In Making Sense of Nietzsche, Richard Schacht articulates an interpretative approach to Nietzsche's work that, in his view, defends it from various forms of intellectual misuse and misunderstanding. As Schacht sees it, the latter stem from an overreaction to the apocalyptic tone of Nietzsche's attack on traditional religion, morality, and philosophy. Against such readings, he demands that Nietzsche be taken seriously as a philosopher with defensible views on a variety of matters of the first importance: the nature and history of (...) philosophy, the theory of value, epistemology and the philosophy of science, art, and philosophical anthropology. Obviously, we cannot appreciate Nietzsche's views on these topics if we dismiss him as a crank. Nor can we do so if we embrace him as a purely destructive thinker who seeks to undermine our confidence in the very possibility of rational inquiry. Schacht's Nietzsche therefore defends the viability of philosophical investigation by reinterpreting its character. He understands the conviction that the rationality of such investigation demands our utter detachment from the actual conditions of meaningful inquiry as the expression of our human, all too human hatred of the perspectival nature of experience. His rejection of the traditional ideal of rational detachment, however, does not entail the rejection of the possibility of inquiry per se. On the contrary. According to Schacht, Nietzsche believes we are only now in a position finally to understand how real investigation of the subjects that matter to us is possible at all. (shrink)

Global security cannot be achieved until people view the world as a global community. Until such time, differences will continue to be perceived as threatening. These perceived “threats” are the primary threat to global security. This volume proposes methods for minimizing the “us versus them” mentality so that we can build a sense of global community.

A clear understanding of social justice requires complex rather than simple answers. It requires comfort with ambiguity rather than absolute answers. This is counter to viewing right versus wrong, just vs. unjust, or good vs. evil as dichotomies. This book provides many examples of where and how to begin to view these as continuums rather than dichotomies.

At the centenary of Frank H. Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, we explore the continuing relevance of Knightian uncertainty to the theory and practice of entrepreneurship. There are three challenges facing such assessment. First, RUP is complex and difficult to interpret. The key but neglected element of RUP is that Knight’s account is not solely about risk and uncertainty as states of nature, but about how an agent’s beliefs about uncertain outcomes and confidence in those beliefs guide their choices. Second, (...) RUP is Knight’s only effort in this area. His subsequent career led elsewhere, so he did not engage with subsequent interpretations of this work. Third, much of the current literature emphasizes that decisions must be different under the two states of nature with a consequent misunderstanding of entrepreneurial agency. This paper addresses each challenge in sequence. First, we explicate Knight’s approach and explain why that approach is murky. Second, as a complement to Knight’s interpretation, we examine Frank P. Ramsey’s approach to subjective probabilities to help clarify Knight’s murky approach. What links Knight and Ramsey is a shared pragmatism about entrepreneurial agency under uncertainty that depends upon the beliefs about, and confidence in, their judgments of possible outcomes. This Knight-Ramsey approach does not require actor’s behaviors to be determined by the class of uncertain environment they face. We focus on the response by the entrepreneur to the existence of uncertainty in all its forms. We argue that this reductive account provides a foundation to examine common problems in management, including managerial hubris, the interaction between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, and the need for experimentation in advance of new product and venture launches. Third, we critique current literature that favors epistemic purism about the ontology of risk and uncertainty and ignores Knight-Ramsey pragmatism in meeting uncertainty, such as using formal and informal institutions for uncertainty mitigation. Our account locates Frank Knight’s subtleties in entrepreneurial behavior firmly in the literature on entrepreneurial agency a century later. (shrink)

2 Enoch 58–59 provides an esoteric and somewhat eccentric delineation of attitudes toward the mistreatment of animals within some sect of Egyptian Judaism, in all probability. Three attitudes, having to do with the mistreatment of animals in failing to feed them properly, the wrongful binding of animals for sacrifice, and possible secret sexual exploitation of animals, are delineated along with warnings regarding the effects of such treatment on the human soul at the great judgment. This linking of how humans treat (...) animals with how humans will be judged in “the great age” is unique in the literature of this period and demonstrates a deep concern for animal welfare that has been largely dormant in many facets of religion until more recent times. (shrink)

The edited collection Rorty and Beyond assesses and moves beyond Rorty’s legacy, bringing together leading international philosophers. The collection covers diverse territory, from his views about what we may hope for to his personal character, and everything in between.

