Philosophy, as I use it here, is a conversation, one stretching back through various canonical European and Ancient Greek texts at least to Thales. Has this conversation progressed? The main objection to philosophy's having a linear progression is dissensus – the fact that philosophers all disagree but still accept each other as peers. In this chapter, I argue that we should conceive of philosophy as being capable of a branching kind of progression: philosophy progresses when it gives us more ways (...) of conceiving of ourselves. (shrink)

The apostle Paul has reemerged as a force on the contemporary philosophical scene. Some of the most powerful recent affirmations of nonrepresentational, materialist, and event-oriented philosophies repeat topics and tropes of the ancient apostle. Paul is appropriated both for and against Kantian cosmopolitanism, psychoanalytic models of subjectivity and power, Schmittian political theologies, Derridean messianism, political universalism, and an ongoing refashioning of identity politics within postsecular contexts. This book provides the most comprehensive constellation to date of current thinking about Paul (...) and his cultural or philosophical "afterlives" in ancient, modern, and contemporary contexts. (shrink)

Stanislas Breton's _A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul_, which focuses on the political implications of the apostle's writings, was an instrumental text in Continental philosophy's contemporary "turn to religion." Reading Paul's work against modern thought and history, Breton helped launch a reassessment of Marxism, introduce secular interpretations of biblical and theological traditions, develop "radical negativity" as a critical category, and rework modern political ideas through a theoretical lens. Newly translated and critically situated, this edition takes a fresh approach to Breton's (...) classic work, reacquainting readers with the remarkable ways in which an ancient apostle can reset our understanding of the political. Breton begins with Paul's biography and the texts of his conversion, which challenge common conceptions of identity. He broaches the question of allegory and divine predestination, introduces the idea of subjectivity as an effect of power, and confronts Paul's critique of Law, which leads to an exploration of the logics and limits of agency and power. Breton develops these and other insights in relation to Paul's subversive reflections on the crucified messiah, which challenge meaning and reason and upend our current world order. Neither a coherent theologian nor a stable humanist, Breton's Paul becomes a fascinating figure of excess and madness, experiencing a kind of being that transcends philosophy, secularity, and religion. (shrink)

Moral outrage is a response to the behavior of others, never one's own. It is a response to infringements or transgressions on what people perceive to be the immunities they, or others with whom they identify, can expect on the basis of their rights and privileges and what they understand to be their reasonable expectations regarding the behavior of others. A person's culturally defined social identities and the rights and privileges that go with them in relationships to which those identities (...) can be party make up the contents of that person's social persona and also constitute that person's social territory. Infringements of rights and privileges in the social and symbolic worlds in which humans live are the equivalent of encroachments on territory among animals, and moral outrage can be understood as the human expression of what we perceive as territorial behavior in animals. As emotion, outrage is affected by such clinical processes as displacement, rationalization, projection, and reaction formation. Outrage has an essential role in the maintenance of viable social groups, but it also exacerbates conflict among people who perceive one another as “others.”. (shrink)

As Brillant-Savarin remarked in 1825 in his classic text Physiologie du Goût, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” Philosophers and political theorists have only recently begun to pay attention to food as a critical domain of human activity and social justice. Too often these discussions treat food as a commodity and eating as a matter of individual choice. Policies that address the global obesity crisis by focusing on individual responsibility and medical interventions ignore (...) the dependency of human agency on a culture of possibilities. -/- The essays collected here address this lack in philosophy and political theory by appreciating food as an origin of human culture and a network of social relations. They show how an approach to the current global obesity epidemic through individual choice deflects the structural change that is necessary to create a culture of healthy eating. Analyzing the contemporary food crises of obesity, malnutrition, environmental degradation, and cultural displacement as global issues of public policy and social justice, these essays display the essential interconnections among issues of social inequity, animal rights, environmental ethics, and cultural identity. They call for new solidarities and new public policies to ensure the sustainable practices necessary to the production and distribution of wholesome and satisfying food. -/- Lévi-Strauss located the origin of ethics in table manners. By learning what and how to eat, humans learned respect for others, for the earth, and for the other forms of life that sustain human existence. Lévi-Strauss fears that in our time this “lesson in humility” coursing throughout the mythologies of “savage peoples” may have been forgotten, so that the world is treated as a thing to be appropriated and the extinction of species and cultures as an inevitable result of the ascendancy of global capital. This volume makes clear the need to change the way we eat, if we are to live on the earth together with what Lévi-Strauss calls “decency and discretion.”. (shrink)

