Though others have surveyed the different methods in comparative religious ethics, relatively little attention has been given to different approaches to pedagogy. The field of comparative religious ethics has now reached a level of maturity so that there are a variety of ways such courses can be taught. In this review I consider the approaches to comparative religious ethics found in four recent texts by Jacob Neusner, Darrell Fasching and Dell deChant, Regina Wolfe and Christine Gudorf, and Sumner Twiss (...) and Bruce Grelle. In the essay I note the strengths and weaknesses of each text, with special attention given to how the texts might work in the classroom. I then argue that the different texts reflect different understandings of the goal of teaching comparative religious ethics, and I make these goals explicit in order to help teachers decide how they might approach the teaching in this growing field. (shrink)

This paper advances a new paradigm in clinical ethics education that not only emphasizes development of individual cli but also focuses on the institutional context within which health care professionals work. This approach has been applied to the goal of improving the care provided to critically and terminally ill adults. The model has been adopted by about thirty hospitals and nursing homes; additional institutions will soon join the program, entitled Decisions Near the End of Life. Here, we describe the history (...) and rationale for this approach, its goals, pedagogical assumptions, and design. (shrink)

In this book, Bruce Waller attacks two prevalent philosophical beliefs. First, he argues that moral responsibility must be rejected; there is no room for such a notion within our naturalist framework. Second, he denies the common assumption that moral responsibility is inseparably linked with individual freedom. Rejection of moral responsibility does not entail the demise of individual freedom; instead, individual freedom is enhanced by the rejection of moral responsibility. According to this theory of "no-fault naturalism," no one deserves either (...) blame or reward.In the course of arguing against moral responsibility, Waller critiques major compatibilist arguments-by Dennett, Frankfurt, Strawson, Bennett, Wolf, Hampshire, Glover, Rachels, Sher, and others. In addition, the implications of denying moral responsibility-for individual freedom, for moral judgments and moral behavior, and for social justice-are examined; the supposed dire consequences of the denial of moral responsibility are challenged; and the benefits of denying moral responsibility are described. Author note: Bruce N. Waller, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Youngstown State University, Youngstown, Ohio, is the author of Critical Thinking: Consider the Verdict. (shrink)

From iPhones and clothing to jewelry and food, the products those of us in the developed world consume and enjoy exist only through the labor and suffering of countless others. In his new book Bruce Robbins examines the implications of this dynamic for humanitarianism and social justice. He locates the figure of the "beneficiary" in the history of humanitarian thought, which asks the prosperous to help the poor without requiring them to recognize their causal role in the creation of (...) the abhorrent conditions they seek to remedy. Tracing how the beneficiary has manifested itself in the work of George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Jamaica Kincaid, Naomi Klein, and others, Robbins uncovers a hidden tradition of economic cosmopolitanism. There are no easy answers to the question of how to confront systematic inequality on a global scale. But the first step, Robbins suggests, is to acknowledge that we are, in fact, beneficiaries. (shrink)

Resumen: Esta exposición intenta comprender las formas culturales de comunicación y fijación mnémica en una narración específica que Davi Kopenawa, chamán Yanomami, expone al antropólogo Bruce Albert, en virtud de los modos de existencia amazónicos, refiriéndose en particular a la intensidad de los espíritus selváticos y a la experiencia chamánica con los mundos espirituales. En el contexto de una extensión vegetal dispersa y sobresaliente, afirmamos una sociabilidad cotidiana en el marco de una “ética respetuosa o amorosa” entre todas las (...) formas de vida, expresada estéticamente en formas significantes y transportadoras de emociones desarrolladas por la cosmología amazónica. Para ello utilizamos las nociones que Aby Warburg emplea en su estudio de la cultura de las imágenes, en tanto curso por el que estas pueden entenderse como organismos vivientes susceptibles a transformación, preservando su propia biología en la trasmisión codificada de la memoria.: This exhibition tries to understand the cultural forms of communication and mnemic fixation in a specific narrative that Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami shaman, exposes to the anthropologist Bruce Albert, by virtue of Amazonian modes of existence, especially referring to the intensity of jungle spirits and experience Shamanic with spiritual worlds. In the context of a dispersed and outstanding plant extension, we affirm a daily sociability within the framework of a “respectful or loving ethic” among all life forms, aesthetically expressed in significant and transporting forms of emotions developed by Amazonian cosmology. For this we use the notions that Aby Warburg uses in his study of the culture of images, as a course by which they can be understood as living organisms susceptible to transformation, preserving their own biology in the coded transmission of memory. (shrink)

