Publié en 1962, le livre de Charles N.R. McCoy, intitulé The Structure of Political Thought, demeure un travail important, encore qu’oublié, sur l’histoire de la philosophie politique. Bien que l’ouvrage ait reçu de bonnes appréciations, il n’existe pas encore d’examen critique de son traitement de la théorie politique médiévale. Dans le présent article, j’explore la structure de son argument dans les deux chapitres sur la pensée médiévale, en montrant comment McCoy centre sa discussion sur une investigation des différentes méthodes interprétatives (...) qu’emploient Thomas d’Aquin et Marsile de Padoue en lisant Aristote. Il le fait dans le dessein de déterminer comment l’enseignement aristotélicien - touchant la structure de la pensée politique - est le mieux préservé par la Révélation. (shrink)

Considered one of the leading proponents of natural theology in the 20th century, E. L. Mascall (1905–1993) taught philosophy and theology at King’s College London for most of his career. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he insisted that classical theism, embodied in the writings of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, could be successfully revived for a modern audience. Known for his vigorous defense of neo-Thomism, Mascall offered an unusual interpretation of The Five Ways. While modern scholastics typically read the proofs as (...) syllogistic exercises, Mascall maintained that God’s existence could not be deduced from premises, but must be grasped by means of a unique type of “metaphysical intuition” which he called “contuition.” In my paper, I will re-examine his position, explore his reasons for adopting it, and finally raise several questions concerning its significance for the history of neo-Thomism. (shrink)

Publié en 1962, le livre de Charles N.R. McCoy, intitulé The Structure of Political Thought, demeure un travail important, encore qu’oublié, sur l’histoire de la philosophie politique. Bien que l’ouvrage ait reçu de bonnes appréciations, il n’existe pas encore d’examen critique de son traitement de la théorie politique médiévale. Dans le présent article, j’explore la structure de son argument dans les deux chapitres sur la pensée médiévale, en montrant comment McCoy centre sa discussion sur une investigation des différentes méthodes interprétatives (...) qu’emploient Thomas d’Aquin et Marsile de Padoue en lisant Aristote. Il le fait dans le dessein de déterminer comment l’enseignement aristotélicien — touchant la structure de la pensée politique — est le mieux préservé par (et accompli au sein de) la Révélation. (shrink)

The Great Dialogue of Nature and Space, a reprint edition of a work first published in 1970, is a set of readings in the philosophy of science collected after Simon’s untimely death in 1961. The ten essays comprising the volume include material from a number of sources: the first seven pieces are taken from a lecture course Simon delivered at the University of Chicago in 1960; the eighth and ninth articles appeared originally in European academic journals in the 1930s and (...) 1940s; and the final essay is an abridged version of the introductory chapter to Simon’s Prevoir et Savior. (shrink)

Some critics have not found this answer to be entirely satisfying, and in chapter 3, Lutz again defends MacIntyre against the charge of relativism. To this end, he distinguishes between the relativity that is a perduring “condition of human inquiry” and the philosophical doctrine of relativism, the dogmatic claim that “truth is relative to culture”. Lutz argues that MacIntyre adopts the former position and—unlike his critics—never equates or conflates the rationality of moral judgments with truth itself. Thus, while sensitive to (...) the constraints of relativity, MacIntyre insists that it is the “objectivity of the real” that remains “the telos of moral inquiry”. (shrink)

By the time of his death in 2003, Bernard Williams was one of the greatest philosophers of his generation. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is not only widely acknowledged to be his most important book, but also hailed a contemporary classic of moral philosophy. Presenting a sustained critique of moral theory from Kant onwards, Williams reorients ethical theory towards ‘truth, truthfulness and the meaning of an individual life’. He explores and reflects upon the most difficult problems in contemporary philosophy (...) and identifies new ideas about central issues such as relativism, objectivity and the possibility of ethical knowledge. (shrink)

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients (...) than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery. The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours. Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. _Shame and Necessity_ gives a new account of our relations to the Greeks, and helps us to see what ethical ideas we need in order to live in the modern world. (shrink)