I consider whether there is a plausible conception of personal identity that can accommodate the ‘Multiplicity Thesis’ (MT), the thesis that some ways of creating and deploying multiple distinct online personae can bring about the existence of multiple persons where before there was only one. I argue that an influential Kantian line of thought, according to which a person is a unified locus of rational agency, is well placed to accommodate the thesis. I set out such a line of (...) thought as developed by Carol Rovane, and consider the conditions that would have to be in place for the possibility identified by MT to be realised. Finally I briefly consider the prospects for MT according to neo-Lockean and animalist views of personhood. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for the identity through time of material objects where those conditions have a kind of empirical content necessary for them to function as criteria for identity through time. Taking Eli Hirsch’s program in The Concept of Identity as representative of attempts to formulate conditions which are logically necessary and sufficient and which also function as criteria guiding our tracing of objects’ careers through time, I argue (a) (...) that, when such programs are constructed in a way sensitive to the criteria we actually use, they fall prey to conceivable counterexamples and (b) that, when such programs are tightened to avoid logically possible counterexamples, they fail to capture the identity criteria implicit in our ordinary experience. The paper argues that our identity criteria are incomplete and informal and that our individuative practice is partially determined by the kind of interest we have in the object(s) being traced. The relationship between this view and two versions of relative identity is also discussed. (shrink)

Taking Aquinas's metaphysics of human nature as my point of departure and taking inspiration from Dante's concept of transhumanization, I sketch a metaphysics of the afterlife according to which a human person in the interim phase between death and resurrection is not a mere disembodied soul. I offer some theological reasons for thinking that our bodily human nature is essential to what we are and for thinking that we can survive the destruction of our bodies at death. I argue that (...) these claims are consistent, provided we hold that our bodily human nature, while essential to what we are, is not necessary to what we are. I argue for this distinction between essence and necessity. I then raise a mereological puzzle about the relation between a disembodied soul and the person whose soul it is, and argue that, if we are to avoid the Cartesian conclusion that this relation is identity, we must hold that a human person, even in the interim phase, is composed of a soul and something else. Drawing on Dante's concept of transhumanization, I argue that this something else is God himself or some specially created divine grace or energy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:69 HUME, DEMONSTRATIVES, AND SELF-ASCRIPTIONS OF IDENTITY I. In his A Treatise of Human Nature1(hereafter referred to as the Treatise and, for purposes of citation, abbreviated as 'T'), Hume says that "[T]he identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one..." (T 259) Although some commentators read this as tantamount to the claim that we can have no idea of a mind, (...) this seems too strong. To see what Hume is getting at, we need to return to the beginning of the section entitled "Of Personal Identity" where he says: There are some philosophers, who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our SELF; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. (T 251, my emphasis) "Unluckily", he continues, we do not have "any idea of self, after the manner it is here explain'd." (T 251, my emphasis) What this suggests, I think, is that it is only the idea of a simple, changeless mind that ought to be called fictitious. With respect to the question "What kind of an idea of mind à o we have?", Hume suggests what has come to be called the "Bundle Theory of Mind". According to the bundle theory, every object of awareness is an individual perception and "what we call a mind, is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations..." (T 207) In other words, Hume is saying that what we are aware of is a stream of perceptions, none of whose members is a perception of a simple, changeless mind. However, given Hume's account of (strict/perfect) identity, an acceptance of the bundle theory seems to entail the rejection of the 70 continuous existence of any mind. Put differently, if true the theory seems to require that the very idea of a mind continuous through time is a fiction. This raises the following problem which Hume must address: Since the ordinary (vulgar) person has a great propensity to ascribe identity through time to minds (T 253), then, from the point of view of a study of human nature, it is important to provide an answer to the question: "why do the vulgar have such a propensity?" Understanding Hume's answer to this question is, I believe, dependent upon the recognition that it is only the idea of a simple, changeless mind that Hume believes is fictitious. Once this is seen, it follows that the ascription of strict identity through time to a mind must, on Hume's account, be a result of the activity of the imagination (see T 209). As Hume says:...identity is nothing really belonging to these different perceptions, and uniting them together; but is merely a quality, which we attribute to them, because of the union of their ideas in the imagination, when we reflect upon them (T 260). Although the qualities that unite ideas typically include causation, resemblance and contiguity, Hume excludes contiguity as a factor in the case of ascriptions of strict identity through time to minds (T 260) and restricts his attention to the relations of resemblance and causation. Of these two relations, a 2 number of commentators have found the relation of resemblance especially problematic. Accordingly, in what follows I will consider whether Hume's explanation of the role of resemblance is sufficient to account for and justify self-ascriptions of strict identity through time. Contrary to the judgement that Hume's explanation of the role of resemblance fails as an account of self-ascriptions of strict identity through time, I will suggest that by recognizing a primitive 71 theory of demonstrative content in Hume's explanation of the role of resemblance many of the problems that the explanation seems to give rise to can be avoided. II. I begin with Hume's description of the role of resemblance: To begin with resemblance; suppose we cou'd see clearly into the breast of another, and observe that succession of perceptions, which constitutes his mind or thinking principle, and suppose that he always preserves the memory of... (shrink)