If how we envisage substances prepares the trajectory of our behavior towards them, art objects, substantial through the manner of their fashioning, can reorderhow we comport ourselves in a world that is not for us, to the extent that what we call by the name of “world” cannot be apprehended as the price paid for humanavarice when confronting a global plenitude sacrificed, always, to the scale of our need for it. To frustrate that desolation, we must enrich our view of (...) things, andthis essay examines the thinking of Merleau-Ponty and Virginia Woolf at the service of that imperative. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Songs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and PoeticsVirginia A. La CharitéSongs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, by John Taggart; 254 pp. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994, $29.95 paper.John Taggart is a highly respected American poet whose passion for objectivism permeates his critical reading as well as his own creative works. The volume Songs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics represents the (...) first time that his various critical articles have been collected into a single work. Of the eighteen essays, all but one were previously published in various journals between 1975 and 1989; the eighteenth is an essay or “A Preface” on one of his own collections of poetry, Peace on Earth. By addressing his own poetry, Taggart’s volume cleverly includes himself as poet in this study of what he considers valuable in a work of art. [End Page 398]Finding a poem to be a simple composition of words (principle) and an image suggested by that composition (process), Taggart adopts the title Songs of Degrees from Louis Zukofsy’s seven short poems published in 1956 as Some Time. A song is then a poetic form, a continuing complete statement which actualizes the separate entities (words) of its expression. However, and most importantly, a song does not begin as a visual report; rather, a song moves towards being visualized. Consequently, everything depends on technique and everything turns on its structure, as the mind coordinates the information received by the eye. Degrees, then, emerge as variations of consonance and dissonance or word-sound functions. To write down is to compose; to compose is to create. Hence, a song of degrees is both an actual object and a metaphor for that object.Under the poetic of objectivism, Taggart’s essays are primarily concerned with poets whose work is in accord with his own: George Oppen (three essays), Frank Sampori, William Bronk, Louis Zukofsy (three essays), Bruce Andrews, Susan Howe (two essays), Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Theodore Enslin. Taggart demonstrates here that he is a sensitive and intellectually alert reader. These essays on criticism are in actuality essays on Taggart’s concept of poetics. Implicit is Taggart’s bias as an objectivist poet who insists that poetry has a spiritual value in the visionary tradition of Robert Lowell and Robert Duncan and to an extent Wallace Stevens.But perhaps of even greater interest than Taggart’s superb readings of his poetic colleagues—and it can be justifiably argued that perhaps only Taggart can read these poets with the sympathetic eye that they deserve—is the inclusion of three essays on other arts: dance (Trina Collins), stained glass (Mark Rothko), and jazz (John Coltrane). By including these essays with those of literary criticism, Taggart expands the terms poetics and poetry to any text or object which is a moving line and complete at the same time. Form comes from language; language is then based on experience, not belief, and the resulting image is what is revealed and reflected, what is seen. A work (poem, song, text) is valuable because its visionary imagination captures the collective conscience to regain spiritual ascesis. The process of objectification is the metaphor or song, which emerges in degrees of interaction. The song has substance, it is tangible, and it has an objective existence of its own. To be critical is to objectify the composition or structure at hand. Critical is another term for technical, and indeed it is the technical aspect of writing poetry which Taggart so deftly elucidates in his volume of essays.For anyone interested in objectivist poetry, Taggart’s collection of essays is mandatory reading. His insights into this kind of cerebral poetry are invaluable, for he blends appreciation with analysis, information with inspiration, and logic with imagination. His own sensitivity to the struggle which is the poetic process brings a new consciousness to the poetics of poetry.Virginia A. La CharitéUniversity of KentuckyCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

My strategy is to examine a recent trend in philosophical discussions of responsibility, a trend that tries, but I think ultimately fails, to give an acceptable analysis of the conditions of responsibility. It fails due to what at first appear to be deep and irresolvable metaphysical problems. It is here that I suggest that the condition of sanity comes to the rescue. What at first appears to be an impossible requirement for responsibility---the requirement that the responsible agent have created her- (...) or himself---turns out to be the vastly more mundane and non controversial requirement that the responsible agent must, in a fairly standard sense, be sane. (shrink)

