In this provocative and insightful work, Philip Leon examines the nature of power and its ethical implications, delving into topics such as social justice, democracy, and civil disobedience. Drawing on a wide variety of sources from philosophy, politics, and history, Leon offers a nuanced and thought-provoking exploration of one of the most fundamental issues of our time. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. (...) This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

There has been for some years a feeling in the philosophical world in this country that we have had enough of the unproductive working of the treadmill of linguistics and of the new logic and that Metaphysics is at least not criminal, and even justifiable; notable justifications of Metaphysics are Professor Emmet's The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking and Professor Barnes” The Philosophical Predicament . But what is Metaphysics about? That, it seems to me, is a question which has to be (...) looked into far more carefully than it has been, before we can think of justifying Metaphysics . “About the Whole” would appear to be the answer which no would-be metaphysician can avoid, however frightened he may be of being sent into a concentration camp by his Ayerian colleagues for giving it. What is this Whole and how is it to be got? Judging at least by most nineteenth-century metaphysics, it would seem that the Whole is some kind of totality , comparable, save in respect of comprehensiveness, to the totality say which Physics deals with, and that it is got by reflecting on the nature of any knowing and/or on all the branches of knowledge and their relations to each other; Metaphysics, we should conclude, is a synthesis or construct both crowning, and confirmed by, knowledge. (shrink)

The following is an attempt at an analysis of some of the difficulties of a certain religious or metaphysical attitude which, common as it has been to many ages, and familiar as we are with it in what we know of the early Greek thinkers and the Sophists, may yet, in the status of settled and almost universally accepted dogma which it has assumed, be said to be the peculiar inheritance of our own generation. We meet it in formal philosophic (...) garb in Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity and in Croce's idealism; with scientific claims it confronts us in Smuts’s Holism ; with more emphasis but less exactness it speaks in J. S. Huxley’s Religion without Revelation and in Middleton Murry's God, Being an Introduction to the Science of Metabiology; in imaginative literature it has found its ample "iconography" in Shaw's Back to Methuselah; best of all, strong and silent, unquestioned and unexplaining, like any master secure of his position, we may find it enthroned each in his own mind. Though here referred to as a religious attitude, we may also call it antireligionor the religion of the professedly anti-religious, and its God the God of the "Godless.". (shrink)

Just as the pleasant experience differs from the non-pleasant or unpleasant, and the aesthetic from the non-aesthetic, internally or qualitatively, and not merely in degree, or externally or relationally, so, it is natural to expect, a moment of moral living differs from a moral or immoral moment. Indeed, from many quarters, and most emphatically from the Stoic and Christian, we have been wont to hear that if we but leave our sinful or indifferent lives and put on righteousness or goodness, (...) we shall become new men or men reborn, even creatures of a different species. But according to many analyses of morality these promises of transfiguration or translation are nonsensical lies: for the moral experience, as exhibited in these analyses, differs from the non-moral or immoral only in respect of external relations, or at the most in degree. Whether the truth resides in the promises or in the analyses is, obviously, a question of no mean import. It is also a vast one, while the time and space that can be given up to an article are brief; hence the following will be barely more than a raising of the question, or a provocation, by means of rough statements, some dogmatic, others hypothetical. (shrink)