Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677)--often recognized as the first modern Jewish thinker--was also a founder of modern liberal political philosophy. This book is the first to connect systematically these two aspects of Spinoza's legacy. Steven B. Smith shows that Spinoza was a politically engaged theorist who both advocated and embodied a new conception of the emancipated individual, a thinker who decisively influenced such diverse movements as the Enlightenment, liberalism, and political Zionism. Focusing on Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise, Smith argues that Spinoza (...) was the first thinker of note to make the civil status of Jews and Judaism (what later became known as the Jewish Question) an essential ingredient of modern political thought. Before Marx or Freud, Smith notes, Spinoza recast Judaism to include the liberal values of autonomy and emancipation from tradition. Smith examines the circumstances of Spinoza's excommunication from the Jewish community of Amsterdam, his skeptical assault on the authority of Scripture, his transformation of Mosaic prophecy into a progressive philosophy of history, his use of the language of natural right and the social contract to defend democratic political institutions, and his comprehensive comparison of the ancient Hebrew commonwealth and the modern commercial republic. According to Smith, Spinoza's Treatise represents a classic defense of religious toleration and intellectual freedom, showing them to be necessary foundations for political stability and liberal regimes. In this study Smith examines Spinoza's solution to the Jewish Question and asks whether a Judaism, so conceived, can long survive. (shrink)

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) approved by the United Nations (UN) in 1948 includes the most widely accepted list of individual rights all over the world. Although it has been a catalyst in the pursuit of a universal ethic for human rights, it has not been updated for over 75 years during which significant progress has been made in the recognition of more human rights. It is time to examine whether the current global society aspires for more/other human (...) rights that are not reflected in previous declarations. We offer a review of literature on the potential areas that human rights may be extended to in the current sociocultural atmosphere and share the results of a survey at an international university in Japan which examines the views of 232 young Asian students from Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, China, Indonesia, etc. regarding the human rights declaration items and their implications, as well as new hypothetical items that they would like to see recognized as human rights. The results demonstrate stronger support for 15 out of the 21 surveyed items by all respondents, as well as stronger support for 10 out of the 21 items by female respondents. These results suggest a variable expansion in the breadth of the human rights concept which is worthy of further research. Also, gender inequality may be the basis for the stronger support of certain human rights by female respondents. (shrink)

The late philosopher Richard Rorty was at root an honest liberal, fearlessly ready to trace the implications of his democratic commitments into deep domains of metaphysical inquiry. He managed an intellectual modesty that was also ruthlessly iconoclastic, situating himself as a great warrior in the sophistic tradition stretching back to Gorgias and continuing up through Nietzsche and later Wittgenstein. Like all sophistry, Rorty took aim at the notion of Truth itself, challenging the idea tha...

Social scientists have long examined the changing role of the individual, and the influence of individualism in social and economic arrangements as well as behavioral decisions. With respect to co-operative behavior among farmers, however, the ideology of individualism has been little theorized in terms of its relationship to the longstanding virtue of independence. This paper explores this relationship by combining analysis of historical literature on the agricultural cooperative movement with the accounts of contemporary English farmers. I show that the virtue (...) of independence is deployed to justify a variety of cooperative (formal and informal) and non-cooperative practices and that, despite apparently alternative interpretations, independence is most often conflated with individualistic premises. That conflation, I argue, leads farmers to see their neighbors as natural competitors: as those from whom which independence must be sought. This has the effect of masking the structural dependencies which farmers face (such as lenders and large purchasers) and limits the alternatives available to them to realize a view of independence that is maintained, rather than opposed, by interdependent collective action. Thus perceived, individualism is an ideological doctrine that succeeds by appealing to the virtue of independence, while simultaneously denying its actual realization. (shrink)