The Great Psychotherapy Debate: Models, Methods, and Findings comprehensively reviews the research on psychotherapy to dispute the commonly held view that the benefits of psychotherapy are derived from the specific ingredients contained in a given treatment (medical model). The author reviews the literature related to the absolute efficacy of psychotherapy, the relative efficacy of various treatments, the specificity of ingredients contained in established therapies, effects due to common factors, such as the working alliance, adherence and allegiance to the therapeutic protocol, (...) and effects that are produced by different therapists. In each case, the evidence convincingly corroborates the contextual model and disconfirms the prevailing medical model. (shrink)

At the very beginning of L’Homme-Machine, La Mettrie claims that Leibnizians with their monads have “rather spiritualized matter than materialized the soul”; a few years later Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and natural philosopher with a strong interest in the modes of transmission of ‘genetic’ information, conceived of living minima which he termed molecules, “endowed with desire, memory and intelligence,” in his Système de la nature ou Essai sur les corps organisés. This text first (...) appeared in Latin in 1751 under the title Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturae systemate, with the pseudonym Dr Baumann; it was translated by Maupertuis in 1754 as Essai sur la formation des corps organisés and was later included in his 1756 Œuvres under the title Système de la nature. Now, it is clear that Maupertuis was a kind of Leibnizian; and that his molecule possessed higher-level, ‘mental’ properties. In that sense he falls under the first category described by La Mettrie. But he was also involved in a debate on this issue with Diderot, who put forth a sustained critique of Maupertuis’ theory of the molecule in the additions to his 1753 Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature. Where Maupertuis attributes higher-level properties to his living minima, Diderot argues that these properties are ‘organizational’, i.e., they can only be properties of the whole. At issue here is the degree of commitment to a form of materialism. (shrink)

The second edition of The Great Psychotherapy Debate has been updated and revised to include a history of healing practices, medicine, and psychotherapy, an expanded theoretical presentation of the contextual model, an examination of therapist effects, and a thorough review of the research on common factors such as the alliance, expectations, and empathy.

This analysis investigates whether solidarity is an appropriate concept for thinking about justifications for a just distribution of bioethical goods in the international arena. This will be explored by looking at the national origins of the idea of justifying solidarity in the form of the health care that welfare states offer. Following that, ‘life’ and ‘health’ will be placed within a philosophical context by focusing on the main arguments of John Rawls and Amartya Sen and the role of solidarity in (...) these two theories of justice will be analysed. It will be shown that these theories assume that solidarity is not a prerequisite for just international structures. Finally, the possibility will be discussed, that there is a degree of uncertainty surrounding justifications for fair distribution in the international context that can result when the concepts of solidarity and justice are handled imprecisely. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophers' Walks by Bruce BaughTim IngoldBaugh, Bruce. Philosophers' Walks. Routledge, 2022. 252pp.Yesterday evening, much to my satisfaction, I finished reading Bruce Baugh's Philosophers' Walks. The author ends by putting down his pen. It is time, he declares, "to put my boots on and walk out into the world" (236). For me, it was bedtime, but knowing that I was to write this review, I resolved (...) to sleep on it. On waking, I set out, as is my wont, for the short walk I take every morning before breakfast. The walk itself is nothing special: it takes in the streets of my neighborhood and a nearby park. Yet every day is different as the weather changes, trees come in and out of leaf, blooms flourish and wilt in front gardens, children on their way to school throng the streets in term-time only to vanish in vacations. Lately, a nineteenth-century fountain in the park has been lovingly restored, and every morning I am refreshed by its water-jets and tinkly sound. Most days I am writing in my head, on whatever I have on the go at the time. Walking briskly and on my own, I find that words that had tied me in knots the day before miraculously straighten themselves out with a rhythm and fluency matching my pace. I cannot, however, walk and write at the same time. It is physically impossible. So as the words come, I have to keep repeating them to myself, until I make it home. With no time to lose, I seize notebook, pencil, and spectacles to jot them down. Only when I have done so can I finally sit down to breakfast. And that's exactly what happened this morning. With my hastily scribbled notes, some good words, and the odd finished sentence, I am ready to write this review.I am not, of course, the first to have discovered the benefits of thinking-while-walking. Countless predecessors have done so before me, including some of the most celebrated figures of the past four centuries of European intellectual history. And so has Baugh. The idea behind his book is that if by walking, philosophers have arrived at many of their most cherished insights, then perhaps we could better take the measure of these insights not merely by reading their words but by retracing their steps, walking the same paths as they did. And this, precisely, is what [End Page 131] Baugh, often accompanied by his wife Diane Lindsay, set out to do. Each chapter, barring the introduction and conclusion, is devoted to one or sometimes two characters, and each blends reflection on their ideas and life-histories of walking with the author's recollection of attempting to follow in their footsteps, and of the experience and even self-knowledge gained from doing so. Some walks are in verdant countryside, or more spectacular Alpine scenery, others are in big cities like London and Paris. Baugh does not pretend that the walks of his chosen characters can be replicated exactly when so much has changed, in both rural areas and the urban fabric, since their heydays. Nor can we ever know exactly what was going through their heads at the time. It is nevertheless surprising how many echoes you can pick up from the past, so long as you keep your ears to the ground, and Baugh is an astute listener. For us, his readers, the book is an invitation to join in his travels, albeit at a distance, and by doing so, to enrich our understanding not only of his characters and of how they thought, but of ourselves as well.Though the book is called Philosophers' Walks, Baugh has cast his net wide to include characters for whom the epithet "poet," "artist," or "writer" might sooner come to mind than "philosopher." No matter: all such labels are a touch arbitrary, and it's the thought that counts. So here they are, in chronological order (not the order in which they appear in the book): Pierre Grassendi, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf, André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de... (shrink)

