Responding to volatile criticisms frequently leveled at Leo Strauss and those he influenced, the prominent contributors to this volume demonstrate the profound influence that Strauss and his students have exerted on American liberal democracy and contemporary political thought. By stressing the enduring vitality of classic books and by articulating the theoretical and practical flaws of relativism and historicism, the contributors argue that Strauss and the Straussians have identified fundamental crises of modernity and liberal democracy.

In Stability and Justification in Hume’s Treatise, Louis Loeb ascribes to Hume a naturalistic account of justified belief, one on which Hume is fundamentally concerned with the question whether stable belief can be achieved. Loeb’s interpretation is systematic, richly explanatory, and powerfully argued. He makes a compelling case that stability plays a central role in Hume’s epistemology. Loeb’s case is so compelling indeed that anyone who wants to defend an alternative interpretation will now have to assimilate or deflect the massive (...) textual evidence in favor of the stability interpretation. I will argue here that, for some passages Loeb cites in favor of the stability interpretation, a veritistic interpretation explains the text at least as well as the stability interpretation does. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to describe how Sally Gadow's perspectives on existential advocacy as the moral framework for the nurse–patient relationship were synthesized with a general theory of motivation, self‐determination theory (SDT), to inform the design of a study in which the influence of interpersonal care on the process of tobacco dependence treatment was explored. Consistent with the tenets of existential advocacy, participants who perceived their care providers as interpersonally sensitive and bringing more of their whole selves to (...) the care encounter reported more autonomous motivation and felt competence for stopping smoking. The integration of existential advocacy with SDT, which led to the empirical work in which Gadow's ideas were actualized and her model supported, is described. Study findings are discussed in light of Gadow's philosophical views, and implications for nursing highlighted. (shrink)

William Rasch offers a reading of Carl Schmitt that avoids rehashing the controversies of the Weimar era in favour of examining a broader historical context. He examines Schmitt's notion of political theology, eschewing theocratic intention but taking seriously the 'secularization' of patterns of thought derived from Medieval theology.

The piece responds to critics of Scheuerman’s END OF LAW: CARL SCHMIT IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Despite our disagreements, the book’s critics and I share the view that Schmitt speaks to our times, albeit in deeply troubling ways. Precisely how and why Schmitt remains pertinent, however, remains a matter of dispute. Inspired by the un-Schmittian hope that deliberation might buttress our common quest to overcome democracy’s present crisis, my response endeavours to identify those disagreements. Though I am unable (...) to address all of them satisfactorily, my aim is to advance our conversation. Most important, the critics and I disagree somewhat about how best to understand Schmitt’s relationship to contemporary authoritarian populism. (shrink)

