Politicians invoke grand ideas: social justice, democracy, liberty, equality, community. But what do these ideas really mean? How can politicians across the political spectrum appeal to the same values? This new edition of Adam Swift's highly readable introduction to political philosophy answers these important questions, and includes new material on global justice, feminism, and method in political theory, as well as updated guides to further reading. This lively and accessible book is ideal for students, but it also brings the (...) insights of the world's leading political philosophers to a wide general audience. Using plenty of examples, it equips readers to think for themselves about the ideas that shape political life. Democracy works best when both politicians and voters move beyond rhetoric to think clearly and carefully about the political principles that should govern their society. But clear thinking is difficult in an age when established orthodoxies have fallen by the wayside. Bringing political philosophy out of the ivory tower and within the reach of all, this book provides us with tools to cut through the complexities of modern politics. In so doing, it makes a valuable contribution to the democratic process and this new edition will continue to be essential reading for students of political philosophy and theory. (shrink)

Politicians invoke grand ideas: social justice, liberty, equality,community. But what do these ideas really mean? How can politicians across the political spectrum appeal to the same values? _Political Philosophy: A Beginners' Guide for Students and Politicians _answers these important questions. Accessible and lively, the book is an ideal student text, but it also brings the insights of the world's leading political philosophers to a wide general audience. Using plenty of examples, it equips readers to think for themselves about the ideas (...) that shape political life. Democracy works best when both politicians and voters move beyond rhetoric to think clearly and carefully about the political principles that should govern their society. But clear thinking is difficult in an age when established orthodoxies have fallen by the wayside. Bringing political philosophy out of the ivory tower and within the reach of all, this book provides us with tools to cut through the complexities of modern politics. In so doing, it makes a valuable contribution to the democratic process. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION There are extant six ancient lives of the philosopher Plato: the fragmentary remains of the Academicorum philosophorum index ...

This article places Hannah Arendt’s fundamental view of the instrumentality of violence in dialogue with Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ in order to demonstrate the importance for each of a notion of ‘mere life’ or ‘life itself’ to an understanding of the agency of violence in modernity. Arendt’s critique of vitalism is most fully developed in The Human Condition, where she describes an entanglement of the instrumental activity of homo faber with life and labour in the work of Bergson, Nietzsche (...) and Marx. I suggest that Bergson’s treatment of life as creative evolution unexpectedly yields an accurate description of politics as spontaneous, unpredictable motion that Arendt takes as typical of modernity. Since Arendt also credits Bergson with a decisive influence on what she takes to be a growing commitment to the life-enhancing, creative potential of violence in the oppositional movements of the 1960s, which she explores in her late essay, On Violence, I trace out the continuity between Arendt’s earlier account of homo faber and her later critique of postmodern oppositional violence. (shrink)

Adam Swift examines the ways in which sociology can inform the study of distributive justice and equality, focusing specifically on the question of whether sociological literature supports Michael Walzer's normative ideal of complex equality. He argues that there are relevant sociological lessons about the role of the state and the importance of citizenship that restrict the scope of Walzer's general claim about the injustice of the conversion of goods between distinct distributive spheres.

_How not to be a hypocrite: _the indispensable guide to school choice that morally perplexed parents have been waiting for. Many of us believe in social justice and equality of opportunity - but we also want the best for our kids. How can we square our political principles with our special concern for our own children? This marvellous book takes us through the moral minefield that is school choice today. Does a commitment to social justice mean you have to send (...) your children to the local comprehensive - regardless of its academic results? Is it hypocritical to disapprove of private schools and yet send your child to one? Some parents feel guilty but shouldn't. Others should feel guilty but don't. Read _How Not to be a Hypocrite_, then answer the questionnaire, and work out where you stand on this crucial issue. (shrink)