Homi Bhabha's attempts to recuperate Frantz Fanon's “black man” as a figure of resistance and subversion have relied on the simple fact of this figure's existence: because the black man's identity is irrevocably divided, Bhabha claims that its mere existence calls the unity of a normative identity into question. This essay broadly questions Bhabha's reading of Fanon by asking exactly how it is that the subject's potential for subversion can be realized in action, and suggests – drawing from (...) Jacques Lacan's work as well from the work of Jean-Paul Sartre – a new model for the figure of Fanon's black man which retains the possibility for a free subjectivity oriented toward resistance. The tacit belief that resistance must arise as a consciously developed response is belied by the suggestion that there are psychic tensions that might produce a subversive subjective orientation involuntarily, spontaneously. (shrink)

Current models of insulin binding to the insulin receptor (IR) propose (i) that there are two binding sites on the surface of insulin which engage with two binding sites on the receptor and (ii) that ligand binding involves structural changes in both the ligand and the receptor. Many of the features of insulin binding to its receptor, namely B‐chain helix interactions with the leucine‐rich repeat domain and A‐chain residue interactions with peptide loops from another part of the receptor, are also (...) seen in models of relaxin and insulin‐like peptide 3 binding to their receptors. We show that these principles can likely be extended to the group of mimetic peptides described by Schäffer and coworkers, which are reported to have no sequence identity with insulin. This review summarizes our current understanding of ligand‐induced activation of the IR and highlights the key issues that remain to be addressed. (shrink)

Both Zora Neale Hurston's "Seraph on the Suwanee" (1948) and Carolyn Chute's "The Beans of Egypt, Maine" (1985) feature white working-class women negotiating class hierarchies in rural communities. Despite contemporary critics' putative concern with class and demonstrated concern with Hurston's other works, particularly "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (1937), both novels have been largely ignored by the critical establishment, in part because readers find it difficult to identify with the main characters. Comparing the critical reception of Seraph, The Beans, and (...) Their Eyes reveals the mechanism by which readers identify with imaginary characters is constituted by middle-class reading practices. While a sympathetic audience emerged for Their Eyes, one is not likely to appear for the other two novels, which expose the class-bound roots of the literary construction of identity, meaning and reality. In addition, Seraph and The Beans point, however obliquely, toward a vernacular notion of home that resists middle-class commodification. (shrink)

[First paragraphs] Reductionists about personal identity contend that there is nothing more to our survival than a series of causally related experiences and/or bodily continuities. Our belief in a separately existing self or subject of experiences is held to be unjustified, and we are recommended to reduce the conception of our own identity over time by jettisoning this belief. The particular form of reductionism that places the true view of our identity in a series of causally related (...) experiences is usually known as psychological reductionism or the psychological continuity approach. The version that gives prominence to the continuity of the body or human being, at least as it has been developed in recent years, is known as animalism or the biological approach. I shall concentrate on psychological reductionism because, of these two views, it seems to me the more intuitively appealing. But I shall also consider the animalist alternative, arguing that my main line of attack against psychological reductionism can be adapted against it. Both positions are mistaken in supposing that we have insufficient reason for believing in a separately existing subject of experiences. This conclusion is defended in the first section. In the second, I maintain that certain additional grounds that have been offered for accepting a reductionist position fail to do so. And, in the third, I examine a general objection to the conception of a subject of experiences that has been defended in the first two sections. (shrink)

