In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Josiah Royce in FocusDwayne A. TunstallJosiah Royce in Focus Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008.Josiah Royce in Focus reads like a sequel to Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley’s earlier book on Royce’s public philosophy, Genuine Individuals and Genuine Communities. As she did in Genuine Individuals and Genuine Communities, Kegley does a remarkable job of interpreting Royce’s philosophy such that it has [End Page 127] contemporary (...) relevance for academic philosophy, conflict resolution, psychology, and the religion-science dialogue. Yet, unlike with her earlier book, Kegley devotes over two-thirds of this book to the task of weaving together Royce’s life and educational experiences with his thought. This integration of Royce’s life with his thought allows the reader to glimpse just how Royce is “a model philosopher: a scholar and a committed teacher, as well as a philosopher much concerned about public issues and basic human concerns” (xiv). Kegley does this while introducing the reader to many dimensions of Royce, including Royce the son, Royce the father, Royce the first-generation Californian, Royce the first-rate historian of California, Royce the amateur novelist, and Royce the world traveler. Amazingly, she uses Royce’s life to illuminate his philosophical thought without psychologizing Royce and hence avoids the all-too-common urge to reduce people’s philosophical ideas to mere rationalizations of their own preferences and desires. This is to be applauded in the age of Oprah, the proliferation of memoirs, and the apparent glut of self-help books.The first five chapters constitute Kegley’s portrait of Royce the person and Royce the thinker. In chapter 1, “Royce as a Frontier Californian and Intellectual Pioneer: Forging Self and Thought in a New and Developing Land,” she introduces the reader to Royce the first-generation Californian and intellectual pioneer. Here she persuasively links his California frontier upbringing; his early educational experiences in California at the Lincoln School (San Francisco) and the University of California, Berkeley; his studies in Germany; and his graduate studies at Johns Hopkins to his concerns about social conflicts and his lifelong attempt to resolve those conflicts to better the communities in which they occur (7–12).Indeed, she persuasively argues that Royce had already formulated the central insights of his philosophy by the time of his arrival at Harvard University in 1882. Kegley’s interpretation of Royce’s intellectual development owes much to Randall Auxier’s recent work on Royce’s thought. In Auxier’s interpretation of Royce’s thought, Royce had formulated the central intellectual insights of his philosophy—especially his ethics, philosophy or religion, and public philosophy—years before The Religious Aspect of Philosophy was published in 1885. This account of Royce’s intellectual development differs somewhat from Frank M. Oppenheim’s account. Oppenheim’s account depicts Royce’s intellectual development as a series of interrelated yet momentous “maximal intellectual insights.” Each of these insights marks a noticeable shift in his intellectual development. Oppenheim thinks that, of all the maximal intellectual insights Royce had throughout his career, the [End Page 128] most momentous one is the 1912 Peircean insight. This insight leads Royce to convert to Peircean semiotics and clarify his moral philosophy and philosophy of religion with Peirce’s theory of interpretation. In Oppenheim’s account, The Sources of Religious Insight (1912) and The Problem of Christianity (1913) are the glorious fruits of his Peircean insight. What Kegley has done in chapter 1 is to provide an account of Royce’s intellectual development that supersedes Oppenheim’s account. Indeed, her account of Royce’s intellectual development could possibly change how scholars study Royce’s thought, much in the same way that John E. Smith’s Royce’s Social Infinite did from the early 1950s until recently.In chapter 2, “The Self,” Kegley depicts Royce as a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century psychologist whose ideas are still relevant today. She reminds the reader throughout this chapter that Royce is a pioneer in psychology, given that his book Outlines of Psychology (1903) advances an approach to psychology that sidesteps faculty psychology and that he is one of the first psychologists, along with William James... (shrink)

