In this thesis, I both analyze the phenomenology of vision from a geometrical point of view, and also develop certain connections between that geometrical analysis and the mind body problem. In order to motivate the need for such an analysis, I first show, by means of a refutation of direct realism, that visual space is never identical with any of the physical objects being indirectly "seen" by constituting color arrangements in it. It thus follows that the geometry of visual space (...) may be quite different from the Euclidean geometry of physical space, and I proceed to analyze that geometry. ;I argue that topologically, visual space is two dimensional, inasmuch as regions of it are capable of being bounded by a line, such as the borders around the various objects constituted in it. An apparent paradox arises here though, inasmuch as we posess phenomenal depth perception, which is particularly striking during binocular vision, and thus the question arises as to how the binocular depth cue of retinal disparity is registered phenomenally in a two dimensional space. I resolve this apparent paradox by arguing that the internal metric struture of this space can be apprehended phenomenally, and can serve as such a phenomenal depth cue. It is shown that holistically, this metric structure is elliptical, since for example marginal distortions in wide-angle photography are not present in visual space, and it is also noted that there is a tendency towards size constancy in visual perception. It is shown from these geometrical considerations that visual space posseses a variable curvature, with that curvature being determined by the physical depths of objects constituted in the space. ;Finally, I investigate what bearing the preceding geometrical conclusions have on the question of how events in visual space may be causally determined by neural events in the brain. The classical isomorphic theory of Gestalt psychology is then reinterpreted in light of my analysis of the geometry of visual space. (shrink)

How does one measure whether a “Speculum” is of sufficiently broad interest to be worthy of an article in Speculum? I refer to Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls, which I believe amply meets the test. Since the publication of the Middle French text of the Mirror in 1965, two translations have appeared in modern French, two in Italian, one in German, one in Spanish, and one in Catalan. Two translations are also available in English. Both have remained (...) in print since their initial appearance in the 1990s; one is owned by 576 libraries worldwide, and the other by 160, to which might be added 279 copies of an earlier English translation made from the Middle English version of the Mirror. A rough count of secondary works on Marguerite published in the last twenty-five years adds up to some one hundred books and articles. Quite intriguing is the diverse use made of Marguerite and her work outside of the academy. In 2001 an “installation opera” about Marguerite based on a libretto by the noted poet Anne Carson was performed in New York City; the following year a “Requiem für Marguerite Porete” with “dance and musical interpretation” was performed in Karlsruhe. A Web site promoting Eastern wisdom explains that Marguerite's “works illumine the nature of the soul in language which is remarkably reminiscent of Vedic teaching on the Atma, the individual soul.” And yes, she has been unofficially canonized, for another Web site informs readers about the “martyrdom” of “Saint Marguerite of Hainaut called la Porète.”. (shrink)

First published in 1918, Ernst Bertram's _Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology_ substantially shaped the image of Nietzsche for the generation between the wars. It won the Nietzsche Society's first prize and was admired by luminous contemporaries including André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Gottfried Benn, and Thomas Mann. Although translated into French in 1932, the book was never translated into English following the decline of Nietzsche's and Bertram's reputations after 1945. Now, with Nietzsche's importance for twentieth-century thought undisputed, the work by (...) one of his most influential interpreters can at last be read in English. Employing a perspectival technique inspired by Nietzsche himself, Bertram constructs a densely layered portrait of the thinker that shows him riven by deep and ultimately irresolvable cultural, historical, and psychological conflicts. At once lyrical and intensely probing, richly complex yet thematically coherent, Bertram's book is a masterpiece in a forgotten tradition of intellectual biography. (shrink)

A renowned scholar investigates the "human crisis" that Albert Camus confronted in his world and in ours, producing a brilliant study of Camus's life and influence for those readers who, in Camus's words, "cannot live without dialogue and friendship. As France--and all of the world--was emerging from the depths of World War II, Camus summed up what he saw as 'the human crisis'. 'We gasp for air among people who believe they are absolutely right, whether it be in their machines (...) or their ideas. And for all who cannot live without dialogue and the friendship of other human beings, this silence is the end of the world.' In the years after he wrote these words, until his death fourteen years later, Camus labored to address this crisis, arguing for dialogue, understanding, clarity, and truth. When he sailed to New York, in March 1946--for his first and only visit to the United States--he found an ebullient nation celebrating victory. Camus warned against the common postwar complacency that took false comfort in the fact that Hitler was dead and the Third Reich had fallen. Yes, the serpentine beast was dead, but "we know perfectly well," he argued, "that the venom is not gone, that each of us carries it in our own hearts." All around him in the postwar world, Camus saw disheartening evidence of a global community revealing a heightened indifference to a number of societal ills. It is the same indifference to human suffering that we see all around, and within ourselves, today. (shrink)