This article focuses on some topics in Jeffrey Brower’s recent and excellent book, Aquinas’s Ontology of the Material World: Change, Hylomorphism, and Material Objects. Part of Brower’s goal for the book is to reconstruct Aquinas’s views. I offer some reflections on Brower’s use of this metaphor of reconstruction, before considering four topics in some detail. These are: 1. Brower’s discussion of the relation between Aristotle’s Ten Categories and the not-obviously-connected four-fold division of being into substance, form, prime matter, and accidental (...) unity. 2. Brower’s interpretation of prime matter as “non-individual stuff.” 3. Brower’s account of numerical sameness without identity along with some discussion of how this is supposed to be useful for solving a particular puzzle about accidental change. 4. I’ll close with some reflections on Brower’s somewhat novel solution to a longstanding problem with Aquinas’s metaphysics of the afterlife. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for the identity through time of material objects where those conditions have a kind of empirical content necessary for them to function as criteria for identity through time. Taking Eli Hirsch’s program in The Concept of Identity as representative of attempts to formulate conditions which are logically necessary and sufficient and which also function as criteria guiding our tracing of objects’ careers through time, I argue (a) (...) that, when such programs are constructed in a way sensitive to the criteria we actually use, they fall prey to conceivable counterexamples and (b) that, when such programs are tightened to avoid logically possible counterexamples, they fail to capture the identity criteria implicit in our ordinary experience. The paper argues that our identity criteria are incomplete and informal and that our individuative practice is partially determined by the kind of interest we have in the object(s) being traced. The relationship between this view and two versions of relative identity is also discussed. (shrink)

We derive, in path integral approach, the (anomalous) master Ward identity associated with an infinite set of nonlocal conservation laws in two-dimensional principal chiral models.

The gap in the mathematical derivation of Noether’s theorem, and also of the Ward-Takahashi identities, caused by performing variation before quantization is closed by introduction of variational calculus for operator fields. It is demonstrated that both Noether’s theorem and the Ward-Takahashi identities retain full validity in quantum field theory.

This paper addresses the coconstruction of identities and emotions through the human/animal relationship, arguing that nonhuman animals can and do act as coagents in interspecies encounters. The paper narrates the extraordinary boundary-transgressing experiences of a particular kind of cogency labeled “huminality” . An autoethnographic account of pet-visitation involving a woman, a West Highland white terrier named Fergus, and geriatric residents demonstrates the power of huminality to authorize the emergence and realization of different identities and selves. Examples include the intimate friend, (...) the dignified self, the institutional resister, the gift-giver, and the available self. Huminality, in the emotional spacetime of the hospital, is rooted in empathy, concern, and affection. As ontological choreography, huminality takes us past the animal-Nature/human-culture frontier into uncharted territories of spacetime to engage in forms of life with nonhuman others. Encounters with animals, even on a geriatric ward, can transform our universe and our selves. (shrink)

We discuss the symmetry basis of unified field theories, i.e., the generalized concept of local gauge symmetry, and its physical implications. The generalized Ward-Takahashi identities and the explicit constraints among renormalization constants are derived by using the path integral in a specific model. These constraints are confirmed at the one-loop level.

Professor Ward has offered a bold alternative to traditional doctrines of the Trinity. I focus on his proposal for understanding the identity of Jesus Christ. I note some ambiguities and raise some concerns, and I show that his theology is not obviously free of the error that motivates his rejection of more traditional views.

Keith Ward’s Christ and the Cosmos is a bold and creative attempt to solve real Trinitarian and Christological difficulties. I object that it is not, as advertised a “reformulation” of any prior Trinity doctrine, and that it contradicts the New Testament in denying the identity of Jesus with the Son, and in denying the identity of the Father with the one God.

Introduction: Conversion and the practice of transformation -- The philosophical structure of Jonathan Edwards's religious affections -- Habit, habit change, and conversion in C.S. Peirce -- Reconstructing faith : religious overcoming in Dewey's pragmatism -- Transforming obligation in William James -- Dwelling in absence: the reflective origin of conversion -- Creative transformation : the work of conversion -- The evasion of conversion in recent American philosophy.