Religion is often criticized for failing to uphold animal concerns, yet Zoroastrianism, an ancient religion that underlies the Abrahamic traditions as well as Eastern religions, offers some strikingly contemporary concerns regarding the kinship of human and nonhuman animals. Human and nonhuman animals alike have souls, free will, and life after death. In the middle of the second millennium BCE, Zoroaster called attention to the treatment of animals as necessary to the divine order and righteousness that has been disturbed by evil (...) and sin. How humans treat animals also affects their own well-being in this world and the next. (shrink)

The various efforts to put the idea of humanity on a secure ethical, political, and social base have not succeeded. The various post-humanist and transhumanist programs are inadequate. Our deep-seated suspicion of our deepest selves and motives is understandable in light of the barbarity of the twentieth century, but humanism is not to blame. The thought of Ernst Cassirer holds a framework for a new humanism, once it is rid of certain colonialist, triumphalist, and Eurocentric ideas that distorted Cassirer’s understanding (...) of the European role in creating the problems of civilization, especially its mistake of thinking that science was a progressive symbolic form of culture. I set out the basis of a new humanism based upon not the problem of knowledge, but the problem of genuine self-situating socialty, a personalist point of view. (shrink)

This paper aims to consider Peirce and Eco’s approach to signs and semiotics in order to assess their relation to Peirce’s mature pragmatism. Both thinkers attempted to set out a truly general theory of signs, and ran into difficulties on similar points. I show that the responses of Peirce and Eco to the difficulties that arose in seeking a truly general theory of signs were quite different. And yet, the differences are not so deep as to prevent us from thinking (...) of both Peirce and Eco as pragmatists, and perhaps of a similar stripe. (shrink)

Preview: Bergson noted that the cinematographic image does not really move. It is, then as now, a series of still photographs. The real motion in such images is produced by machinery, which imparts a kinesis, an energy of movement, to the succession of fixed images. Our perception then endows such images with their “life,” insofar as they can be said to possess life. It is an illusion, it is “virtual” both as space and time. The real duration, as generated by (...) the machinery or as lived by the perceiver is part of a broader system of images that includes those still photographs and their succession. Images of images of images, by the time they are processed by our bodies and appear to our mind’s eye as inhibited acts we have not enacted. (shrink)

Josiah Royce (1855?-1916) has had a major influence on American intellectual life, both popular movements and cutting-edge thought, but his name often went unmentioned while his ideas marched forward. The leading American proponent of absolute idealism, Royce has come back into fashion in recent years. With several important new books appearing, the formation of a Josiah Royce Society, and the re-organization of the Royce papers at Harvard, the time is ripe for Time, Will, and Purpose. Randall Auxier delves into (...) the primary texts written by Royce. (shrink)

Philosophers analyze the last of the great rock stars.

In 1922 Charles Hartshorne, then an aspiring young philosopher, wrote to Edgar Sheffield Brightman, a preeminent philosopher of religion for twenty-three subsequent years and, remarkably, almost every letter was preserved. In their introductory essays, editors Randall Auxier and Mark Davies place the unusually rich and intensive correspondence in its intellectual context and address the relationship between personalism and process philosophy/theology in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and social philosophy.

BOOK REVIEWS 3~3 reaction to them into account. The actual historical dialectic involving Moore, Mal- colm, and Wittgenstein is a good deal more complicated, and more interesting, than the story told here by Stroll. Moving on to Stroll's discussion of Wittgenstein, I should now acknowledge that, so far as I can judge, Stroll offers a largely reliable account of On Certainty. In particular, in the best chapter of the book, on "Wittgenstein's Foundationalism," he makes a convincing case for the view (...) that Wittgenstein, unlike Moore, separates propositional knowledge from the kind of "non-propositional" certainty concerning what "stands fast" for us and which is primarily evinced in our ways of acting. What is less clear to me is just what kind of response to sceptical arguments this amounts to: Stroll says that although at some points Wittgenstein is prepared to countenance, in a relativist spirit which closely adjoins scepticism, radical changes in what is thus cer- tain, by and large towards the end of On Certainty Wittgenstein advances an "absolut- ist" position which rules out such changes. But if this is so , we surely need some arguments why it has to be so. But much here depends on the broader context within which Wittgenstein's position is developed and discussed. Despite noting Wittgenstein's invocation of the conception of man as a "primitive.. (shrink)

Eco says that which cannot be theorized must be narrated. What about that which cannot be narrated? What must we do about the limits of interpretation, especially as narration. This review essay takes a method from Giambattista Vico and applies it to the interpretation of Laurent Binet’s portrayal of Umberto Eco in his novel The Seventh Function of Language. Comparing the character of Eco with the thought of the historical Eco we find coincidences and other angles at incidence that reveal (...) some portion of Binet’s underlying interpretation of Eco, and it limits. (shrink)

Beginning with the present number of The Pluralist, we commence an association with the well known and widely respected Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, founded in 1972. It is a pleasant circumstance that we can combine our twenty-five-year history of service to pluralistic and personalist philosophies with the admirable mission of the SAAP, which has always stood for openness and responsible philosophical growth with an eye to the lessons of the past and an orientation to a more ideal (...) future for the natural world, its inhabitants, and the role of thought in guiding and evaluating our common direction.Our journal will publish the best and most representative offerings at the annual meeting of .. (shrink)