Peter French’s and Steven Ratner’s thoughtful comments are helpful in advancing the analysis we offered in our book On Complicity and Compromise. Inevitably, there are areas of disagreement and bones to pick. However, our primary concern in this reply will be to press, with their assistance, the more positive agenda.

This book falls midway between being a treatise and being a history. Incomplete, intentionally, as a history, it is also unfortunately inadequate as a treatise, though it is a most useful and interesting volume. Todorov has given us selected and highly selective chapters in the history of western reflection upon symbolization as a mode of signifying, the seriation and presentation of materials being rather erratically informed by a consciousness of the contemporary scope and intents of semiotics as an integrative discipline. (...) The book begins with a relatively synthetic discussion of the "birth of western semiotics" in "late" Greek philosophy and its focusing and semi-systematization in the work of Augustine, whom Todorov shows to have immense semiotic importance. Todorov then proceeds to give an account of the attempts to systematize the various figures of thought and speech in classical rhetorical theory, whose scope, limitations, rise, and decline are charted in chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 4 and 5 discuss the connections between symbolization as a motivated discourse and the specifically aesthetic problem of imitation, which informed aesthetic theories from antiquity to the Romantic crisis, to whose delineation Todorov devoted the longest and best chapter in the book, showing in interesting detail the progressive subjectification of the process of symbolization and aesthetic creation that took place during the original German portion of the movement and which, as is well known, influenced the English portion primarily through Coleridge's "translation" activities. Chapter 7 treats the modern "scientific" temptation, epitomized in Lévy-Bruhl's studies on "primitive thought," to ascribe "symbolic" and "mystical" structures to other periods and places while denying it to one's own thought processes, a procedure ironically belied in Lévy-Bruhl's methodological practice. Chapter 8, on Freud, sheds very little new light, and scarcely is adequate to more than a perfunctory knowledge of the old light, on this most important thorny figure in modern consciousness, a deficiency due in part to Todorov's excision of materials from the original French edition. The following chapter on de Saussure focuses, with some interesting biographical help, on his tendency to avoid the problem of motivated discourse in favor of an effectively exclusive concentration on the implications of his axiom or theorem on the arbitrariness of the sign. The final chapter offers an appreciation rather than an account of the paradigmatic work of Jakobson, whom Todorov obviously, and rightly, considers the hero of modern attempts to weld linguistics and poetics together. These ten chapters are preceded by a short apologia pro libro suo and rounded off by a short oxymoronic conclusion entitled "Openings.". (shrink)

This book is concerned with how we should think and act in our work, leisure activities, and time utilization in order to achieve flourishing lives. The scope papers range from general theoretical considerations of the value, e.g. 'What is a balanced life?', to specific types of considerations, e.g. 'How should we cope with the effects of work on moral decision-making?'.

Two categorization arguments pose particular problems for localist connectionist models. The internal representations of localist networks do not reflect the variability within categories in the environment, whereas networks with distributed internal representations do reflect this essential feature of categories. We provide a real biological example of perceptual categorization in the monkey that seems to require population coding (i.e., distributed internal representations).

Taking to heart Massaro's [(1988) Some criticisms of connectionist models of human performance, Journal of Memory and Language, 27, 213-234] criticism that multi-layer perceptrons are not appropriate for modeling human cognition because they are too powerful (i.e. they can simulate just about anything, which gives them little explanatory power), Regier develops the notion of constrained connectionism. The model that he discusses is a distributed network but with numerous constraints added that are (more or less) motivated by real psychophysical and neurophysical (...) constraints. His model learns static prepositions of spatial location such as in, above, to the left of, to the right of, under, etc., as well as dynamic prepositions such as through and the Russian iz-pod, meaning out from under. The network learns these prepositions by viewing a number of examples of them. Very importantly, this book tackles-and goes a long way towards resolving-the problem of the lack of negative exemplars (i.e. we are only very rarely told when something is not above something else), which should lead to overgeneralization, but does not. This book is a significant contribution to connectionist literature. (shrink)