In this paper I address two important objections to the theory called ‘ Composition as Identity’ : the ‘wall-bricks-and-atoms problem’, and the claim that CAI entails mereological nihilism. I aim to argue that the best version of CAI capable of addressing both problems is the theory I will call ‘Atomic Composition as Identity’ which consists in taking the plural quantifier to range only over proper pluralities of mereological atoms and every non-atomic entity to be identical to the plurality (...) of atoms it fuses. I will proceed in three main steps. First, I will defend Sider’s Composition as identity. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 211–221, 2014) idea of weakening the comprehension principle for pluralities and I will show that :219–235, 2016a) it can ward off both the WaBrA problem and the threat of mereological nihilism. Second, I will argue that CAI-theorists should uphold an ‘atomic comprehension principle’ which, jointly with CAI, entails that there are only proper pluralities of mereological atoms. Finally, I will present a novel reading of the ‘one of’ relation that not only avoids the problems presented by Yi Composition as identity. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 169–191, 2014) and Calosi :429–443, 2016b, Am Philos Q 55:281–292, 2018) but can also help ACAI-theorists to make sense of the idea that a composite entity is both one and many. (shrink)

Throughout her work, Audre Lorde maintains that her self-preservation in the face of oppression depends on acting from the recognition and valorization of her feelings as a deep source of knowledge. This claim, taken as a portrayal of agency, poses challenges to standard positions in ethics, epistemology, and moral psychology. This article examines the oppositional agency articulated by Lorde’s thought, locating feeling, poetry, and the power she calls “the erotic” within her avowed project of self-preservation. It then explores the implications (...) of taking seriously Lorde’s account, particularly for theorists examining ethics and epistemology under nonideal social conditions. For situations of sexual intimacy, for example, Lorde’s account unsettles prevailing assumptions about the role of consent in responsibility between sexual partners. I argue that obligations to solicit consent and respect refusal are not sufficient to acknowledge the value of agency in intimate encounters when agency is oppositional in the way Lorde describes. (shrink)

This article draws on feminism and post-structuralism to theorize a narrative framework for developing and critiquing therapeutic practices with women who have experienced child sexual abuse. I argue that both objectivism and relativism provide poor guides for conducting therapy and that it is only through situating our knowledges precisely that more liberatory therapy practices may be developed. This approach, termed ‘visible therapy’, is used to directly and explicitly challenge normative constructions of women, child sexual abuse and therapy. I argue that (...) it is necessary to explicate the embedded assumptions produced through practices of abuse, and which serve to construct children's experiences of that abuse, in order to ward against their reproduction within therapy relationships. I demonstrate that it is through situating and explicating the operations of power that the authenticity of experience and identity may be questioned and women's ongoing positioning as guilty victims may be challenged. Thus, I am concerned not with who women ‘really are’ but with how they come to know and be known through practices of both abuse and therapy. This, then, is about making the tactics of abuse and therapy visible. Problems are not located within individuals, but rather within the narratives which situate both past and current relationships but which, through reiteration, obscure their own social production. I conclude that it is only when categorical identity is no longer assumed that progressive therapy practices with women who have been sexually abused can be developed and maintained. (shrink)

The analysis of personal identity over time (personal persistence) in terms of properties of the first-person perspective has been neglected for quite a while. However, there seems to be an interesting relation between experiential features on the one hand and the notion of personal persistence on the other hand. This idea is famously spelled out in an argument introduced by Barry Dainton (2000; 2005; 2008), according to which diachronic personal persistence con- sists in experiential continuity (stream of consciousness). This (...) paper challenges one central claim of the argument, whose main target is to ward off the threat of factual interruptions in the stream of consciousness. It will be objected that this problem cannot be properly solved. However, the relevance of experiential features to personal persistence can be shown if one leaves behind the question of criteria of personal identity over time and instead turns to the question of what it means to have a sense of self-identity over time. It will be argued that not only experiential continuity but also experiential features of episodic memory characterise the sense of self-identity over time. (shrink)