Jacoby Adeshei Carter has done an invaluable service in editing this critical edition of Alain Leroy Locke’s series of six lectures in Haiti delivered “from April 9 to July 10, 1943, when he was the Inter-American Exchange Professor to Haiti under the joint auspices of the American Committee for Inter-American Artistic and Intellectual Relations and the Haitian Ministry of Education”. African American Contributions to the Americas’ Cultures consists of two parts. The first part is Locke’s series of six lectures entitled (...) “The Negro’s Contribution to the Culture of the Americas.” The second part is Carter’s critical interpretative essay on Locke’s lectures entitled “‘Like Rum in the Punch’: The Quest for Cultural... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Josiah Royce's "Enlightened" Antiblack Racism?Dwayne A. TunstallThis article has not been written by some ideal Roycean mediator whose interpretive acts can help heal the deep-seated racial and ethnic divisions of contemporary American society. Nor has it been written by an impartial judge adjudicating a dispute. Rather this article has been written by a Roycean scholar and a philosopher of race who feels compelled to examine Royce's social philosophy (...) in order to determine whether his positions on race in the United States of America and on racialized colonialism in the British Caribbean presuppose the legitimacy of antiblack racism. What has compelled me to examine Royce's social philosophy critically are the presentations made by Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley and Tommy J. Curry at the joint Josiah Royce Society and Personalist Discussion Group session for the 2008 American Philosophical Association (APA) Central Division meeting.For those readers who might be familiar with Royce's philosophy, this entire article may seem pointless. I can imagine quite a few readers asking themselves the following questions: Why should we waste our time reading an article investigating whether Royce's social philosophy presupposes antiblack racism? Do we not already know that Royce's philosophy is an antiracist one? This response has been nurtured by those Roycean scholars who have interpreted his philosophy to be antiracist. Indeed, this has apparently been the standard approach to interpreting Royce's philosophy since the publication of his 1905 address to the Chicago Ethical Society, "Race Questions and Prejudices," in Race Questions, Provincialism and Other American Problems. These scholars have included American pragmatists, African-American philosophers, theologians, ethicists, and philosophers of race. Over the last forty years alone, these scholars have included William T. Fontaine, Cornel West, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Alain Locke, Shannon Sullivan, and Jacquelyn Kegley. [End Page 39]In this article I argue that the standard antiracist interpretation of Royce's philosophy is a mistaken one. This is an understandable mistake, though, given that many of those who interpret Royce this way presuppose that (1) one can analyze certain concepts and principles from Royce's ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics (e.g., his theory of interpretation) apart from his concrete social philosophy and (2) one can ignore his tacit acceptance of early twentieth-century, British-style racialized colonialism. I think Kegley's writings on Royce and race are paradigmatic examples of this reading of Royce.Kegley's recent APA presentation can be read as a further articulation of one of the central contentions in her 2005 article, "Is a Coherent Racial Identity Essential to Genuine Individuals and Communities?": "… Royce advocates and provides the foundation for an anti-essentialist and nonracialist understanding of race" (216). Following her earlier analysis, Kegley's presentation takes these two contentions for granted: First, when one criticizes an essentialist conception of race (that is, regarding race as a natural kind), that person is not racist. Second, when one regards the concept of race as a social kind, one is antiracist, if not an outright nonracist. However, I think that it is possible for one to criticize an essentialist conception of race and regard race as a social kind and still accept a form of cultural antiblack racism. Moreover, I think that Royce's social philosophy is a paradigmatic example of this phenomenon, with him being a nonessentialist with regards to the concept of race but yet being a cultural antiblack racist.Here, the significance of Curry's presentation for Royce scholars is obvious. In it he asks us Royce scholars if Royce's social philosophy, with regards to race issues, is an accomplice for the cultural perpetuation of white supremacy. I think that the answer to that question hinges on whether Royce's acceptance of British-style racialized colonialism in the West Indies is based on a misguided ethnocentrism or on a form of cultural antiblack racism.I take it for granted that Royce's recommendation that Southern Euro-Americans learn from the British colonial rule of Jamaica and Trinidad in "Race Questions and Prejudices" is evidence that he had accepted the legitimacy of British-style racialized colonialism. What I would like to do now is explain how Royce's... (shrink)