When, in Telos #55, we sought to evaluate the meaning and impact of French socialism in power, the verdict turned out to be peculiarly disappointing. The rhetorical question in the Introduction: “Beyond Reform or Revolution?” had already been effectively answered. As early as 1982 French socialism had revealed itself to be a “Gaullism with a Human Face” which did not have much to do either widi reform or revolution, and could provide nothing more -above and beyond the usual (...) cliches—than a continuation of the same berated but unsurpassed technocratic management of the given. Socialism had turned out to be a bad idea whose time had past. (shrink)

"Among the foremost Catholic philosophers of his generation. He has utilized the fullness of the Catholic intellectual tradition to brilliantly take the measure of modern philosophical thought... This volume is an expression of Robert Wood's singular philosophical outlook." -Jude Dougherty, dean emeritus, school of philosophy, The Catholic University of America.

In the criminal law of many jurisdictions complicity, though not itself a substantive crime but a way of committing a crime, is a doctrine that determines when one person is legally liable for a criminal offense that was committed by another person, typically by being an accomplice. That doctrine has a number of troubling moral implications with respect to responsibility, particularly when complicity is employed as a devise to capture one agent as morally accountable for the actions of another agent (...) and/or the consequences of those actions. I focus on the issue of responsibility for consequences and actus reus and mens rea difficulties with complicity as a moral concept in the light of two cases in which complicity is the basis for ascriptions of moral and criminal responsibility to someone who was not the primary wrongdoer. The book on the topic by Chiara Lepora and Robert E. Goodin provokes my discussion. (shrink)

Ancient Fortifications of the Tamil Country as Recorded in Eighteenth-Century French Plans. By Jean Deloche. Collection Indologie, vol. 120. Pondicherry: Institut Français De Pondichery, École Française D’Extreme-Orient, 2013. Pp. 139, 111 photos, 41 figs., 6 pls.

When in the 1950s Antoine Dondaine published his work on Thomas Aquinas’ “secretaries,” he relied on his study of codices BAV, Vat. lat. 718 and Vat. lat. 9851. He claimed that the scribe C and the other scribes on the same staff were in the service of Thomas Aquinas when they executed those codices. The present contribution deals with the work of C in those two codices and in two more manuscripts, i.e., Paris, Bibliothèque Mazerine, Ms. 873 and Wien, ÖNB, (...) Cod. 1479. In Vat. lat. 718, C, a French scribe, works in the service of A, the Italian scholar who upon examination proves to be the original owner of that codex. In Vat lat. 9851, no direct link can be substantiated between Thomas Aquinas and C. On f. 5va C simply begins to copy a model without special quality, while on f. 5rb, scribe E, an Italian scholar who was a direct associate of Thomas, finishes his copy from an independent and excellent textual tradition. In Paris Maz. 873 and Wien ÖNB 1479, C writes in the service of the original owners, who... (shrink)