ExcerptNow a century old, Carl Schmitt’s The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy still provides useful training for historians in the necessary task of making distinctions between “liberalism” and “democracy,” two movements that arose with overlapping but distinct core principles in eighteenth-century Europe, often competed with each other, and sometimes came into bloody conflict. Schmitt makes one highly controversial assertion, however, near the beginning of this book. After agreeing with Alexis de Tocqueville that the spread of democracy was the most (...) powerful political trend of the nineteenth century, a trend that became almost irresistible,1 Schmitt declares that there is a crucial flaw in the argument of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that exposes a major problem with democratic theory in general. Democracy has taken so many different forms, according to Schmitt, that it can only be defined according to the basic principle that political decisions are only binding for those who participated in making them. This belief presupposes “that the will of the outvoted minority is in truth identical with the will of the majority. Rousseau’s frequently cited arguments in the Contrat social are fundamental [emphasis added] for democratic thought and ultimately conform to an old tradition.”2 Schmitt refers here to Rousseau’s argument in On the Social Contract (book IV, ch. 2) that if the proposition you supported fails to gain a majority in a referendum, you should acknowledge that you had been mistaken when you voted, because the question posed to citizens was not exactly whether they personally approved of the proposition, but “whether or not it conforms to the general will that is theirs.”3 Schmitt observes caustically that “with this Jacobin logic one can, it is well known, justify the rule of a minority over the majority, even while appealing to democracy.” The first democratic movement of the modern era, the Levellers in the English Civil War, had already attempted this, Schmitt argues, when they proclaimed in 1649 that only the “well-affected” deserved the right to vote in parliamentary elections.4 Schmitt concludes that democracy is therefore highly vulnerable to the emergence of dictatorship, and that the Bolsheviks had just as strong an argument in 1923 that their brutal dominion by an “enlightened” minority was truly democratic as did the Jacobins of 1793. “Theoretically, and in critical times also practically, democracy is helpless [emphasis added] before the Jacobin argument, that is, when faced with the authoritative identification of a minority as the people.” The meaning here of “authoritative identification” (entscheidenden Identifikation) is unclear; Schmitt does not seek to explain why the majority in a democracy should ever accept a minority’s claim that it alone possesses civic virtue or wisdom.5 A very similar argument about Rousseau was made nevertheless by J. L. Talmon in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (published in 1952), which has in turn influenced some recent scholars who, like Talmon, do not acknowledge any intellectual debt to Schmitt.6. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt kept diaries throughout his life, several of which he specifically selected for academic publication. These are the recordings made in the early years after World War II, when Schmitt lost all his positions. After his release from the prison he returned to his home in small town of Plettenberg, where he remained until his death. Schmitt ordered these diaries to be published only after his death, because, even several decades after the war, they remained ideologically (...) dangerous. In this issue we continue to publish fragments of translation of the “Glossarium”. In the fragments prepared for present publication, Schmitt argues on several important topics. First, he writes about utopia — paradise located in a remote, but achievable future. The ability to think future located at long distance decreases in modern times. Therefore, in the 19th century they have to move from utopia to positive science. Those who write on future must say that heaven can come tomorrow. Schmitt goes further to compare the utopian ideas of Thomas More with the utopias of the 19th century. More was not a cleric; he was just a clerk, an intellectual, a writer, not a priest. Schmitt questioned the rightfulness of the canonization of More and compared him with another Catholic thinker of that time, Fr. Vitoria. Another important topic — the problem of legality and legitimacy. Schmitt once again handles it in connection with the events in Czechoslovakia in 1948. These events he contrasts with the situation in Germany in 1929-1932. (shrink)

By revisiting late-Weimar debates between Carl Schmitt and two left-wing critics, Otto Kirchheimer and Franz L Neumann, we can shed light on the surprising alliance of populist politics with key tenets of economic liberalism, an alliance that vividly manifests itself in the political figure and retrograde policies of Donald Trump. In the process, we can begin to fill a striking lacuna in recent scholarly literature on populism, namely its failure to pay proper attention to matters of political economy. We (...) can also perhaps begin to make sense of the roots of Trump’s assault on the US federal state: formal law and its organizational basis, modern bureaucracy, represent potential restraints on the alliance of populism with neoliberalism. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt’s theory of emergency powers has garnered substantial attention in the aftermath of terrorist attacks on the US, UK, and Spain. Against those who underscore apparent discontinuities in Schmitt’s view of emergency government, or see him as advocating law-based and/or a constitutional model of emergency government, this chapter revisits three key historical and intellectual contexts—the First World War, the Weimar debate about Article 48, and the disintegration of Weimar democracy after 1930— to offer an alternative interpretation. The (...) radical anti-legal character of Schmitt’s position, along with its underlying continuities, is emphasized. Three recent post 9/11 employments of Schmitt’s ideas about emergency power are then examined. Each is found inadequate, in part because each accepts too much of the underlying logic of Schmitt’s theory and thus becomes vulnerable to its normative and political frailties. (shrink)

The classic and contemporary readings in this collection represent the four most influential theories of truth – correspondence, pragmatist, coherence, and deflationary theories. A collection of classic and contemporary philosophical reflections on the nature of truth. Opens with an introduction to theories of truth, designed for readers with little or no prior knowledge of the subject. Divided into four sections on the most important theories of truth - correspondence, pragmatist, coherence, and deflationary theories. Brings together articles in the recent debate (...) over the correspondence theory and deflationism that are not otherwise available in one place. Includes contributions by C.S. Peirce, William James, Bertrand Russell, Alfred Tarski, Hartry Field, Dorothy Grover, Anil Gupta and others. Concludes with an extensive bibliography of recent articles on truth. (shrink)

A careful reading of Harvey C. Mansfield's Manlines s and the recent translation of Daniel Tanguay's Leo Strauss; une biographie intellectuelle reveals that neither text supports the view that Leo Strauss was a harmless if qualified friend of liberal democracy. Key Words: Leo Strauss • Straussians • Nietzsche • Carl Schmitt • Heidegger • National Socialism • Liberalism • Redlichkeit • Hobbes • Hegel • Viktor Trivas.