Since the publication of The Man-Not in July of 2017, the wealth of empirical information challenging the conclusions of intersectionality and Black masculinity studies has gained the public’s attention. The Man-Not argues that in western patriarchal societies Black males and other racialized men and boys are targeted for extermination and social ostracization. Following the work of social dominance theorists and Global South Masculinities, Black Male Studies argues that patriarchy places outgroup-racialized men at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Tommy J. Curry’s Another white Man’s Burden is an excellent study of Josiah Royce’s philosophy, particularly his social philosophy, within its historical milieu. I think that Curry is right with respect to his criticism of Royce’s social philosophy. As I read Another white Man’s Burden, I found myself distinguishing between the “good Royce” and the “bad Royce,” along the lines of the simplistic yet fruitful good-bad dichotomy Richard Rorty used to characterize philosophers such as John Dewey. By the “good Royce,” (...) I mean the Royce whose thought is neither necessarily anti-black and racist, nor advances the cause of Anglo-Saxon cultural superiority. By the “bad Royce,” I mean the Royce whose... (shrink)

Ethical personalism is normally associated with three of the central personalist movements in the twentieth century: the Boston personalism of Borden Parker Bowne, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rufus Burrow, Jr.; the French personalism of Emmanuel Mounier; and the personalism of Pope John Paul II. In the twenty-first century, there are a growing number of people living in North America and Europe who are not affiliated with any religious tradition, yet are still sympathetic to the Christian ethical ideas associated with (...) twentieth century personalist movements. This essay attempts to situate the best ideas from ethical personalism, specifically from Boston personalism, in a non-Christian religious humanist context. That way, non-theists who are sympathetic to Boston ethical personalism can still identify themselves as ethical personalists. (shrink)

This paper aims to sever the tie between Josiah Royce's ethico-religious insight and his idiosyncratic absolutistic idealism. The first section of this paper sets the stage for this severance by explaining what it is that Royce's ethico-religious insight needs to be separated from: his absolutistic idealism and its conception of God. This explanation will consist mainly of a concise description of Royce's phenomenology of concept formation in chapter nine of his Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885) and a critical exegesis of (...) his 1895 Berkeley lecture, "The Conception of God." The second section of this paper actually severs the tie between Royce's ethico-religious insight and his absolutistic conception of God via a Marcellian critique of Royce's conception of God. The third section of this paper places Royce's ethico-religious insight in a more hospitable environment — namely, the philosophical orbit of a Marcellian existential phenomenology. (shrink)

Despite differences between Cornel West's prophetic pragmatism and Dewey's pragmatism, they both conceive of “creative democracy” as an ethico-religious ideal. Accordingly, this article examines how Deweyan creative democracy is an ethico-religious ideal, in the sense of being a religious humanist ideal. This article concludes with an explanation of how a contemporary Deweyan democrat living in the United States cannot help but recognize the tragicomic undercurrents of creative democracy.

Abstract:In this essay, I respond to Chris Voparil’s reconstruction of Richard Rorty’s engagement with Josiah Royce’s pragmatism in chapter 4 of Reconstructing Pragmatism. I first express my thoughts about Voparil’s three main claims about Rorty’s reconstruction of Royce’s pragmatism. I then mention what I took to be the least interesting part of this chapter. Finally, I propose that Alain Locke’s pragmatism, and more specifically his approach to resolving conflicting loyalties and his appropriation of Royce’s concept of wise provincialism, could function (...) as a bridge between Royce’s absolute pragmatism and Rorty’s pragmatism. Readers should take the last part of this essay as a prolegomenon to a study of Locke’s appropriation of Royce’s concept of wise provincialism. (shrink)