Introduction: the advance of governmentality -- Foucault, power, and governmentality: introduction; what is governmentality?; beyond the microphysics of power?; from theory of the state to genealogy of the state; history of the art of government; pastoral power; raison d'état; liberal governmentality; five propositions on foucault and governmentality -- Governmentality 3.4.7.: introduction; governmentality after Foucault; governmentality and the political sciences; some problems in governmentality -- Foucault effect redux? some notes on international governmentality studies: constellation; a few preliminary observations; problems and debates (...) in international governmentality studies -- Reconnecting governmentality and genealogy: introduction; genealogy and governmentality; pluralizing genealogy; practicing genealogy; lines of descent: the family tree of power?; counter-memory and re-serialization; the retrieval of forgotten struggles and subjugated knowledges -- Conclusion: encountering governmentality: governmentality as a new cartography of power; from mapping to encountering; governmentality and politics. (shrink)

Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this 'attention economy', we need to recognise the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order to (...) take back control. Drawing on insights ranging from Diogenes to contemporary tech leaders, Williams's thoughtful and impassioned analysis is sure to provoke discussion and debate. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

Drawing on a passage from Ramsey's Truth and Probability, we formulate a simple, plausible constraint on evaluating the accuracy of credences: the Calibration Test. We show that any additive, continuous accuracy measure that passes the Calibration Test will be strictly proper. Strictly proper accuracy measures are known to support the touchstone results of accuracy-first epistemology, for example vindications of probabilism and conditionalization. We show that our use of Calibration is an improvement on previous such appeals by showing how it answers (...) or sidesteps problems that have been raised for previous work in this area. (shrink)

Bernard Williams's remarkable essay on morality confronts the problems of writing moral philosophy, and offers a stimulating alternative to more systematic accounts which seem nevertheless to have left all the important issues somewhere off the page. Williams explains, analyses and distinguishes a number of key positions, from the purely amoral to notions of subjective or relative morality, testing their coherence before going on to explore the nature of 'goodness' in relation to responsibilities and choice, roles, standards, and human nature. The (...) final chapters make a fascinating enquiry into what morality is about, looking beyond happiness to other human aims and ideals. This re-issue of a classic in moral philosophy includes a new foreword by the author. (shrink)

Discusses what is involved in describing a person as responsible: she has responsibilities that she is duty-bound to undertake, and may be held responsible when she fails to fulfill these. Considers why societies and organizations divide responsibilities between persons. Also considers how questions of responsibility arise in the spheres of morality, law, organizational life and politics, and how different modes of holding responsible may be appropriate in each. Concludes with a brief discussion of some questions about collective responsibility.

This is the first critical study of The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze's most important work on language and ethics, as well as the main source of his vital philosophy of the event.James Williams explains the originality of Deleuze's work with careful definitions of all his innovative terms and a detailed description of the complex structure he constructs. This reading makes connections to his ground-breaking work on literature, to his critical but also progressive relation to the sciences, and to his (...) controversial denial of the priority of standard logics, human values and 'meaning' in thinking.This book will open new debates and develop current ones around Deleuze's work in philosophy, politics, literature, linguistics, cultural studies and sociology. (shrink)

Are interpersonal comparisons of desire possible? Can we give an account of how facts about desires are grounded, that underpins such comparisons? This paper supposes the answer to the first question is yes, and provides an account of the nature of desire that explains how this is so. The account is a modification of the interpretationist metaphysics of representation that the author has recently been developing. The modification is to allow phenomenological affective valence into the “base facts” on which correct (...) interpretation is grounded. To use this extra resource within that theory to vindicate interpersonal comparisons, we will need to appeal rational connections between level of valence and level of desire, which this paper sets out and examines. (shrink)

This paper examines some of the background social and institutional practices involved in the production of official statistics about crime and criminal justice. It documents how a host of micropolitical considerations impinge on what studies are conducted, which agencies control official data, and how measures are standardized. The communication of statistical facts is also shown to be influenced by a concern to prospectively manage the political symbolism of popular accounts about crime and criminal justice statistics.

Acknowledged as perhaps _the_ masterpiece of materialist criticism in the English language, this omnibus ranges over British literary history from George Eliot to George Orwell to inquire about the complex ways economic reality shapes the imagination.