Carl Schmitt was a jurist, political philosopher, and a devoted student of Thomas Hobbes. Schmitt lived from 1888 to 1985 in Germany, and for a time enjoyed with Martin Heidegger the right to create under Hitler a new spiritual German state. Both men shared enduring veneration, admiring pilgrimages, and remain sources of political and philosophical discussions and interpretation. Recently, three of Schmitt’s books were added to the one already available in English, The Concept of the Political. Most (...) of Schmitt’s books are pamphlets addressing particular subjects, which were important at the time they were written. The interest we have in Schmitt today could not be easily evaluated if we were to turn to his books for historical information. He has written on topics that would interest the constitutional jurist and the political philosopher, but they are not vital books and, if lost, there would be little weeping. We write about Schmitt because we want to show the danger of every political philosophy that claims for its hypothesis scientific data. His theory of humankind is reduced to the problem of evil and his concepts of reality claim that realism, the analysis of what is, is eternally timed and fatefully structured. We read such realists with pleasure because they seem to satisfy our need to see our fellow human beings in the most dismal light. We read them with disdain because we are naturally idealistic and believe that we are condemned to no given condition, and that ideals are not absent from reality, but are the source of its evaluation and the power of its transformation. We read Hobbes and find him perceptive and insightful, for example when he tells us: “I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death”. We seem to find much that is true and valuable. There is much that is absent if we believe that people and communities have always believed that reason and the reasonable force them to find differences between the good and the evil, between the truth and the lie, between the just and the unjust. The deepest difference lies between the philosopher of reason, or the speculative philosopher, and the political thinker who refuses to draw a distinction between what exists and what should exist, i.e., the thinker who absolutizes the given and values only what is suitable to it. (shrink)

An unrepentant Nazi, Carl Schmitt remains one of the most divisive figures in twentieth century political thought. In recent years, his ideas have attracted a new and growing audience. This book seeks to cut through the controversy surrounding Schmitt to analyse his ideas on world order. In so doing, it takes on board Schmitt's critique of the condition of order in late modernity, and considers Schmitt's continued relevance. Consideration is given to the two devices Schmitt (...) deploys, the Grossraum and the Partisan, and argues that neither concept lives up to its claim to transcend or reform Schmitt's pessimistic history of the state. The author concludes that Schmitt's continuing value lies in his provocative historical critique, rather than his conceptual innovation"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Religion is intrinsically social, and hence irretrievably organizational, although organization is often seen as the darker side of the religious experience--power, routinization, and bureaucracy. Religion and secular organizations have long received separate scholarly scrutiny, but until now their confluence has been little considered. This interdisciplinary collection of mostly unpublished papers is the first volume to remedy the deficit. The project grew out of a three-year inquiry into religious institutions undertaken by Yale University's Program on Non-Profit Organizations and sponsored by the (...) Lilly Endowment. The scholars who took part in this effort weree challenged to apply new perspectives to the study of religious organizations, especially that strand of contemporary secular organizational theory known as "New Institutionalism." The result was this groundbreaking volume, which includes papers on various aspects of such topics as the historical sources and patterns of U.S. religious organizations, contemporary patterns of denominational authority, the congregation as an organization, and the interface between religious and secular institutions and movements. The contributors include an interdisciplinary mix of scholars from economics, history, law, social administration, and sociology. (shrink)

Here, I have tried to show that a second look at the young Schmitt's legal thinking does bring clarity to the 'confused'� and 'polemical' debate about his theoretical and political legacy. Pace Schmitt, it helps demonstrate that Schmitt's embrace of German fascism was anticipated by key elements of his thinking about the dilemma of legal indeterminacy -- well before Hitler's rise to power.