Philosophers often entertain positions that they themselves do not hold. This article is an example of this. While I do not advocate localized acts of violence to combat white supremacy, I think that it is worthwhile to explore why it might be theoretically justifiable for some African Americans to commit such acts of violence. I contend that acts of localized violence are at least theoretical justifiable for some African Americans from the vantage point of racial realism. Yet, I also contend (...) that the likely detrimental consequences of engaging in such violence on economically disadvantaged African Americans outweigh its possible benefits for them; hence, it should not be used by them to combat white supremacy presently. (shrink)

This book argues that Josiah Royce bequeathed to philosophy a novel idealism based on an ethico-religious insight.This insight became the basis for an idealistic personalism, wherein the Real is the personal and a metaphysics of community is the most appropriate approach to metaphysics for personal beings, especially in an often impersonal and technological intellectual climate. -/- The first part of the book traces how Royce constructed his idealistic personalism in response to criticisms made by George Holmes Howison. That personalism is (...) interpreted as an ethical and panentheistic one, somewhat akin to Charles Hartshorne's process philosophy. The second part investigates Royce's idealistic metaphysics in general and his ethico-religious insight in particular. In the course of these investigations, the author examines how Royce's ethico-religious insight could be strengthened by incorporating the philosophical theology of Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Emmanuel Levinas's ethical metaphysics. The author concludes by briefly exploring the possibility that Royce's progressive racial anti-essentialism is, in fact, a form of cultural, antiblack racism and asks whether his cultural, antiblack racism taints his ethico-religious insight. (shrink)

Josiah Royce’s The Problem of Christianity has been studied in numerous ways since its publication in 1913. The most common approaches to studying PC among historians of classical American philosophy and Royce scholars are to regard it as a contribution to the psychology of religion, as a contribution to philosophy of religion, or as an application of Royce’s logical theory to the study of religion. Scholars who study PC as a contribution to the psychology of religion often emphasize such things (...) as the continuity between Royce’s phenomenological description of a range of religious insights in The Sources of Religious Insight and his... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Josiah Royce in FocusDwayne A. TunstallJosiah Royce in Focus Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008.Josiah Royce in Focus reads like a sequel to Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley’s earlier book on Royce’s public philosophy, Genuine Individuals and Genuine Communities. As she did in Genuine Individuals and Genuine Communities, Kegley does a remarkable job of interpreting Royce’s philosophy such that it has [End Page 127] contemporary (...) relevance for academic philosophy, conflict resolution, psychology, and the religion-science dialogue. Yet, unlike with her earlier book, Kegley devotes over two-thirds of this book to the task of weaving together Royce’s life and educational experiences with his thought. This integration of Royce’s life with his thought allows the reader to glimpse just how Royce is “a model philosopher: a scholar and a committed teacher, as well as a philosopher much concerned about public issues and basic human concerns” (xiv). Kegley does this while introducing the reader to many dimensions of Royce, including Royce the son, Royce the father, Royce the first-generation Californian, Royce the first-rate historian of California, Royce the amateur novelist, and Royce the world traveler. Amazingly, she uses Royce’s life to illuminate his philosophical thought without psychologizing Royce and hence avoids the all-too-common urge to reduce people’s philosophical ideas to mere rationalizations of their own preferences and desires. This is to be applauded in the age of Oprah, the proliferation of memoirs, and the apparent glut of self-help books.The first five chapters constitute Kegley’s portrait of Royce the person and Royce the thinker. In chapter 1, “Royce as a Frontier Californian and Intellectual Pioneer: Forging Self and Thought in a New and Developing Land,” she introduces the reader to Royce the first-generation Californian and intellectual pioneer. Here she persuasively links his California frontier upbringing; his early educational experiences in California at the Lincoln School (San Francisco) and the University of California, Berkeley; his studies in Germany; and his graduate studies at Johns Hopkins to his concerns about social conflicts and his lifelong attempt to resolve those conflicts to better the communities in which they occur (7–12).Indeed, she persuasively argues that Royce had already formulated the central insights of his philosophy by the time of his arrival at Harvard University in 1882. Kegley’s interpretation of Royce’s intellectual development owes much to Randall Auxier’s recent work on Royce’s thought. In Auxier’s interpretation of Royce’s thought, Royce had formulated the central intellectual insights of his philosophy—especially his ethics, philosophy or religion, and public philosophy—years before The Religious Aspect of Philosophy was published in 1885. This account of Royce’s intellectual development differs somewhat from Frank M. Oppenheim’s account. Oppenheim’s account depicts Royce’s intellectual development as a series of interrelated yet momentous “maximal intellectual insights.” Each of these insights marks a noticeable shift in his intellectual development. Oppenheim thinks that, of all the maximal intellectual insights Royce had throughout his career, the [End Page 128] most momentous one is the 1912 Peircean insight. This insight leads Royce to convert to Peircean semiotics and clarify his moral philosophy and philosophy of religion with Peirce’s theory of interpretation. In Oppenheim’s account, The Sources of Religious Insight (1912) and The Problem of Christianity (1913) are the glorious fruits of his Peircean insight. What Kegley has done in chapter 1 is to provide an account of Royce’s intellectual development that supersedes Oppenheim’s account. Indeed, her account of Royce’s intellectual development could possibly change how scholars study Royce’s thought, much in the same way that John E. Smith’s Royce’s Social Infinite did from the early 1950s until recently.In chapter 2, “The Self,” Kegley depicts Royce as a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century psychologist whose ideas are still relevant today. She reminds the reader throughout this chapter that Royce is a pioneer in psychology, given that his book Outlines of Psychology (1903) advances an approach to psychology that sidesteps faculty psychology and that he is one of the first psychologists, along with William James... (shrink)