When in the 1950s Antoine Dondaine published his work on Thomas Aquinas’ “secretaries,” he relied on his study of codices BAV, Vat. lat. 718 and Vat. lat. 9851. He claimed that the scribe C and the other scribes on the same staff were in the service of Thomas Aquinas when they executed those codices. The present contribution deals with the work of C in those two codices and in two more manuscripts, i.e., Paris, Bibliothèque Mazerine, Ms. 873 and Wien, ÖNB, (...) Cod. 1479. In Vat. lat. 718, C, a French scribe, works in the service of A, the Italian scholar who upon examination proves to be the original owner of that codex. In Vat lat. 9851, no direct link can be substantiated between Thomas Aquinas and C. On f. 5va C simply begins to copy a model without special quality, while on f. 5rb, scribe E, an Italian scholar who was a direct associate of Thomas, finishes his copy from an independent and excellent textual tradition. In Paris Maz. 873 and Wien ÖNB 1479, C writes in the service of the original owners, who... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly by Jason FrankRobert HarimanThe Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly. By Jason Frank. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. xvii + 255 pp. Paper $28.00. ISBN-10: 0190658169. ISBN-13: 9780190658168.Who knew that the twenty-first century might turn on a battle over the legitimacy of democracy? As norms of deliberation and legislative compromise erode, and as a global struggle between democratic (...) and autocratic rule is waged both between and within nations, a strange form of political theater emerges: all sides claim to represent the will of the people, which is expressed in images of populist demonstrations that are seen by their opponents as dangerous embodiments of irrationality. It should be no surprise that violence is waiting in the wings.Despite the historical specificity of the present conflict, it is not new. Although focused on the French Revolution, Jason Frank's carefully argued study of the aesthetics of popular assembly resonates with contemporary concerns regarding political spectacles, populist movements, and whether or how democracy might prevail. Frank's objective is not to restore anything but to challenge left and right critiques of "the people" in order to recover a "lost radicalism of democracy" (xii). By reexamining one of modern democracy's origin stories, Frank zeros in on popular assembly as "a distinctive—and distinctively powerful—mode of democratic representation" (xiv). One result can be more clarity about why populism—and its mix of democratic self-assertion and delegitimation—has such a hold on democratic regimes today. Another, and Frank's hope, is that paying more attention to the aesthetic contours of "the people" can lead to a rebooting of the political imagination—a rebooting, I would add, that is desperately needed if democracy is to become more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable. [End Page 418]Frank begins with the assumption that democracy depends on more than "enlightenment and education": beyond rational-critical speech, it also requires distinctive illusions of collective belonging (see also, e.g., Allen 2004, chap. 2). "At the heart of modern democracy's fantasy space," he argues, "lies its enigmatic constituent subject: the people" (3). But where are the people? What do they look like? Democracy's constituent subject has an image problem: the people can't be seen as a whole. Thus, the problem of envisioning the people "haunts the history and theory of modern democracy" (5).Frank becomes something of a ghost hunter, working carefully through theory and history to see what has been lurking around the corners and in the attic, more felt than observed. Through careful parsing of Judith Butler, Claude Lefort, Jacques Rancière, Carl Schmitt, and others, he constructs a theoretical framework for identifying a process of democratic belonging that is persistent, contested, and aesthetic. This dynamic field of political representation then is explored through his historical example.The French Revolution is taken up through its exponents, interpreters, and one of its visual figures. Rousseau is up first, as he comprehends both the historical transformation and its constitutive problem. Rousseau sees popular demonstrations as ritual performances essential to the transition to democracy and to the expression of democratic legitimacy. Instead of being props for the king or mobs of rebellion, the crowd becomes the people as the people become a self-aware actor in history. But there is a crucial deficiency that other actors don't have: as a sovereign subject, the people are silent. The general will, beyond representation, is a spontaneous, authentic, and unmediated self-assertion that can be expressed only in part and must be enjoyed as sensate experience. This "mute eloquence" (64) of the assembly and a corresponding "collective self-absorption" (61) has obvious benefits for those who would usurp power, but it also opens a space for a more productive concept: the aesthetic resources that Frank labels the "democratic sublime."The next chapter captures this aesthetic in the "living image of the people" as it involved "a dramatic transformation in the iconography of political power and rule" (69). The people came to be understood not as an incarnation of the general will but as "a surplus of democratic immanence, the physical manifestation of... (shrink)

L'épithète de "grand" donnée par la postérité à Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694) est méritée par la complexité d'un personnage que les historiens modernes ont encore à découvrir. Quinze études ponctuelles, appuyées sur de nombreux documents rares ou inédits, permettent de retracer son itinéraire intellectuel.

Utilitarianism, the great reforming philosophy of the nineteenth century, has today acquired the reputation for being a crassly calculating, impersonal philosophy unfit to serve as a guide to moral conduct. Yet what may disqualify utilitarianism as a personal philosophy makes it an eminently suitable guide for public officials in the pursuit of their professional responsibilities. Robert E. Goodin, a philosopher with many books on political theory, public policy and applied ethics to his credit, defends utilitarianism against its critics and (...) shows how it can be applied most effectively over a wide range of public policies. In discussions of such issues as paternalism, social welfare policy, international ethics, nuclear armaments, and international responses to the environment crisis, he demonstrates what a flexible tool his brand of utilitarianism can be in confronting the dilemmas of public policy in the real world. (shrink)