Words like "terrorism" and "war" no longer encompass the scope of contemporary violence. With this explosive book, Adriana Cavarero, one of the world's most provocative feminist theorists and political philosophers, effectively renders such terms obsolete. She introduces a new word—"horrorism"—to capture the experience of violence. Unlike terror, horrorism is a form of violation grounded in the offense of disfiguration and massacre. Numerous outbursts of violence fall within Cavarero's category of horrorism, especially when the phenomenology of violence is considered from the (...) perspective of the victim rather than that of the warrior. Cavarero locates horrorism in the philosophical, political, literary, and artistic representations of defenseless and vulnerable victims. She considers both terror and horror on the battlefields of the _Iliad_, in the decapitation of Medusa, and in the murder of Medea's children. In the modern arena, she forges a link between horror, extermination, and massacre, especially the Nazi death camps, and revisits the work of Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt's thesis on totalitarianism, and Arendt's debate with Georges Bataille on the estheticization of violence and cruelty. In applying the horroristic paradigm to the current phenomena of suicide bombers, torturers, and hypertechnological warfare, Cavarero integrates Susan Sontag's views on photography and the eroticization of horror, as well as ideas on violence and the state advanced by Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. Through her searing analysis, Caverero proves that violence against the helpless claims a specific vocabulary, one that has been known for millennia, and not just to the Western tradition. Where common language fails to form a picture of atrocity, horrorism paints a brilliant portrait of its vivid reality. (shrink)

Bringing continental sensibilities and skill to his project, David Janssens has abandoned the line of defense heretofore used by North American intellectuals to shield Leo Strauss from criticism: Janssens wastes no time trying to prove Strauss was a liberal democrat, frankly admits his atheism, and emphasizes the continuity and European origins of his thought. Nevertheless committed to defending Strauss even at his most vulnerable points, Janssens is compelled to anchor his new defensive position on a misreading of what he calls (...) "an inconspicuous footnote" in Philosophie und Gesetz (1935). (shrink)

Homeosis is a developmental abnormality corresponding to the transformation of a part of the body into another one. This term was introduced in 1894 by William Bateson, who aimed to make an inventory of all kinds of biological variation in order to understand how evolution proceeds. But, immediately afterwards experimental embryology, or Entwicklungsmechanik in Germany, adopted and redefined this term to refer to abnormal regenerations in which the newly developed organ was not identical to the initial one but rather (...) resembled another part of the body. At that time, many experimental embryologists, such as Wilhelm Roux, were calling for the elimination of any phylogenetic explanation of development and were attempting to promote more mechanistic, proximate explanations. Despite these recommendations, several biologists continued to account for developmental processes by turning to phylogeny instead of mechanical forces. The case of homeosis is representative. Indeed, abnormal regenerations were often seen as examples of atavisms, or recurrence of ancestral characteristics, and many embryologists appealed to Ernst Haeckel's 'fundamental biogenetic law' to explain these strange phenomena. The break between Haeckelian tradition and Entwicklungsmechanik is thus less radical than often assumed, and the homeosis concept represents one of the factors of this continuity. (shrink)

This essay uses Schmitt's work to cast new light on the relevance of the American legal tradition known as ‘legal realism’ for the history and analysis of human rights. It does so by exploring several of Schmitt's most famous criticisms of international law and human rights, and then suggests how they might correspond with a widespread critical legal tradition in the 1920s and 1930s. This essay describes in detail two fundamental features of this tradition: historicism and realism. It (...) concludes by suggesting that a return to some of these earlier law writers and texts might be a more substantive way to develop a constructive critical position in the fields of human rights and international law than an overreliance on the politically provocative (and problematic) rhetorical flourishes of Carl Schmitt. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt's critique of liberal pluralism (of individuals and associations) was conducted in the name of a different pluralism, a truer pluralism, according to him, namely, the pluralism of equal and sovereign nation-states. His friend/enemy distinction dictates that conflict is the only legitimate model for politics, at least on the international level. By translating Schmitt's theory of politics as conflict into terms derived from the work of Lyotard and Luhmann, this article asks whether Schmitt's concept of the (...) political has any relevance for the contemporary world, especially considering that the liberal pluralism of associations (or social systems) seems to have carried the day. Such a transposition requires that the modern, horizontal structure of operationally closed (but internally bifurcated) social systems be thought of as sovereign states fiercely fighting to maintain their autonomy. Thus, the common battle fought by the anti-modernist, Schmitt, the ultra-modernist, Luhmann, and the post-modernist, Lyotard, is the one against de-differentiation and the expansion of a universalist morality and economy. (shrink)