Gabriel Marcel’s reflective method is animated by his extraphilosophical commitment to battle the ever-present threat of dehumanization in late Western modernity. Unfortunately, Marcel neglected to examine what is perhaps the most prevalent threat of dehumanization in Western modernity: antiblack racism. Without such an account, Marcel’s reflective method is weakened because it cannot live up to its extraphilosophical commitment. Tunstall remedies this shortcoming in his eloquent new volume.

In Gabriel Marcel and American Philosophy, David W. Rodick investigates Gabriel Marcel's relationship to classical American philosophy—more specifically, to Josiah Royce's idealism, William James's radical empiricism, William Ernest Hocking's empiricism, and Henry G. Bugbee's experiential naturalism—to provide Marcel scholars and scholars of classical American philosophy with a fruitful perspective for understanding Marcel's thought. He also seeks to capture Marcel's dynamic and concrete approach to philosophizing along with examining its "relevance to the contemporary world—a world in which philosophy, confined to the (...) ivory tower, remains at risk of becoming somewhat of a caricature of itself". In... (shrink)

When thinking about Frank M. Oppenheim’s legacy, one cannot help but think, first and foremost, about his many contributions to Royce scholarship. Yet I personally have had some difficulty imagining how to characterize Oppenheim’s contributions to Royce scholarship until late 2013. Prior to that time, the more I thought about how to characterize his contributions to Royce scholarship, the less I became able to imagine an appropriate characterization of them. Then, on an autumn afternoon in 2013, I stumbled across a (...) Tumblr post, written by Missy H. Dunaway, that caught my attention. The title of that post was “‘The Lonely’ Lighthouse Keeper.” Dunaway’s post was an entertaining yet sad account of her fascination with... (shrink)

Religious ethicists use a variety of conceptual tools from many disciplines—for example, psychology, sociology, anthropology, theology, philosophy, political science, cognitive science, and neuroscience—to study various religious traditions. They use these interdisciplinary tools to study how these traditions influence and are influenced by the cultural mores and societal norms of the societies in which these traditions are practiced. If William Schweiker's depiction of religious ethics in The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics is representative of the field's emerging self-conception, then religious ethics (...) is primarily a hermeneutical and multidimensional field (See Schweiker 2-3). Schweiker thinks that this .. (shrink)