_How not to be a hypocrite: _the indispensable guide to school choice that morally perplexed parents have been waiting for. Many of us believe in social justice and equality of opportunity - but we also want the best for our kids. How can we square our political principles with our special concern for our own children? This marvellous book takes us through the moral minefield that is school choice today. Does a commitment to social justice mean you have to send (...) your children to the local comprehensive - regardless of its academic results? Is it hypocritical to disapprove of private schools and yet send your child to one? Some parents feel guilty but shouldn't. Others should feel guilty but don't. Read _How Not to be a Hypocrite_, then answer the questionnaire, and work out where you stand on this crucial issue. (shrink)

This paper analyses the role chaplaincy plays in providing religious and spiritual care in the UK’s National Health Service. The approach considers both the current practice of chaplains and also the wider changes in society around beliefs and public service provision. Amid a small but growing literature about spirituality, health and illness, I shall argue that the role of the chaplain is changing and that such change is creating pressures on the identity and performance of the chaplain as a religiously (...) authorised health worker. I shall question whether either orthodox belief or religious belonging have any significant bearing on the patients’ demand for chaplaincy services. Utilising an example of chaplaincy work I shall argue that patient need constitutes the strongest platform for both practice development and an articulated understanding of what chaplains bring to health care. Drawing on a case study the definition and interpretation of spiritual need will be discussed in relation to chaplaincy practice. In conclusion, I shall set out the case for effective research to establish with greater precision the detail of the chaplain’s practice within a state-funded health system. (shrink)

This authoritative edition was originally published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique selection from the full range of Swift's fifty-year career - prose, poetry, and letters - to give the essence of his work and thinking. Jonathan Swift is best known as the author of Gulliver's Travels, which alone would have secured his place in the history of English literature. But in addition to this classic fictional (...) satire, Swift wrote numerous works concerning politics, religion, and Ireland, some savage, others humorous, and all suffused with his tremendous wit, inventiveness, and vigour. This anthology includes satirical works such as A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books, political pamphlets, pieces for the popular press, poems, and a generous selection from Swift's correspondence. Presented chronologically, the anthology offers a new and clearer awareness of the unity as well as the complexity of Swift's vision, and the powerful bonds between disparate pieces. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

Becoming Nietzsche is an essential book for understanding Nietzsche's philosophical genealogy from 1866D1868, a phase that is punctuated by the influence of Friedrich Lange and a surprising rejection of Schopenhauer's theory of the will. During this phase, Nietzsche focuses on the scientific and artistic status of teleological judgments and their relevance for thinking about organic life and representation.

Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus provided some of our most cherished assumptions about physics and ethics. He postulated an infinite universe made exclusively of atoms and void. He also treated slaves and women as equals and defined our standards of pleasure and luxury. Now David Swift turns to Epicurus for help with another significant mystery: the scientific explanation of mind. Using Epicurean ideas that our minds are in our chests and, perhaps even more radically, that meaning is understood in our (...) sense organs he re-examines and reinterprets the works of philosophers like Descartes, Locke, Kant and Mill and scientists such as Pavlov, Freud, Skinner and Rogers. Seen in the light of the Epicurean concept, Renaissance philosophy and classic scientific psychology validate a surprisingly consistent and coherent scientific explanation of behaviour. The mechanisms of meaning, knowledge, learning and remembering are explained in terms of biological reflexes. The secrets of love, hate and loyalty are revealed as non-verbal knowledge only accessible as feelings. And success, failure, criminal and other behaviours are shown to be the results of learned experience not genetic predisposition. At last we have the possibility of a plausible biologically-based general psychological theory. (shrink)

Despite intense academic debate in the recent past over the use of ‘sham surgery’ control groups in research, there has been a recent resurgence in their use in the field of neurodegenerative disease. Yet the primacy of ethical arguments in favour of sham surgery controls is not yet established. Preliminary empirical research shows an asymmetry between the views of neurosurgical researchers and patients on the subject, while different ethical guidelines and regulations support conflicting interpretations. Research ethics committees faced with a (...) proposal involving sham surgery should be aware of its ethical complexities. An overview of recent and current placebo-controlled surgical trials in the field of Parkinson's Disease is provided here, followed by an analysis of the key ethical issues which such trials raise. (shrink)