In this paper, we challenge the commonly held assumption that actors in the education sector are largely ethical, and that there is therefore little need to scrutinize leader behaviors in this sector. We also overcome past scholars’ tendencies to either focus selectively on positive leader behaviors, or to stay content with categorizing leader behaviors into effective and ineffective. Using data from three case studies previously conducted in eight British and French academic establishments, we show that not only do negative (...) leader behaviors abound in the education sector, but they can also be differentiated into three types: behaviors emanating from leaders’ lack of functional skills i.e., ineffective behaviors, behaviors emanating from leaders’ insouciance toward harming the organization and its members i.e., dysfunctional behaviors, and behaviors emanating from leaders’ lack of honesty, integrity, ethicality, and transparency i.e., unauthentic behaviors. We enrich current understanding on ineffective, dysfunctional, and unauthentic leader behaviors, and offer a unified framework of negative leader behaviors in the academic sector. Since each type of negative behavior emanates from different motivational drivers, different measures are required to curb them. These are also discussed. A comparison of our findings with those from leadership studies in other sectors reveals that negative leader behaviors in the education sector are quite similar to those in other sectors. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive translation of the expanded French version of E.F.F. Chladni's Traité d'Acoustique, using Chladni's 1802 Die Akustik for reference and clarification. Chladni's experiments and observations with sound and vibrations profoundly influenced the development of the field of Acoustics. The famous Chladni diagrams along with other observations are contained in Die Akustik, published in German in 1802 and Traité d'Acoustique, a greatly expanded version, published in French in 1809. The present translation was undertaken by (...) class='Hi'>Robert T. Beyer, PhD (1920-2008), noted acoustician, Professor of Physics at Brown University, and Gold Medal recipient of the Acoustical Society of America. Along with many other projects completed over the course of his career, Dr. Beyer translated Von Neumann's seminal work, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics from the original German, spent 30 years translating Russian physics treatises and journals, served as editor of the English translation of the Soviet Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics, and also authored Sounds of our Times: Two Hundred Years of Acoustics. Represents the first comprehensive English translation of a seminal work in acoustics Translated by a prominent acoustician, and former Gold Medal recipient of the Acoustical Society of America In addition to the classic experiments with glass plates and violin bows, covers topics in music, architecture, and anatomy of human and animal hearing Appeals to a wide audience in physics, acoustics, and history of science. (shrink)

This book examines the Condorcet Jury Theorem and how its assumptions can be applicable to the real world. It will use the theorem to assess various familiar political practices and alternative institutional arrangements, revealing how best to take advantage of the truth-tracking potential of majoritarian democracy.

In his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, Nicole Oresme raises a question that he is apparently the first to ask in these terms, in such a context: do all beings have the desire to persevere into being? Before him, this question is not found in any of the medieval commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics. But after him it became canonical until at least the 16th century, since it can be found in Pietro Pomponazzi’s works for example. The novelty here consists in questioning (...) the validity of Averroes’ thesis, in his own commentary on the Physics, according to which all beings have the desire to persist into being, using the Augustinian analysis of voluntary death and suicide. How can we explain that one can freely put an end to his days if he is naturally inclined by a desire for life and even for eternity? Oresme’s solution consists in justifying not only the possibility, but also the moral obligation to accept death under certain conditions. In most cases, we do not really want to die. The desperate man wishes to cancel his misfortune and the heroic man who sacrifices himself for his country wishes to immortalize himself in the memory of other men. From a moral point of view, Nicole Oresme justifies only one case of voluntary death: that of individual sacrifice for the common good. The aim of this paper is to analyze precisely this important turning point in the long history of the notion of conatus in the West by comparing this quaestio from the commentary on the Physics with the glosses that accompany the French translation of the Nicomachean Ethics realised by Oresme at the court of Charles V. (shrink)