The Association of American Colleges & Universities has a guiding principle that presidents, chief academic officers, deans, and faculty at its member institutions can follow to cultivate diverse, inclusive, and equitable communities at their institutions. This principle constitutes the “Making Excellence Inclusive” initiative, which is a component of the AAC&U’s Liberal Education and America’s Promise initiative. Taking the “Making Excellence Inclusive” initiative as my starting point, I challenge the way that diversity and inclusion seem to be conceived of by many (...) people at colleges and universities. I then imagine how genuinely inclusive and equitable communities can be cultivated at colleges and universities by taking social justice seriously. (shrink)

In this article, I contend that there are at least two contemporary types of Kantian transcendental pragmatism: Sami Pihlström’s naturalistic transcendentalpragmatism and Josiah Royce’s absolute pragmatism. Each one of these transcendental pragmatisms represents one side of the Kantian transcendentaltradition. Pihlström’s naturalistic transcendental pragmatism represents the side of the Kantian transcendental tradition that is familiar to most philosophers, namely, the transcendental inquiry into the conditions for the possibility of human experience. Royce’s absolute pragmatism represents the other, more neglected, side of the (...) Kantian transcendental tradition, namely, the transcendental analysis of the meaningfulness of moral, aesthetic, and religious experience, especially theistic religious experience. I contend that Royce’s pragmatism is more representative of the Kantian transcendental tradition than is Pihlström’s pragmatism. (shrink)

i find roger ward’s interpretation of Charles Sanders Peirce’s logic, semiotics, and pragmaticism in Peirce and Religion to be not only plausible, but also compelling. What makes Ward’s interpretation of Peirce’s thought compelling, at least to me, is the story he tells about how Peirce’s Trinitarian faith commitments shaped Peirce’s thought from the early 1860s to his death in 1914. Ward’s story accounts for how Peirce’s Trinitarian faith commitments led Peirce to consider his study of logic and semiotics as his (...) vocation. It also accounts for how Peirce’s Trinitarian faith commitments motivated Peirce to transition from being a proponent of a nominalistic pragmatism in the 1870s to being a pragmaticist by the... (shrink)

In Common Ground, Anthony Neal examines the role that the ideas of consciousness and consciousness-raising play in the writings of Howard Thurman and Huey Newton. He examines these ideas from a broadly Afrocentric framework in which the concerns, interests, and perspectives of Africans--whether they reside on the continent or live in the African diaspora--are the legitimate and central subjects of scholarly study. This approach warrants Neal’s interpretation of Thurman’s and Newton’s writings as fitting within the “African Freedom Aesthetic,” in which (...) the aesthetic expressions of transcendence, transformation, human consciousness, and collective will have become the means by which Africans living under oppressive conditions during the modern period could work to liberate themselves from those conditions. (shrink)

In recent years, emergentism has resurfaced as a possible method by which to secure autonomous mental causation from within a physicalistic framework. Critics argue, however, that emergentism fails, since emergentism entails that effects have sufficient physical causes, so they cannot also have distinct mental causes. In this paper I argue that this objection may be effective against supervenient emergentism, but it is not established that it is effective against mereological emergentism. In fact, after demonstrating that two founding emergentists, Samuel (...) class='Hi'>Alexander and C. Lloyd Morgan, are mereological emergentists, I show how mereological emergentism provides fresh responses to the causal exclusion problem. (shrink)

This has been an excellent opportunity for me to get a sense of what scholars in fields other than my own (viz., theological social ethics) think I am trying to do, and whether there might be some sense in it. But in all honesty, I must say that the experience of reading and pondering the articles by Lewis Baldwin and Dwayne Tunstall in this issue of The Pluralist has been both enlightening and a joy, inasmuch as it has been (...) an opportunity for me to find out what I have been doing in the academy for the last twenty-five years and where might be some of the limitations as well as promise in my work.When I read these articles, I recalled an experience that second-generation personalist Francis J. McConnell reported .. (shrink)

Review essay on Tunstall, Doing Philosophy Personally.