As humans, we want to live meaningfully, yet we are often driven by impulse. In Religion and the Meaning of Life, Williams investigates this paradox – one with profound implications. Delving into felt realities pertinent to meaning, such as boredom, trauma, suicide, denial of death, and indifference, Williams describes ways to acquire meaning and potential obstacles to its acquisition. This book is unique in its willingness to transcend a more secular stance and explore how one's belief in God may be (...) relevant to life's meaning. Religion and the Meaning of Life's interdisciplinary approach makes it useful to philosophers, religious studies scholars, psychologists, students, and general readers alike. The insights from this book have profound real-world applications – they can transform how readers search for meaning and, consequently, how readers see and exist in the world. (shrink)

This new volume of philosophical papers by Bernard Williams is divided into three sections: the first Action, Freedom, Responsibility, the second Philosophy, Evolution and the Human Sciences; in which appears the essay which gives the collection its title; and the third Ethics, which contains essays closely related to his 1983 book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Like the two earlier volumes of Williams's papers published by Cambridge University Press, Problems of the Self and Moral Luck, this volume will be (...) welcomed by all readers with a serious interest in philosophy. It is published alongside a volume of essays on Williams's work, World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, edited by J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison, which provides a reappraisal of his work by other distinguished thinkers in the field. (shrink)

Bernard Williams; XIV*—The Truth in Relativism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 75, Issue 1, 1 June 1975, Pages 215–228, https://doi.org/10.1093.

Awarding rights to rivers, forests, and other environmental entities (EEs) is a new and increasingly popular approach to environmental protection. The distinctive feature of such rights of nature (RoN) legislation is that direct duties are owed to the EEs. This paper presents a novel rebuttal of the strongest argument against RoN: the no interest argument. The crux of this argument is that because EEs are not sentient, they cannot possess the kinds of interests necessary to ground direct duties. Therefore, they (...) cannot be legitimate rights-bearers. After considering and rejecting standard responses to this argument, the paper challenges its fundamental assumption: that rights-correlative duties must be grounded in the interests of the rights-bearer. The paper then presents the RoN critic with a dilemma. The critic must either accept that EEs are legitimate rights-bearers, or delegitimise many well-established rights-bearers along with EEs. Either way, the no interest argument loses its force. (shrink)

This book puts forward a revisionist view of Japanese wartime thinking. It seeks to explore why Japanese intellectuals, historians and philosophers of the time insisted that Japan had to turn its back on the West and attack the United States and the British Empire. Based on a close reading of the texts written by members of the highly influential Kyoto School, and revisiting the dialogue between the Kyoto School and the German philosopher Heidegger, it argues that the work of Kyoto (...) thinkers cannot be dismissed as mere fascist propaganda, and that this work, in which race is a key theme, constitutes a reasoned case for a post-White world. The author also argues that this theme is increasingly relevant at present, as demographic changes are set to transform the political and social landscape of North America and Western Europe over the next fifty years. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue for the value of two complementary pedagogical tools for teaching moral emotions: (1) taxonomies and (2) normative case studies. The paper proceeds in four parts. Section One discusses our motivations for teaching moral emotions. Section Two introduces envy as the central example we use to demonstrate the value of developing a scaffolded approach to teaching moral emotions that moves from taxonomy to normative case studies. Specifically, we engage with Sara Protasi’s The Philosophy of Envy (2021). (...) We start by focusing on how an instructor could use Protasi’s taxonomy of envy effectively in the classroom. Then, Section Three engages with Rebecca M. Taylor’s recent work on normative case studies. We build on one of Protasi’s cases to demonstrate how instructors can design normative case studies to speak directly to the experiences of their students and we suggest a sample assignment. Finally, Section Four concludes by reinforcing the complementary relationship between taxonomies and normative case studies for teaching moral emotions. (shrink)

A revised, expanded and fully up-to-date critical introduction to Deleuze's most important work of philosophyBy critically analysing Deleuze's methods, principles and arguments, James Williams helps readers to engage with the revolutionary core of Deleuze's philosophy and take up positions for or against its most innovative and controversial ideas.

An exploration of Immanuel Kant's account of war and the controversies that have arisen from its interpretation. This book brings the ideas of Kant's critical philosophy to bear on one of the leading political and legal questions of our age: under what circumstances, if any, is recourse to war legally and morally justifiable?