DOES SLAVERY EXIST BY NATURE as some throughout history have been taken to believe? Or is slavery merely conventional, sanctioned by the opinions and practices of diverse communities? Is it a punishment for sinfulness or proscribed by the natural law? Can one sell oneself into slavery as the result of a free exchange, or is slavery prohibited by virtue of the natural rights of the individual? Is slavery a necessary moment in the struggle of human beings to attain mutual recognition (...) and respect? Or have modern institutions like the market economy and the state created new and potentially more ominous forms of oppression? (shrink)

Interest in Leo Strauss is greater now than at any time since his death, mostly because of the purported link between his thought and the political movement known as neoconservatism. Steven B. Smith, though, surprisingly depicts Strauss not as the high priest of neoconservatism but as a friend of liberal democracy—perhaps the best defender democracy has ever had. Moreover, in _Reading Leo Strauss, _Smith shows that Strauss’s defense of liberal democracy was closely connected to his skepticism of both the (...) extreme Left and extreme Right. Smith asserts that this philosophical skepticism defined Strauss’s thought. It was as a skeptic, Smith argues, that Strauss considered the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between reason and revelation—a conflict Strauss dubbed the “theologico-political problem.” Calling this problem “_the_ theme of my investigations,” Strauss asked the same fundamental question throughout his life: what is the relation of the political order to revelation in general and Judaism in particular? Smith organizes his book with this question, first addressing Strauss’s views on religion and then examining his thought on philosophical and political issues. In his investigation of these philosophical and political issues, Smith assesses Strauss’s attempt to direct the teaching of political science away from the examination of mass behavior and interest group politics and toward the study of the philosophical principles on which politics are based. With his provocative, lucid essays, Smith goes a long way toward establishing a distinctive form of Straussian liberalism. (shrink)

In a recent commentary, Memmert critiqued claims that attentional misdirection is directly analogous to inattentional blindness and cautioned against assuming too close a similarity between the two phenomena. One important difference highlighted in his analysis is that most lab-based inductions of IB rely on the taxing of attention through a demanding primary task, whereas attentional misdirection typically involves simply the orchestration of spatial attention. The present commentary argues that, rather than reflecting a complete dissociation between IB and attentional misdirection, this (...) difference highlights potential grounds for delineating mechanistically distinct forms of IB: spatial inattentional blindness, which stems from the covert misallocation of spatial attention, and central inattentional blindness, which stems from disruption or preoccupation of perceptual mechanisms that interface with higher-level processes such as working memory. Recognition of such distinctions can help situate theoretical understanding of IB more firmly within the context of the broader attention literature. (shrink)

This book is about contemporary evangelical approaches to the knowledge of God, considering--and suggesting--ways Christian philosophers and theologians envision and make use of theological knowledge in the postmodern context.

OF THE NUMEROUS LEGACIES BEQUEATHED BY LEO STRAUSS, his influence on the study of German philosophy frequently goes least mentioned. Apart from some early reviews and other occasional pieces, Strauss left no major work on any German thinker. With the exception of the chapter on Max Weber in Natural Right and History and a short essay on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil written near the end of his life, there are no works on such giants of the German Aufklärung as (...) Mendelssohn, Kant, and Hegel to rival his studies of other seminal figures in the history of political thought. Why, for example, did Strauss not write a Thoughts on Kant to parallel his study of Machiavelli, or The Argument and Action of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ to complement his commentary on the Laws of Plato, or The Literary Character of Nietzsche’s ‘Zarathustra’ modeled after his essay on Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed? In any case, for a thinker like Strauss who has emphasized that what a person does not say is almost as important as what he does, such a startling omission calls for comment. (shrink)

Intended for students without prior training in philosophy, An Introduction to Philosophy includes both an overview of key subject areas and questions in philosophy and consideration of everyday implications of philosophical concerns.