In this commentary, I consider Schmitt's cross-cultural investigation of sociosexuality from a comparative perspective. I argue that such a perspective lends support to an evolutionary explanation of a number of Schmitt's findings, including universal sex differences in sociosexuality and the sensitivity of mating behavior to contextual variables such as sex ratio.

Antonio Negri, one of the world's leading scholars on Baruch Spinoza and his contemporary legacy, offers a straightforward explanation of the philosopher's elaborate arguments and a persuasive case for his ongoing relevance. Responding to a resurgent interest in Spinoza's thought and its potential application to contemporary global issues, Negri demonstrates the thinker's special value to politics, philosophy, and related disciplines. Negri's work is both a return to and an advancement of his initial affirmation of Spinozian thought in _The Savage Anomaly_. (...) He further defends his understanding of the philosopher as a proto-postmodernist, or a thinker who is just now, with the advent of the postmodern, becoming contemporary. Negri also connects Spinoza's theories to recent trends in political philosophy, particularly the reengagement with Carl Schmitt's "political theology," and the history of philosophy, including the argument that Spinoza belongs to a "radical enlightenment." By positioning Spinoza as a contemporary revolutionary intellectual, Negri addresses and effectively defeats twentieth-century critiques of the thinker waged by Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben. (shrink)

Writing in 1935 as "Hugo Fiala," Karl Löwith not only connected Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt to an apparently contentless "decisionism" but drew attention to the fact that his correspondent Leo Strauss had attacked Schmitt—like Heidegger an open Nazi since 1933— from the Right in 1932. In opposition to the views of Peter Eli Gordon, Heidegger's bellicose stance at the Davos Hochschule of 1929 is presented as "political" in Schmitt's sense of the term while Strauss's embrace of (...) Heidegger, never regretted, showed that he ceased to be Nietzsche's "Good European" in his thirtieth year. A more significant "change of orientation" is revealed in Strauss's 1932 version of the "second cave," a pseudo-Platonic image of Verjudung . Revelation had disrupted a nihilistic "natural ignorance" that could only be reversed by an elite's secret decision for a self-contradictory content: only an atheistic religion provides a post-liberal solution to "the theological-political problem.". (shrink)

This article reflects on William E Scheuerman’s The End of Law and the value of the liberal rule of law. It puts Scheuerman’s concerns about Schmitt’s attacks on the liberal rule of law in dialogue with Schmitt’s theory of ‘legal revolution’. It argues that, although Schmitt was neither a liberal nor a democrat, his work on legal revolution can help liberals respond to populist attacks on liberal constitutional essentials.

While ‘political theology’ has attracted widespread attention for decades, it is often taken to be too fideist for orthodox Christianity and too illiberal for secular politics. But in the work of Jacques Maritain one finds a defence of a certain political theology, one whose character is key to grasping Maritain’s justification of another controversial concept: ‘Christian philosophy’. In this study I draw out Maritain’s distinction between Christian philosophy and theology, paying particular attention to the relevance of their differences in the (...) realm of practical thought. To illustrate what Maritain has in mind by these claims, I further consider his intriguing classification of the political works of Thomas Aquinas. I argue that distinguishing between rival notions of political theology clarifies the opportunities for dialogue between believing and secular citizens. (shrink)