In the Transcendental Aesthetic (TA), Kant is typically held to make negative assertations about “things in themselves,” namely that they are not spatial or temporal. These negative assertions stand behind the “neglected alternative” problem for Kant’s transcendental idealism. According to this problem, Kant may be entitled to assert that spatio-temporality is a subjective element of our cognition, but he cannot rule out that it may also be a feature of the objective world. In this paper, I show in a new (...) way how Kant’s view (focusing on his conclusions about space) is not subject to this objection, by showing that he does not make the denial about mind-independent reality that he is typically held to make. The argument develops consequences of a new reading of Kant’s expression “an sich selbst” (‘in itself’; ‘in themselves’). I argue that “an sich selbst” or “per se” has a special, judgment-level role, so that this expression does not form new noun-terms adjectivally. It follows that the conceptual unit of Kant’s “Conclusions” in the TA is simply “things” (Dinge), since “things in themselves” is not a nominal expression; Kant adopts the Wolffian ontological use of “thing” as the basic kind-term for any existent. The arguments that things per se are not in space are arguments that space cannot be a necessary property or relations of things as a kind. I show that this does not involve the positive claim about mind-independent reality that inspires the neglected alternative objection. (shrink)

Micheline Sauvage of the French National Scientific Research Centre traces for us the story of this great Athenian and great philosopher, as seen both by his contemporaries and by the European philosophers who followed after him.

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...

In his Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1717), the English deist Anthony Collins proposed a complete determinist account of the human mind and action, partly inspired by his mentor Locke, but also by elements from Bayle, Leibniz and other Continental sources. It is a determinism which does not neglect the question of the specific status of the mind but rather seeks to provide a causal account of mental activity and volition in particular; it is a ‘volitional determinism’. Some decades later, (...) Diderot articulates a very similar determinism, which seeks to recognize the existence of “causes proper to man” (as he says in the Réfutation d’Helvétius). The difference with Collins is that now biological factors are being taken into account. Obviously both the ‘volitional’ and the ‘biological’ forms of determinism are noteworthy inasmuch as they change our picture of the nature of determinism itself, but my interest here is to compare these two determinist arguments, both of which are broadly Spinozist in nature – and as such belong to what Jonathan Israel called in his recent book “the radical Enlightenment,” i.e. a kind of underground Enlightenment constituted by Spinozism – and to see how Collins’ specifically psychological vision and Diderot’s specifically biological vision correspond to their two separate national contexts: determinism in France in the mid-1750s was a much more medico-biological affair than English determinism, which appears to be on a ‘path’ leading to Mill and associationist psychology. (shrink)

A study of Philo and Paul and the first-century sophistic movement.