Problems in Epistemology and Metaphysics takes a pro and con approach to two central philosophical topics. Each chapter begins with a question: Can We Have Knowledge? How are Beliefs Justified? What is the mind? Contemporary philosophers with opposing viewpoints are then paired together to argue their position and raise problems with conflicting standpoints. Alongside an up-to-date introduction to a core philosophical stance, each contributor provides a critical response to their opponent and clear explanation of their view. Discussion questions are included (...) at the end of each chapter to guide further discussion. With chapters covering core questions surrounding religious beliefs, scientific knowledge, truth, being and reality, this is a comprehensive introduction to debates lying at the heart of what we know, how we know it and the nature of the world we live in. (shrink)

This paper elaborates on an intrinsically quantum approach to gravity, which begins with a general framework for quantum mechanics and then seeks to identify additional mathematical structure on Hilbert space that is responsible for gravity and other phenomena. A key principle in this approach is that of correspondence: this structure should reproduce spacetime, general relativity, and quantum field theory in a limit of weak gravitational fields. A central question is that of “Einstein separability,” and asks how to define mutually independent (...) subsystems, e.g. through localization. Familiar definitions involving tensor products or operator subalgebras do not clearly accomplish this in gravity, as is seen in the correspondence limit. Instead, gravitational behavior, particularly gauge invariance, suggests a network of Hilbert subspaces related via inclusion maps, contrasting with other approaches based on tensor-factorized Hilbert spaces. Any such localization structure is also expected to place strong constraints on evolution, which are also supplemented by the constraint of unitarity. (shrink)

Most readers of Spinoza treat him as a pure metaphysician, a grim determinist, or a stoic moralist, but none of these descriptions captures the author of the _Ethics, _argues Steven B. Smith in this intriguing book. Offering a new reading of Spinoza’s masterpiece, Smith asserts that the Ethics is a celebration of human freedom and its attendant joys and responsibilities and should be placed among the great founding documents of the Enlightenment. Two aspects of Smith’s book distinguish it from (...) other studies. It treats the famous “geometrical method” of the _Ethics _as_ _a form of moral rhetoric, a model for the construction of individuality. And it presents the _Ethics _as_ _a companion to Spinoza’s major work of political philosophy, the _Theologico-Political Treatise, _each work helping to explore the problem of freedom. Affirming Spinoza’s centrality for both critics and defenders of modernity, the book will be of value to students of political theory, philosophy, and intellectual history. (shrink)

Gallup Polls have reported on the perceived ethics of various professions in the US since 1976. Clergymen and pharmacists were consistently identified as two of the most ethical professionals in the 1980''s and 1990''s. Business executives have not fared well in these polls and have not been rated among the top ten most ethical professions in any of the years the poll was taken. Ethical codes have not done much to belay the perception that the US business executive is not (...) very ethical. Whether the Sarbanes-Oxley Act will impact the ethical behavior of business executives remains to be seen. (shrink)

Steven B. Smith examines the concept of modernity, not as the end product of historical developments but as a state of mind. He explores modernism as a source of both pride and anxiety, suggesting that its most distinctive characteristics are the self-criticisms and doubts that accompany social and political progress. Providing profiles of the modern project’s most powerful defenders and critics—from Machiavelli and Spinoza to Saul Bellow and Isaiah Berlin—this provocative work of philosophy and political science offers a novel (...) perspective on what it means to be modern and why discontent and sometimes radical rejection are its inevitable by-products. (shrink)

In Hegel's Critique of Liberalism , Steven B. Smith examines Hegel's critique of rights-based liberalism and its relevance to contemporary political concerns. Smith argues that Hegel reformulated classic liberalism, preserving what was of value while rendering it more attentive to the dynamics of human history and the developmental structure of the moral personality. Hegel's goal, Smith suggests, was to find a way of incorporating both the ancient emphasis on the dignity and even architectonic character of political life with the (...) modern concern for freedom, rights, and mutual recognition. Smith's insightful analysis reveals Hegel's relevance not only to contemporary political philosophers concerned with normative issues of liberal theory but also to political scientists who have urged a revival of the state as a central concept of political inquiry. (shrink)