We fear that the growing threat of violent attack has upset the balance between existential concepts of political power, which emphasize security, and traditional notions of constitutional limits meant to protect civil liberties. We worry that constitutional states cannot, during a time of war, terror, and extreme crisis, maintain legality and preserve civil rights and freedoms. David Williams Bates allays these concerns by revisiting the theoretical origins of the modern constitutional state, which, he argues, recognized and made room for tensions (...) among law, war, and the social order. We traditionally associate the Enlightenment with the taming of absolutist sovereign power through the establishment of a legal state based on the rights of individuals. In his critical rereading, Bates shows instead that Enlightenment thinkers conceived of political autonomy in a systematic, theoretical way. Focusing on the nature of foundational violence, war, and existential crises, eighteenth-century thinkers understood law and constitutional order not as constraints on political power but as the logical implication of that primordial force. Returning to the origin stories that informed the beginnings of political community, Bates reclaims the idea of law, warfare, and the social order as intertwining elements subject to complex historical development. Following an analysis of seminal works by seventeenth-century natural-law theorists, Bates reviews the major canonical thinkers of constitutional theory (Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau) from the perspective of existential security and sovereign power. Countering Carl Schmitt's influential notion of the autonomy of the political, Bates demonstrates that Enlightenment thinkers understood the autonomous political sphere as a space of law protecting individuals according to their political status, not as mere members of a historically contingent social order. (shrink)

The symposiasts press from a number of directions. Erin Kelly contends that Hume’s stability-based sentimentalist ethics cannot do justice to our considered normative moral judgements. Schmitt and Williams criticize my account of Hume’s epistemology proper. I will have to give ground: my book does overstate the extent to which Hume reaches a destructive result, in large part because I overlook significant variants of a stability account of justification. I make other concessions—in regard to the country gentlemen passage and Hume’s (...) 1.3.9 treatment of resemblance—but believe these have limited repercussions. (shrink)

Across mammals, when fathers matter, as they did for hunter-gatherers, sex-similar pair-bonding mechanisms evolve. Attachment fertility theory can explain Schmitt's and other findings as resulting from a system of mechanisms affording pair-bonding in which promiscuous seeking is part. Departures from hunter-gatherer environments (e.g., early menarche, delayed marriage) can alter dating trajectories, thereby impacting mating outside of pair-bonds.

Hume’s moral philosophy is a sentiment-based view. Moral judgment is a matter of the passions; certain traits of character count as virtues or vices because of the approval or disapproval they evoke in us, feelings that express concern we have about the social effects of these traits. A sentiment-based approach is attractive, since morality seems fundamentally to involve caring for other people. Sentiment-based views, however, face a real challenge. It is clear that our affections are often particular; we favor certain (...) persons over others. This poses a problem when it comes to determining the proper content of morality. The ties of sentiment would seem to be in tension with the aspirations of morality toward impartiality and universality. (shrink)

I have before me a letter dated January 5, 2000 from Bradford Wilson, the executive director of the NAS. It begins, “I really enjoyed your contribution to the recent symposium in the January issue of First Things, so much so that I’ve also decided to invite you to join the NAS. Many of your fellow contributors including Robert George, Jeffrey Satinover, and Father Neuhaus are among our current members, and I think you’d find it well worth your while if you (...) joined ranks with us yourself.”. (shrink)

Darwin's greatest accomplishment was to show how life might be explained as the result of natural selection. But does Darwin's theory mean that life was unintended? William A. Dembski argues that it does not. In this book Dembski extends his theory of intelligent design. Building on his earlier work in The Design Inference (Cambridge, 1998), he defends that life must be the product of intelligent design. Critics of Dembski's work have argued that evolutionary algorithms show that life can be (...) explained apart from intelligence. But by employing powerful recent results from the No Free Lunch Theory, Dembski addresses and decisively refutes such claims. As the leading proponent of intelligent design, Dembski reveals a designer capable of originating the complexity and specificity found throughout the cosmos. Scientists and theologians alike will find this book of interest as it brings the question of creation firmly into the realm of scientific debate. (shrink)

Why does anything happen? What is the best account of natural necessity? In this book, William A. Bauer presents and defends a comprehensive account of the internal structure of causal powers that incorporates physical intentionality and information. Bauer explores new lines of thought concerning the theory of pure powers, the place of mind in the physical world, and the role of information in explaining fundamental processes. He raises probing questions about physical modality and fundamental properties, and explores the possibility (...) that physical reality and the mind are unified through intentionality. His book will be valuable for researchers and students working in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