In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx outlined his idea of a material 'base' and politico-cultural 'superstructure'. According to this formula, a material reality - wealth, income, occupation - determined your politics, leisure habits, tastes, and how you made sense of the world. Today, the importance of material deprivation, in terms of threats to life, health and prosperity, are as acute as ever. Despite the continued importance of inequality and disadvantage, the identities apparently generated by these (...) realities are increasingly detached from material circumstances. In many casesthe identity has become a powerful signifier in its own right, and is now instrumentalised, idealised and imitated. People attempt to police the boundaries and determine the significance of the identity, so that the identity matters more than the lives of the individuals concerned. These powerful identities can be used for various purposes, from the commercial to the aesthetic to the political. This trend has accelerated in recent years, with increasing precarity and increasingly obvious inequality fuelling anger, and the internet acting as a perfect mechanism for identity theft. Identity Theft covers four different kinds of identity most susceptible to these trends - class, race, sex and age - considering how the boundaries of different identities are policed, and how different versions of the same identity can be deployed to different ends. Ultimately, the argument is not just that 'identities are more complex' than they appear, but rather that there are more important commonalities. Many totemic 'culture war' issues are not particularly contested, but have broad appeal, or little concern for most people. In the UK at least, what might be called a 'culture war' is waged largely on the periphery by crank politicians, social media groups and newspaper columnists. If there is one argument to be taken from this book, it is a call for conscientious objection in the culture wars.,. (shrink)

The family is hotly contested ideological terrain. Some defend the traditional two-parent heterosexual family while others welcome its demise. Opinions vary about how much control parents should have over their children's upbringing. Family Values provides a major new theoretical account of the morality and politics of the family, telling us why the family is valuable, who has the right to parent, and what rights parents should—and should not—have over their children. Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift argue that parent-child relationships (...) produce the "familial relationship goods" that people need to flourish. Children's healthy development depends on intimate relationships with authoritative adults, while the distinctive joys and challenges of parenting are part of a fulfilling life for adults. Yet the relationships that make these goods possible have little to do with biology, and do not require the extensive rights that parents currently enjoy. Challenging some of our most commonly held beliefs about the family, Brighouse and Swift explain why a child's interest in autonomy severely limits parents' right to shape their children's values, and why parents have no fundamental right to confer wealth or advantage on their children. Family Values reaffirms the vital importance of the family as a social institution while challenging its role in the reproduction of social inequality and carefully balancing the interests of parents and children. (shrink)

Nietzsche on Truth and Overcoming traces the development of Friedrich Nietzsche's epistemic criticism. Nietzsche's outright denial of the existence of truth is grounded in his claim that stable metaphysical entities do not exist. The following inquiry examines Nietzsche's method of doubting which compels him to dismiss "being" as a fictitious "perspectival falsification". Nietzsche's denial of the reality of pre-existent "being" creates problems with communicating what he means through normal language. Nietzsche on Truth and Overcoming elucidates the problems which Nietzsche creates (...) through his uprooting of being and provides Nietzsche's hint as to where mankind might still look for the "most real", in art. Through his conception of the Dionysian artist, Nietzsche offers us the tragic annihilator of the "all-too-human" fictions of linguistic truth. This thesis thereby concludes that the Dionysian artist is Nietzsche's "answer" to epistemology, for the tragic wisdom of the Dionysian provides a glimpse into primal reality precisely because he affirms existence in spite of not knowing fiction as the logical opposite of truth. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between accountability, trust and corporate reputation building. Increasing numbers of corporations are mobilising themselves to put more and more information out into the public domain as a way of communicating with stakeholders. Corporate social accounting and stakeholder engagement is happening on an unprecedented scale. Rather than welcoming such initiatives, academics have been quick to pick faults with contemporary social auditing and reporting, claiming that in its current form it is not about demonstrating accountability at all, (...) but rather about building corporate reputation. Academics argue that ‘accountability should hurt’, that if accountability is an enjoyable process, then the organisation isn’t doing it right. For organisations that are currently engaging with stakeholders and ostensibly becoming more transparent about their corporate social performance, this kind of critique is likely to be bewildering. This paper argues that central to the notion of accountability and to contemporary social accounting practice is the concept of trust. Accountability is based upon a distrust of corporate management, whereas corporate reputation building is about strategically seeking to establish trust in stakeholder relationships in order to negate formal accountability requirements. Using a split trust continuum, the paper seeks to explain and synthesise what seem to be two very different paradigms of organisational transparency. (shrink)

