophers and the Church Fathers and on the political teaching behind Dante’s Divine Comedy. (shrink)

Margaret Reynolds: The Child in Poetry Ken Binmore: The Origins of Fair Play James Simpson: Bonjour Paresse: Waste and Recycling in Book 4 of Gower's Confessio Amantis Ian Hacking: Kinds of People: Moving Targets Adam Smith: Nation and Covenant: The Contribution of Ancient Israel to Modern Nationalism Louise Daston: The Marquis de Condorcet and the Meaning of Enlightenment R J Evans: Coercion and Consent in Nazi Germany Robert Douglas-Fairhurst: A E Housman's Rejected Addresses Bernard Bailyn: The Search for Perfection: Atlantic (...) Dimensions John Stachel: Einstein; Ian Donaldson, Shakespeare, Jonson and the Invention of the Author Neil MacCormick: Judicial Independence: Who Cares? Norman Hammond: Recovering Maya Civilisation Roy Foster: 'Now Shall I Make My Soul': Approaching Death in Yeats's Life and Work Robert Darnton: The Devil in the Holy Water: Political Libel in Eighteenth-Century France. (shrink)

PREFACE -/- WHEN first I undertook the study of the theory of Art, many years ago, I was impressed by the emphasis of pleasure attainment in all descriptions of art works, and by the emphatic pleasurableness of my own mental state during the contemplation of artistic productions. -/- My thought being thus turned to the consideration of the relation of æsthetics to hedonics, I was led to make a careful study of the psychology of pleasure and of its correlate pain: (...) the results of this study I here lay before those who may be interested. (shrink)