In this paper we discuss how Causal Decision Theory should be modified to handle a class of problematic cases involving deterministic laws. Causal Decision Theory, as it stands, is problematically biased against your endorsing deterministic propositions (for example it tells you to deny Newtonian physics, regardless of how confident you are of its truth). Our response is that this is not a problem for Causal Decision Theory per se, but arises because of the standard method for assessing the truth of (...) certain counterfactuals. The truth of deterministic laws is `modally fragile' on the standard semantics for counterfactuals: if determinism is true and you were to do otherwise, the laws would be different. We provide two ways of avoiding this problem: 1) supplement the standard semantics for counterfactuals with impossible worlds, or 2) introduce rigid designators into the description of problematic decision situations. We argue that both of these approaches are well-motivated and can be readily incorporated into Lewisian Causal Decision Theory. (shrink)

In this article, I argue for the redundancy of Whitehead’s Platonic notion of the extensive continuum, counterposing it to his related notion of an atomic “ether of events.” I argue that Whitehead’s atomic ether is more compatible with orthodox general relativity than generally supposed and remarkably close to the contemporary idea of a discrete manifold in the causal set theory of quantum gravity. I argue that the method of extensive abstraction complements Whitehead’s atomic hypothesis by demonstrating the ultimately fictive nature (...) of any continuum. (shrink)

This paper sought to test whether student demographics (gender, age, religion, type of degree and number of courses done containing ethics) influenced the likelihood of engaging in unethical business practices. The study involved the use of a questionnaire being administered to a sample of 231 undergraduate students in Barbados. It was found that gender, religiousness, type of degree and number of courses taken containing ethics significantly impacted on the intentions to engage in unethical behaviour. It was also found that the (...) impact of age was not conclusive. The study has several limitations including low generalisability due to the use of a non-probability sampling method, and the possibility of social desirability bias. The study informs educators about the need to integrate ethics into the curriculum as an essential component of professional training for future managers and business people. This study makes an important contribution to the ethics literature on small island developing states, since the study was done in the country of Barbados. (shrink)

I recently argued that reductive physicalist versions of libertarian free will face a physical indeterminism luck objection. John Lemos claims that one potential advocate of reductive physicalist libertarianism, Robert Kane, avoids this physical indeterminism luck objection. I here show how the problem remains.

Modern logicians have sought to unlock the modal secrets of Aristotle's Syllogistic by assuming a version of essentialism and treating it as a primitive within the semantics. These attempts ultimately distort Aristotle's ontology. None of these approaches make full use of tests found throughout Aristotle's corpus and ancient Greek philosophy. I base a system on Aristotle's tests for things that can never combine (polarity) and things that can never separate (inseparability). The resulting system not only reproduces Aristotle's recorded results for (...) the apodictic syllogistic in the Prior Analytics but it also generates rather than assumes Aristotle's distinctions among 'necessary', 'essential' and 'accidental'. By developing a system around tests that are in Aristotle and basic to ancient Greek philosophy, the system is linked to a history of practices, providing a platform for future work on the origins of logic. (shrink)

Libertarian free will is, roughly, the view that agents cause actions to occur or not occur: Maddy’s decision to get a beer causes her to get up off her comfortable couch to get a beer, though she almost chose not to get up. Libertarian free will notoriously faces the luck objection, according to which agential states do not determine whether an action occurs or not, so it is beyond the control of the agent, hence lucky, whether an action occurs or (...) not: Maddy’s reasons for getting beer in equipoise with her reasons to remain in her comfortable seat do not determine that she will get up or stay seated, so it seems beyond her control, hence lucky, that she gets up. In this paper I consider a sub-set of the luck objection called the Physical Indeterminism Luck Objection, according to which indeterministic physical processes cause actions to occur or not, and agent’s lack control over these indeterministic physical processes, so agent’s lack control over, hence it is lucky, whether action occurs or not. After motivating the physical indeterminism luck objection, I consider responses from three recent event-causal libertarian models, and conclude that they fail to overcome the problem, though one promising avenue is opened up. (shrink)