The Supreme Court of Idaho held, in Idaho Association of Chiropractic Physicians, Inc. v. Alcorn, No. 23787,1999 WL 134677, at *1, that insurance regulations of health care services must apply equally to all providers. The Idaho legislature enacted the Small Employer Health Insurance Availability Act, Idaho Code § 41-4701, and the Individual Health Insurance Availability Act, id. § 41-5201, which is to be implemented by the Idaho Small Employer and Individual Health Reinsurance Program. The goal of the legislation is to (...) make health insurance available and affordable to small employers and their employees, and to individuals who would not otherwise have health insurance. Accordingly, the Program promulgated the following rule: “Chiropractic services will be subject to one thousand dollars per year limit.” Idaho Ass’n of Chiropractic Physicians, 1999 WL 134677, at *1.The plaintiff, the Idaho Association of Chiropractic Physicians, sought declaratory judgment and injunctive relief against defendant, James M. Alcorn, director of the Idaho State Department of Insurance, on equal protection and due process grounds. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The final shape of the "Internet of Things" ubiquitous computing promises relies on a cybernetic system of inputs , computation or decision making , and outputs . My interest in this paper lies in the computational intelligences that suture these positions together, and how positioning these intelligences as autonomous agents extends the dialogue between human-users and ubiquitous computing technology. Drawing specifically on the scenarios surrounding the employment of ubiquitous computing within aged care, I argue that agency is something that cannot (...) be traded without serious consideration of the associated ethics. (shrink)

The article presents a theory of the basis and nature of parents’ rights that appeals to the goods distinctively produced by intimate-but-authoritative relationships between adults and the children they parent. It explores the implications of that theory for questions about parents’ rights to raise their children as members of a religion, with particular attention to the issue of religious schooling. Even if not obstructing the development of their children’s capacity for autonomy, parents exceed the bounds of their legitimate authority in (...) so far as they aim deliberately to influence their children’s religious views. Healthy familial relationships involve some identification of child with parent and require a sphere of spontaneous interaction between parent and child that are in any case likely to influence those views and constitute a standing threat to autonomy. Correcting over-deferential understandings of parents’ rights enables schools better to promote not only children’s autonomy but also other legitimate civic goals. (shrink)

Philip Kitcher’s The Main Enterprise of the World is extraordinarily wide-ranging and ambitious, developing and arguing for a unified account of education.

Private education, and whether or not it is morally defensible, is currently a focus of public debate. Here, Adam Swift explains why he believes some of the popular justifications for private schooling just won't do.

An empirical study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (King, L. A. and C. K. Nappa: 1998, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75(1), 156-165) concludes that people generally believe meaning and happiness are essential elements of the good life, whereas money is relatively unimportant. Yet, the authors also state that although "we do know what it takes to make a good life...we still behave as if we did not." The authors are suggesting that despite a general (...) belief that money is relatively unimportant in creating happiness, many people continue to focus their behaviors on increasing income and wealth. This is the classic conflict between the folk wisdom that money cannot buy happiness, on the one hand, and a continued focus by many people on achieving material success on the other. The issue is of particular importance to business professionals, not only because profit maximization is the central focus of business, but also because college students often pursue business as a profession for the express purpose of maximizing personal income and wealth. In the business world a focus on personal financial success is the norm. Wealth and income are honored. The purpose of this is to critically analyze psychological studies comparing happiness and financial success. The results are then contrasted with philosophical wisdom and religious writings comparing happiness and money. The intent is to determine whether psychological studies provide incremental insights into the connection between financial success and happiness. (shrink)