Pierre-Alain Tilliette is a Breton writer, who lives with his family in Paris, where he is Conservateur des fonds étrangers at the Bibliothèque de l'Hôtel de Ville. The tragi-comic inventiveness of his fiction, with its Gaelic humor and extraordinary linguistic virtuosity, has made a small stir in France, but is still virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. His first novel, Gapos: vies chimériques, published by LePassage in 2011, described in Le Monde as "une des excellentes surprises de ce début de (...) l'année", placed him squarely in the lineage of Rabelais to Joyce. In 2015, Tilliette's second Bildungsroman-gone-awry, Un sentiment humain... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies Edited by Bernadette J. BrootenEboni Marshall TurmanBeyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies EDITED BY BERNADETTE J. BROOTEN New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 352 pp. $30.00In her introduction to this edited collection of essays, Bernadette Brooten asserts that religion has long been complicit in the construction and practice of the logic of human enslavement. She provocatively claims that (...) religion and the racial and sexual norms that emerge from religious inquiry have historically [End Page 236] designated women and other bodies that defy white male normativity as inherently “slaveable.” She further contends that the religious and sexual legacies of slavery are not relegated to a moment in time, now past and gone. Rather, contemporary society is the heir of a flesh-and-blood hierarchy that continues to shape its “social values, religious thought, and economic realities” (3). The remnants of enslavement persist among human communities not only as a lived reality that, as Mende Nazer suggests in the epilogue, continues to threaten the lives and life chances of poor women and children throughout the world, but also as a blood memory—a recollection that runs so deep into the social fabric of our theopolitical worlds that in spite of slavery’s superficial obscurity, it remains as the pulse of human everydayness, lurking beneath the surface of daily exchanges.The insidious legacies of slavery that emerge from bigoted God-talk promote dehumanizing racial-sexual stereotypes, dictate the quality of marriage and intimate relationships, corrupt and exploit sexual expression, and drive the development of public policy and law in ways that disproportionately marginalize and disempower women and girls. Consequently, this volume proposes resistance and calls readers to communal action that renounces slavery in all its forms.In parts 2, 3, and 4, the essays detail the racial, religious, and sexual character of slavery by focusing on the experience of black women’s oppression in America. This focus on the varieties of black women’s enslavement—from legal chattel slavery and social-political bondage to incarceration—provides the groundwork for the volume’s subsequent engagement of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic law, which demonstrates how slavery and its concomitant assignment and rationalization of embodied inferiority has been primarily cultivated by sacred texts. In her essay, for example, Sheila Briggs explicitly connects religious belief and dehumanizing practices; she ingeniously links religious textual interpretation with the sexual violence of early Christian gladiatorial practices in ancient amphitheaters.In parts 5 and 6, the volume reintroduces the substance of slavery’s legacies by way of a historical survey that connects enslavement across social contexts. In linking Debra Blumenthal’s discussion of slavery in late medieval Spain and Catherine Clinton’s analysis of the racial hypocrisies of Thomas Jefferson and Strom Thurmond to the problem of the Bible and the oppression it yields for sexual minorities as uncovered by Sylvester Johnson, Brooten exposes the vast and prevailing scope of slavery that affects all of us—women and girls, men and boys, sexual minorities, and even those who dare to fall in love across racial boundaries. In parts 7 and 8, Frances Smith Foster and Dwight Hopkins directly engage the “herstories” of black women who are marked by the legacies of slavery and yet who have consistently resisted in creative and effective ways (271). [End Page 237]Undoubtedly, this volume is a critical contribution to the field insofar as it uncovers an enduring social issue that continues to influence how we engage each other across differences of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The breadth of its disciplinary scope proves to be overwhelming at times. Nonetheless, Brooten’s constructive method serves well to emphasize the titanic complexity of enslavement and the challenge of its demolition.Eboni Marshall TurmanDuke Divinity SchoolCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This volume traces the evolution of Whig and Tory, Puritan and Anglican ideas across a tumultuous period of British history, from the mid-seventeenth century through to the Age of Enlightenment. This volume, a tribute to Mark Goldie, traces the evolution of Whig and Tory, Puritan and Anglican ideas across a tumultuous period of British history, from the mid-seventeenth century through to the Age of Enlightenment. Mark Goldie, Fellow of Churchill College and Professor of Intellectual History at Cambridge University, is one (...) of the most distinguished historians of later Stuart Britain of his generation and has written extensively about politics, religion and ideas in Britain from the Restoration through to the Hanoverian succession. Based on original research, the chapters collected here reflect the range of his scholarly interests: in Locke, Tory and Whig political thought, and Puritan, Anglican and Catholic political engagement, as well as the transformative impact of the Glorious Revolution. They examine events as well as ideas and deal not only with England but also with Scotland, France and the Atlantic world. Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain will be of interest to later Stuart political and religious historians, Locke scholars and intellectual historians more generally. JUSTIN CHAMPION is Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London. JOHN COFFEY is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leicester. TIM HARRIS is Professor of History at Brown University. JOHN MARSHALL is Professor of History at John Hopkins University. CONTRIBUTORS: Justin Champion, John Coffey, Conal Condren, Gabriel Glickman, Tim Harris, Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, Clare Jackson, Warren Johnston, Geoff Kemp, Dmitri Levitin, John Marshall, Jacqueline Rose, S.-J. Savonius-Wroth, Hannah Smith, Delphine Soulard. (shrink)

This essay examines the French reception of the Carl Schmitt's thought, specifically its Hegelian strand. Beginning with the early readings of Schmitt's thought by Alexandre Kojève and Georges Bataille during the mid-1930s, it attends to the partial adoption of Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction and his theories of sovereignty and neutralization in Kojève and Bataille's Hegelian writings, as well as to their critical responses. The essay then turns to examine the reading of Kojève by the Jesuit Hegelian résistant Gaston Fessard during the (...) war, a reading specifically intended to delegitimate Vichy as a “slave-prince,” resistance to whom would be legitimate. The final section returns to Bataille and his 1948 book The Accursed Share in order to propose that his Maussian understanding of the Marshall Plan suggested an overcoming of the friend/enemy distinction, a suggestion that was later made explicit in a 1957 talk by Kojève at Düsseldorf before Schmitt and a group of his supporters. At stake throughout are both the thoroughly critical reception of Schmitt, the particular political inflection of Hegel carried out by and in Kojève's reading, and certain methodological links between conceptual history and the reception history. (shrink)