Revisioning macro-democratic processes in light of the processes and promise of micro-deliberation, Innovating Democracy provides an integrated perspective on democratic theory and practice after the deliberative turn.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:An Introduction to Mādhva VedāntaRobert ZydenbosAn Introduction to Mādhva Vedānta. By Deepak Sarma. Ashgate World Philosophies Series. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Pp. xiii + 159. Paper.The school of Vedānta philosophy founded by Madhva (1238-1317 C.E.) is popularly known as Dvaita, a name Madhva himself never used and which is somewhat misleading, as it suggests a dualism while Madhva's philosophy is rather a pluralistic one. The adjective Mādhva, derived from (...) Madhva's name, is used to designate the followers of Madhva's Vaiṣṇava variety of brahminical Hinduism, and may be used to unambiguously identify this kind of Vedānta. Although this school plays an important role in the history of Indian thought, it has been sadly neglected by modern Vedānta scholarship, which tends to focus on Advaita and Viśiṣṭādvaita. The first serious modern study, written in German by Helmut von Glasenapp, was Madhva's Philosophie des Vishnu-Glaubens (Bonn, 1923), of which the English translation by S. Shrothri, Madhva's Philosophy of the Vishnu Faith (Bangalore, 1992), is not beautiful but has the merit that a few minor errors in von Glasenapp's pioneer work have been corrected in footnotes. In the well-known histories of Indian philosophy, Surendranath Dasgupta's treatment of Madhva (A History of Indian Philosophy, vol. 4) is considerably better than the rather scanty one by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (Indian Philosophy, vol. 2, chap. 10, sections 6-14).The amount of Sanskrit writing in the tradition of Madhva is considerable, and in this still very living tradition there is a huge production of literature in modern Indian languages, almost all of it in Kannada, the tradition having originated and still having its stronghold in what today is the Kannada-speaking state of Karnataka in southern India (Madhva was a native speaker of Tulu, a language spoken in southwestern Karnataka, which has hardly any written literature). Among modern authors writing in English, the best known is B.N.K. Sharma (The Philosophy of Śrī Madhvācārya: A History of the Dvaita School of Vedānta and Its Literature), most of whose writings unfortunately suffer from a polemically sectarian outlook. As a general historical and systematic introduction to Madhva, his works, and his thought, the French La doctrine de Madhva by Suzanne Siauve (Pondichéry, 1968) remains unsurpassed. More recently, the most important studies of Madhva's works that appeared outside India are again in German, by Roque Mesquita: Madhva und seine unbekannten literarischen Quellen (Vienna, 1997; now also available in an English translation as Madhva's Unknown Literary Sources: Some Observations. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 2000) and his superb translation and study of one of Madhva's most important works, Madhva: Viṣṇutattvanirṇaya (Vienna, 2000).Madhva's doctrine is considered one of the three main currents in Vedānta, next to Viśiṣṭādvaita-Vedānta (the monistic doctrine formulated by Rāmānuja) and the variety that is best known in the Western world, Advaita-Vedānta (the illusionistic [End Page 665] monism that received its classical form at the hands of Śankara). According to the hagiography, Madhva grew up in an Advaitin environment but came to consider the Advaitins his main philosophical opponents, because monism, and particularly one that essentially denied the reality of the phenomenal world, did not support his Vaiṣṇava (recognizing Viṣṇu as the supreme being) devotional religiosity. He therefore sought to establish a pluralistic philosophy that did not dismiss phenomenal reality as illusory.Dvaita- or Mādhva-Vedānta is actually much more than the exegesis, sometimes rather imaginative, of the standard set of mainstream brahminical texts that one would expect from Vedānta. Madhva was a creative thinker, and his doctrine is an intellectual tour de force that seeks to combine elements from several sources and currents of religious and philosophical thought into one coherent whole: a philosophical terminology from Vedānta; ritualism from the Pāñcarātra āgamas; mythology from the Vedas, Upanishads, the great epics, and the purāṇas (Madhva wrote an extensive commentary on the Bhāgavatapurāṇa); and an ontology and epistemology that reveal the influence of Jainism.It... (shrink)

Bracket out the wrong of committing a wrong, or conspiring or colluding or conniving with others in their committing one. Suppose you have done none of those things, and you find yourself merely benefiting from a wrong committed wholly by someone else. What, if anything, is wrong with that? What, if any, duties follow from it? If straightforward restitution were possible — if you could just ‘give back’ what you received as a result of the wrongdoing to its rightful owner (...) — then matters are morally more straightforward. But in real-world cases that is often impossible, and questions of ‘how much, from whom and to whom?’ become far more vexing. The beneficiary disgorging all benefits of the wrong is part of the story, but where that is not possible or will not suffice to compensate the victim of wrongdoing we discuss various ways of allocating the cost of making the victim whole, including supplementation from public coffers. (shrink)