This volume emphasizes the diversity and fruitfulness of early modern mechanism as a program, as a concept, as a model. Mechanistic study of the living body but also of the mind and mental processes are examined in careful historical focus, dealing with figures ranging from the first-rank (Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Cudworth, Gassendi, Locke, Leibniz, Kant) to less well-known individuals (Scaliger, Martini) or prominent natural philosophers who have been neglected in recent years (Willis, Steno, etc.). The volume moves from early modern (...) medicine and physiology to late Enlightenment and even early 19th-century psychology, always maintaining a conceptual focus. It is a contribution to a newly active field in the history and philosophy of early modern life science. It is of interest to scholars studying the history of medicine and the development of mechanistic theories. (shrink)

In Against Moral Responsibility, Bruce Waller launches a spirited attack on a system that is profoundly entrenched in our society and its institutions, deeply rooted in our emotions, and vigorously defended by philosophers from ancient times to the present. Waller argues that, despite the creative defenses of it by contemporary thinkers, moral responsibility cannot survive in our naturalistic-scientific system. The scientific understanding of human behavior and the causes that shape human character, he contends, leaves no room for moral responsibility. (...) Waller argues that moral responsibility in all its forms--including criminal justice, distributive justice, and all claims of just deserts--is fundamentally unfair and harmful and that its abolition will be liberating and beneficial. What we really want--natural human free will, moral judgments, meaningful human relationships, creative abilities--would survive and flourish without moral responsibility. In the course of his argument, Waller examines the origins of the basic belief in moral responsibility, proposes a naturalistic understanding of free will, offers a detailed argument against moral responsibility and critiques arguments in favor of it, gives a general account of what a world without moral responsibility would look like, and examines the social and psychological aspects of abolishing moral responsibility. Waller not only mounts a vigorous, and philosophically rigorous, attack on the moral responsibility system, but also celebrates the benefits that would result from its total abolition. (shrink)

Sport provides an arena for human flourishing. For some, this pursuit of a meaningful life through sport involves the use of non-human animals, not least of all through sport hunting. This paper will take seriously that sport – including sport hunting – can provide a meaningful arena for human flourishing. Additionally, it will accept for present purposes that animals are of less moral value than humans. This paper will show that, even accepting these premises, much use of animals for sport (...) – including sport hunting – is unacceptable. Nonetheless it will show that there can be acceptable ways of using animals as part of a human’s meaningful life pursuits through sport, albeit in a more limited fashion than many sportspersons currently accept. (shrink)

Für Aristoteles ist das Kontinuum ein potentiell Unendliches. Dieser Unendlichkeitsbegriff, den er neben dem prozessualen und aktualen einführte, wurde im Laufe der Philosophiegeschichte nicht mehr berücksichtigt. So verwenden ihn u.a. weder Kant noch Weyl in ihren Kontinuumsbetrachtungen, obwohl ihr Kontinuumsverständnis ihn geradezu nahelegt. - In dieser Arbeit werden zum einen die ontologischen Kontinuumslehren des Aristoteles und späterer Philosophen und Mathematiker behandelt, zum anderen erfährt die von Aristoteles im 6. Buch der «Physik» vorgelegte strukturelle Kontinuumsuntersuchung eine eingehende Würdigung.

Offers a compelling vision of how to achieve and conduct a liberal but democratic society through the ideal of Neutrality--between people and ideas of the good--and using the tool of Neutral dialogue.

Part of the draw of athletics is its straightforwardness. There are nuances to competitions to make them more sporting contests, but at the end of a long jump competition whomever records the longest jump should win. Unfortunately, a recent rule-change at the highest level of the sport – the “Final 3” format – undermined this simplicity for the horizontal jumps and the throws for some of the 2020 and much of the 2021 seasons. While fortunately this rule was largely reverted (...) within days of the initial submission of this paper, it’s still valuable to critically evaluate why such a rule is problematic so as to better understand of the value of sporting competitions and give guidance on future rule changes, be they in athletics or other sports. To that end, we will be drawing from the literature on the purpose and value of competitions and coupling that with simulations based on data from actual top-tier long jump competitions to show that the Final 3 format makes for significantly worse competitions than the standard format. (shrink)

Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in Before the Law, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics.

This chapter discusses the analysis of Joseph Raz on coercion, trust, and citizenship. The chapter starts with a number of brief comments on some of his observations regarding the doctrine of liberty and the preference for minimum government. The chapter also includes one of Raz's arguments that states that some people favour non-perfectionist forms of government out of a misunderstanding of the implications of perfectionism for liberty.