William Galston is a distinguished political philosopher whose work is informed by the experience of having also served from 1993–5 as President Clinton's Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy. He is thus able to speak with an authority unique amongst political theorists about the implications of advancing certain moral and political values in practice. The foundational argument of this 2002 book is that liberalism is compatible with the value pluralism first espoused by Isaiah Berlin. William Galston defends a version (...) of value pluralism - liberal pluralism - and argues, against the contentions of John Gray and others, that it undergirds a kind of liberal politics that gives weight to the ability of individuals and groups to live their lives in accordance with their deepest beliefs about what gives meaning and purpose to life. (shrink)

How is a legitimate state possible? Obedience, coercion and intrusion are three ideas that seem inseparable from all government and seem to render state authority presumptively illegitimate. This book exposes three fallacies inspired by these ideas and in doing so challenges assumptions shared by liberals, libertarians, cultural conservatives, moderates and Marxists. In three clear and tightly argued essays William Edmundson dispels these fallacies and shows that living in a just state remains a worthy ideal. This is an important book (...) for all philosophers, political scientists and legal theorists as well as other readers interested in the views of Rawls, Dworkin and Nozick, many of whose central ideas are subjected to rigorous critique. (shrink)

William Sweet gathers responses to the major writings of the leading figures of the British idealist movement, including contributions by Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Sir Ernest Barker, Sir Henry Jones, R.F.A. Hoernle, J.S. MacKenzie, Brand Blanshard and others.

William Galston is a distinguished political philosopher whose work is informed by the experience of having also served from 1993–5 as President Clinton's Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy. He is thus able to speak with an authority unique amongst political theorists about the implications of advancing certain moral and political values in practice. The foundational argument of this 2002 book is that liberalism is compatible with the value pluralism first espoused by Isaiah Berlin. William Galston defends a version (...) of value pluralism - liberal pluralism - and argues, against the contentions of John Gray and others, that it undergirds a kind of liberal politics that gives weight to the ability of individuals and groups to live their lives in accordance with their deepest beliefs about what gives meaning and purpose to life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Bibliography of the New Rhetoric ProjectDavid A. Frank and William DriscollScholars do not have access to a complete bibliography of the new rhetoric project. We have redressed this problem by compiling what we believe is the most comprehensive bibliography to date of the works of Chaïm Perelman and of those he coauthored with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. The bibliography includes all the English and French titles, as well as (...) titles that saw first publication in other languages. Translations we believe Perelman may have authorized or endorsed are included.With this bibliography, scholars can now better understand how the new rhetoric project was conceived and how it unfolded. Within the larger constellation of the project, Perelman's bibliography is the most extensive, numbering almost three hundred entries. The trajectory of Perelman's scholarship reveals the origins of the new rhetoric project and how it evolved between the time of his announcement in 1949 that he and Olbrechts-Tyteca had embarked on a program designed to rehabilitate reason and the period of his final articles in the 1980s. A review of the articles and books that came out of the Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca collaboration reveals both a phase of conceptualization and development of the project and a phase of culmination. In the first phase, commencing with Rhétorique et philosophie, the authors established the need for a rhetorically grounded philosophy. As they built toward the publication of the Traité, [End Page 449] the culmination of their ten-year effort, they wrote articles elaborating on "notions" in argumentation (1955) and on the tenets of the "new rhetoric" (1956). In 1958, the year the Traité appeared, they published articles on classical and romantic loci in argumentation and on time in argumentation. With the exception of a 1983 tribute to the theorist Pareto, they did not write together after 1958 but instead pursued separate lines of research out of their collaboration. A significant number of theses entries rehearse and embellish notions introduced between 1947 and 1958, the years of the genesis, development, and culmination of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's new rhetoric project.AbbreviationsChALe champ de l'argumentationDMPDroit, morale, et philosophieEDEthique et droitIJPAThe Idea of Justice and the Problem of ArgumentJLAJustice, Law, and Argument: Essays on Moral and Legal ReasoningNRHThe New Rhetoric and the Humanities: Essays on Rhetoric and Its ApplicationsJJusticeJRJustice et raisonRPRhétorique et philosophie pour une théorie de l'argumentation en philosophieBibliography1931 "Esquisse d'une logistique des valeurs." Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles 36 (3–4): 486–96. Google Scholar1932 "A propos de la philosophie de M. Dupréel." Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles 37 (3): 385–99. Google Scholar1933 "De l'arbitraire dans la connaissance." Archives de la Société belge de philosophie 5 (3): 5–44. Google Scholar"Le statut social des jugements de vérité." Revue de l'Institut de sociologie 13 (1): 17–23. Google Scholar1935 "Réflexions sur l'assimilation." La tribune Juive 12:51–52. [End Page 450]Google Scholar1936 "L'antinomie de M. Gödel." Bulletins de l'Académie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique 22 (6): 730–36. Google Scholar"Les paradoxes de la logique." Mind 45 (178): 204–8. Google Scholar1937 "L'équivalence, la définition et la solution du paradoxe de Russell." L'enseignement mathématique 36 (5–6): 350–56. Google Scholar"Metafizyka fregego." Kwartalnik filozoficzny 12 (2): 121–42. Google Scholar"Réponse à MM. Grelling et Beth." Mind 46 (182): 278–79. Google Scholar"Une solution des paradoxes de la logique et ses conséquences pour la conception de l'infini." In Congrès Descartes: IXe Congrès international de philosophie, 6:206–10. Paris: Hermann. Google Scholar1938 "Etude sur Frege." PhD diss., Université Libre de Bruxelles.1939 "Etude sur Gottlob Frege." Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles 44 (2): 224–27. Google Scholar"De logica en het vrije onderzoek." Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles 44 (2): 209–19. Google Scholar"La morale des forts et la morale... (shrink)