Democracy used to be seen as a relatively mechanical matter of merely adding up everyone's votes in free and fair elections. That mechanistic model has many virtues, among them allowing democracy to 'track the truth', where purely factual issues are all that is at stake. Political disputes invariably mix facts with values, however, and then it is essential to listen to what people are saying rather than merely note how they are voting. The great challenge is how to implement that (...) deliberative ideal among millions of people at once. In this strikingly original book, Goodin offers a solution: 'democratic deliberation within'. Building on models of ordinary conversational dynamics, he suggests that people simply imagine themselves in the position of various other people they have heard or read about and ask, 'What would they say about this proposal?' Informing the democratic imaginary then becomes the key to making deliberations more reflective - more empathetic, more considered, more expansive across time and distance. (shrink)

Discusses the justification for a minimal welfare state independent of political rhetoric from the right or the left.

Having an agreed-upon definition of character education would be useful for both researchers and practitioners in the field. However, even experts in character education disagree on how they would define it. We attempted to achieve greater conceptual clarity on this issue through a prototype analysis in which the features perceived as most central to character education were identified. In Study 1 (N = 77), we asked character education experts to enumerate features of character education. Based on these lists, we identified (...) 30 features. In Study 2 (N = 101), experts assessed which features were central to character education through a categorization task. In Study 3 (N = 166), we assessed the extent of centrality using scalar items. We conclude by offering practical advice for the development of future character education studies and programs rooted in what is deemed central to such programs. (shrink)

Robert Abrams argues that new concepts of space and landscape emerged in mid-nineteenth-century American writing, marking a linguistic and interpretative limit to American expansion. Abrams supports the radical elements of antebellum writing, where writers from Hawthorne to Rebecca Harding Davis disputed the naturalizing discourses of mid-nineteenth century society. Whereas previous critics find in antebellum writing a desire to convert chaos into an affirmative, liberal agenda, Abrams contends that authors of the 1840s and 50s deconstructed more than they constructed.

The VIA Classification of Character Strengths and Virtue has received substantial attention since its inception as a model of 24 dimensions of positive human functioning, but less so as a potential contributor to a psychological science on the nature of virtue. The current paper presents an overview of how this classification could serve to advance the science of virtue. Specifically, we summarize previous research on the dimensional versus categorical characterization of virtue, and on the identification of cardinal virtues. We give (...) particular attention to the three-dimensional model of cardinal virtues that includes moral, self-regulatory, and intellectual domains. We also discuss the possibility that these three clusters be treated as fundamental elements of a virtue model, meaning that they clearly and directly contribute to both individual and communal flourishing across various cultures. This discussion includes a summary of previous speculations about the evolution of adaptations underlying the human capacity for using behavioral repertoires associated with the three virtues, as well as discussing ways in which they simultaneously enhance community and individual, in the last case focusing particularly on evidence concerning mating potential. We then discuss the relationship between the evolutionary perspective on virtues and Aristotle’s concept of the reciprocity of the virtues. Finally, we provide speculations about the nature of practical wisdom. While accepting the potential value of future revisions to the VIA model, that model even under its current conditions has the potential to generate a number of intriguing and testable hypotheses about the nature of virtue. (shrink)

Robert Schofield explores the rational elements of British experimental natural philosophy in the 18th century by tracing the influence of two opposing concepts of the nature of matter and its action—mechanism and materialism. Both concepts rested on the Newtonian interpretation of their proponents, although each developed more or less independently. By integrating the developments in all the areas of experimental natural philosophy, describing their connections and the influences of Continental science, natural theology, and to a lesser degree social and (...) institutional changes, the author demonstrates that mechanistic concepts dominated interpretations from about 1687 to 1740, when they were replaced by materialistic concepts. A revival of the mechanistic approach early in the next century made England a fertile field for ideas on the dynamic interaction of forces. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

The democratic egalitarian ideal requires that everyone should enjoy equal power over the world through voting. If it is improper to vote twice in the same election, why should it be permissible for dual citizens to vote in two different places? Several possible excuses are considered and rejected.