In their recent book The colonial machine, James McClellan III and François Regourd detail how ancien regime France’s government marshalled science in the service of colonial expansion. By focusing on the local and long distance struggles to make the Isle de France (present day Mauritius) a globally significant centre during the long eighteenth century, this essay suggests an alternative to McClellan and Regourd’s geography of metropolitan centre and colonial periphery, as well as their claim that the investigation of nature was (...) tied to colonial expansion by state centralization. Rather than view centralization as a double process whereby a metropolitan state is able to dominate increasingly peripheral territory by concentrating power and the means of its production and management under state authority, this essay argues that centralization occurred in numerous places and involved the organization, pursuit and management of various sorts of accumulation, with geographically extensive consequences. The goal is to present centralization as historically open and multi-centred, inviting examination of both its local dynamics and long-distance entanglements from various perspectives, which in turn reveals the multi-centred dynamics of empire building and governance, including the organization and pursuit of natural inquiry. (shrink)

SUMMARYEighteenth-century scientific translation was not just a linguistic or intellectual affair. It included numerous material aspects requiring a social organization to marshal the indispensable human and non-human actors. Paratexts and actors' correspondences provide a good observatory to get information about aspects such as shipments and routes, processes of translation and language acquisition, texts acquisition and dissemination.The nature of scientific translation changed in France during the second half of the eighteenth century. Beside solitary translators, it also happened to become a collective (...) enterprise, dedicated to providing abridgements or enriching the learned journals with full translations of the most recent foreign texts. That new trend clearly had a decisive influence on the nature of the scientific press itself. A way to set up science as a social activity in the provincial capital of Dijon, translation required a local and international network for acquiring the linguistic and scientific expertise, along with the original texts, as quickly as possible. Laboratory results and mineralogical observations were used to compare material facts with those described in the original text. By providing a double kind of validation – with both the experiments and the translations – the laboratory thus happened to play a major role in translation. (shrink)

In this article I am concerned with whether it could be morally significant to distinguish between doing something 'in order to bring about an effect' as opposed to 'doing something because we will bring about an effect'. For example, the Doctrine of Double Effect tells us that we should not act in order to bring about evil, but even if this is true is it perhaps permissible to act only because an evil will thus occur? I discuss these questions in (...) connection with a version of the so-called Trolley Problem known as the Loop Case. I also consider how these questions may bear on whether a rational agent must aim at an event which he believes is causally necessary to achieve an end he pursues. (shrink)

Studies of protests against mobile phone masts typically concentrate on the potential health risks associated with mobile phones and their masts. Beck’s Risk Society has been particularly influential in informing this debate. This focus on health, however, has merely served to limit the discussion to those concerns legitimated by science conveniently ignoring other disputed issues. In contrast, this article contends that it is necessary to use a wider notion of risk to understand fully how the current political emphasis on active (...) citizenship may have contributed to the protests. It examines how neoliberal governmentality and the move to empower people are in contention with one another. The study draws upon case material from a small village protest group in United Kingdom and argues that much of the tension arises from the encouragement of the public on one hand to become active citizens but on the other to be passive consumers. (shrink)

An extended discussion with Frances Kamm about deontology and the methodology of ethical theorizing. (An extended and revised version appears in Alex Voorhoeve, Conversations on Ethics, OUP 2009).).

Placing Bruno—both advanced philosopher and magician burned at the stake—in the Hermetic tradition, Yates's acclaimed study gives an overview not only of Renaissance humanism but of its interplay—and conflict—with magic and occult practices. "Among those who have explored the intellectual world of the sixteenth century no one in England can rival Miss Yates. Wherever she looks, she illuminates. Now she has looked on Bruno. This brilliant book takes time to digest, but it is an intellectual adventure to read it. Historians (...) of ideas, of religion, and of science will study it. Some of them, after reading it, will have to think again.... For Miss Yates has put Bruno, for the first time, in his tradition, and has shown what that tradition was."—Hugh Trevor-Roper, _New Statesman_ "A decisive contribution to the understanding of Giordano Bruno, this book will probably remove a great number of misrepresentations that still plague the tormented figure of the Nolan prophet."—Giorgio de Santillana, _American Historical Review_ "Yates's book is an important addition to our knowledge of Giordano Bruno. But it is even more important, I think, as a step toward understanding the unity of the sixteenth century."—J. Bronowski, _New York Review of Books_. (shrink)