Carl Schmitt, whatever his clear deficiencies as a human being and excesses in his overall thought, is, by any objective measure, one of the leading jurisprudential figures of the 20th century. And...

Scheuerman’s book is one of the handful of significant attempts to rethink Schmitt’s work systematically over the past four decades. In so doing, he raises three key questions for me. First, is Schmitt’s work a sincere contribution to legal and political theory, or an attempt to argue for setting the rule of law aside for authoritarianism, that is, an instrumental critique of indeterminacy? Second, to what extent is Schmitt – critical of the ‘bourgeois’ rule of law, critical (...) of globalization – really a thinker defending capitalism? Can he really be associated with the Ordoliberals (even if they adopted his arguments from 1931 to 1932 in their own writing of the time)? Third, to what extent were Schmitt’s early contributions to National Socialist law aimed at responding to legal indeterminacy, and to what extent did they in fact point towards a radicalism of German law within the Nazi system, especially insofar as they endorsed making decisions based on the principles of justice of the Nazi state – and potentially against the express language of statutes? (shrink)

A book chapter for the volume Eco-Anxiety and Planetary Hope: Experiencing the Twin Disasters of COVID-19 and Climate Change using Nietzsche's philosophy and primarily based on archival research done by William A. B. Parkhurst.

Spectacular treatment disasters in recent years have made it clear that informal "let's-try-it-and-see" methods of testing new proposals are more risky now than ever before, and have led many to call for a halt to experimentation in clinical medicine. In this easy-tp-read, philosophical guide to human experimentation, William Silverman pleads for wider use of randomized clinical trials, citing many examples that show how careful trials can overturn preconceived or ill-conceived notions of a therapy's effectiveness and lead to a clearer (...) understanding of clinical anomalies. Because it gives careful guidance on setting up trials and avoiding conceptual pitfalls, this book will be of great interest to all epidemiologists and clinical statisticians, and to a wide varitey of clinicians, pharmacologists, and nurses. Since it requires no medical or statistical knowledge, it will also appeal to ethicists, lawyers, and the general public. (shrink)

A few years back, well-known skeptic Michael Shermer and I were speakers at Baylor’s The Nature of Nature conference. During evening refreshments, we discussed how we could generate funds for our respective causes—he to promote skepticism and debunk people like me, and me to promote intelligent design and debunk Darwinism (which underwrites Shermer’s brand of skepticism). We agreed that we should start a highly visible campaign against each other in which we argue the dangers of the other’s position. Having escalated (...) the conflict between us, we could then go to our natural constituencies and urge them to fund each of us against the other. Of course, nothing ever came of that conversation. But we had a chuckle. And both our causes have since done quite well financially. (shrink)