Two sources of possible disagreement in bioethics may be associated with pessimism about what bioethics can achieve. First, pluralism implies that bioethics engages with interlocutors who hold divergent moral beliefs. Pessimists might believe that these disagreements significantly limit the extent to which bioethics can provide normatively robust guidance in relevant areas. Second, the interdisciplinary nature of bioethics suggests that interlocutors may hold divergent views on the nature of bioethics itself—particularly its practicality. Pessimists may suppose that interdisciplinary disagreements could frustrate the (...) goals of bioethics. In this article, I explore how wonder may alleviate the concerns of the first group of pessimists regarding problems associated with pluralism, provided that we are willing to accept some interdisciplinary frustrations. Then, I invite readers of this issue of The Journal of Medicine & Philosophy to test these intuitions by considering the role of wonder in these articles. (shrink)

This article is an exploration of the problem of identity in Whitehead. Both the Platonic and the nominalistic tendencies in Whitehead are analyzed. His theory of eternal objects is criticized and a process view of identity based on tropes is defended.

Résumé Cet article aborde la querelle comme un élément de la stratégie d’un philosophe vis-à-vis de la postérité. On pourrait évidemment penser à des querelleurs invétérés comme Pascal, Voltaire ou Rousseau, mais il sera question ici du cas plus complexe de Diderot et du dernier ouvrage publié de son vivant, l’_Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron et sur les moeurs et les écrits de Sénèque pour servir à l’introduction de la lecture de ce philosophe_ (1782). L’article démontre (...) que celui-ci constitue un cas de « texte-querelle », c’est-à-dire un texte qui met en scène la querelle menée à son propre sujet et qui ainsi la fait redémarrer; il analyse la posture qu’adopte le philosophe-querelleur, surtout dans l’énoncé paradoxal « ne nous engageons point dans les querelles », dont il examine les qualités performatives. (shrink)

In the paper, a detailed analysis of some new logical aspects of Cantor’s diagonal proof of the uncountability of continuum is presented. For the first time, strict formal, axiomatic, and algorithmic definitions of the notions of potential and actual infinities are presented. It is shown that the actualization of infinite sets and sequences used in Cantor’s proof is a necessary, but hidden, condition of the proof. The explication of the necessary condition and its factual usage within the framework of Cantor’s (...) proof makes, Cantor’s proof invalid. It’s shown that traditional Cantor’s proof has a second necessary, but hidden as well, condition which is teleological by its nature, i.e., is not mathematical. The explication of the second necessary condition makes Cantor’s statement on the uncountability of continuum unprovable from the point of view of classical logic.One of the most dramatic facts in history of science is connected just with the notion of actual infinity and consists in the following. On the one hand, Aristotle, Berkeley, Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, Gauss, Kant, Cauchy, Kronecker, Hermite, Poincaré, Bair, Borel, Brouwer, Quine, Wittgenstein, Weyl, Luzin, and a lot of other outstanding creators of classical logic and classical mathematics, during millenniums, stated categorically and insistently warned about that the actual infinity is a self-contradictory notion and its usage in mathematics is inadmissible (e.g., according to Poincare, “There is no actual infinity. - Cantorians forgot that and fell into contradictions. Later generations will regard Mengenlehre (set theory) as a disease from which one has recovered”). On the other hand, a lot of outstanding scientists of the XX c.c., such as Hilbert, Church, Turing, Gödel, etc., and modern axiomatic set theory as a whole ignored this (intuitive though) opinion of genii and accepted Cantor’s “transfinite paradise”, based on the actual infinity. In the paper some logical, philosophical, and psychological aspects of this historical “favorable opposition” are analyzed, and the fact that the scientific intuition of genii has won the historical battle against the mytho-’logic’ of Cantor’s transfinite ‘paradise’ is explained and logically justified. (shrink)