Discussions of sexual ethics often focus on the wrong of treating another as a mere object instead of as a person worthy of respect. On this view, the task of sexual ethics becomes putting the other’s subjectivity above their status as erotic object so as to avoid the harms of objectification. Ward and Anderson argue that such a view disregards the crucial, moral role that erotic objecthood plays in sexual encounters. Important moral features of intimacy are disclosed through the (...) experience of being an erotic object for another, as well as in perceiving another as an erotic object. Drawing on phenomenology, especially the insights of Simone de Beauvoir, Ward and Anderson argue that erotic encounters are shaped by the human condition of ambiguity, where being an object for others is intertwined with bodily agency. Because sexual agency is complex in this way, theories of sexual ethics and responsibility must widen their focus beyond transparent communication and authoritative expressions of will. (shrink)

Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of goodness—those that take there to be (...) absolute goodness—are comparatively rich: they offer grounds for judging some types of things better than others because they have more absolute goodness. Moorean accounts, for example, can tell us that humans and human experiences are superior to bees and blades of grass. But such theories tend to be descriptively poor: they struggle to tell us in virtue of what this is so. In this essay we motivate and flesh out a view that splits the difference between accounts of goodness as relative and accounts of goodness as absolute. Such a view holds promise only if the mechanics of this kind of metaphysics of goodness can be worked out. Here we present a view on which the paradigm for absolute goodness is God and the paradigm for each kind of relative goodness is a divine idea. (shrink)

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and/or queer (LGBTQ) people experience profound health and social care inequalities. Research suggests that staff with negative attitudes towards LGBTQ people, are more likely to hold strong, traditional, religious beliefs. This article reports on a single case study with a newly qualified UK nurse who has since left the National Health Service. This is based on a single interview taken from a larger dataset derived from a funded scoping research study exploring religious freedoms, sexual orientation and (...) gender identity rights in older age care spaces. The interviewee described a toxic nursing culture on a hospital ward for older people. She recounted various incidents involving homophobic and transphobic practice and LGBTQ microaggressions which reportedly impacted the quality of nursing care. The findings are considered in relation to standards for anti-oppressive practice in nursing care, and how nursing students and staff can be supported in addressing practice relating to equality and diversity issues, specifically LGBTQ issues. They confirm the direct significance of addressing the needs and circumstances of LGBTQ people in nursing curricula and ongoing professional practice, and the need to further research, evaluate and progress translation of learning into improved quality care for diverse populations. (shrink)

Arguing for a new direction in postmodern theological thinking, away from the liberalism and nihilism of those who name themselves postmodern theologians, the ...

A dominant strand of philosophical thought holds that natural kinds are clusters of objects with shared properties. Cluster theories of natural kinds are often taken to be a late twentieth-century development, prompted by dissatisfaction with essentialism in philosophy of biology. I will argue here, however, that a cluster theory of kinds had actually been formulated by William Whewell (1794-1866) more than a century earlier. Cluster theories of kinds can be characterized in terms of three central commitments, all of which are (...) present in Whewell’s work on classification. Like contemporary cluster theorists, Whewell claims that kinds are united by similarity, that many kinds do not have essences, and that there are “gaps” between kinds. Moreover, Whewell advises taxonomists to look for consilience (roughly, convergence) between different classificatory schemes, a recommendation that reinforces the identification of natural classes with property clusters. Thus Whewell was not only an early cluster theorist, but one with important insights into what a cluster theory of kinds means for the practice of classification. (shrink)

An important volume connecting classical studies with feminism, Feminism and Ancient Philosophy provides an even-handed assessment of the ancient philosophers' discussions of women and explains which ancient views can be fruitful for feminist theorizing today. The papers in this anthology range from classical Greek philosophy through the Hellenistic period, with the predominance of essays focusing on topics such as the relation of reason and the emotions, the nature of emotions and desire, and related issues in moral psychology. The volume contains (...) some new, ground-breaking essays on Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, as well as previously published pieces by established scholars like Martha Nussbaum and Julia Annas. It promises to be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience including those working in classics, ancient philosophy, and feminist theory. (shrink)

An argument is presented for a form of democracy in which both identity groups and secondary associations might receive some political recognition. The aim of this approach is to ward against both the atomism of mass democracy and the divisiveness of highly politicized and insular identity groups on the other. This approach relies on achieving social integration, not by increasing unity or homogenization, but by increasing the complexity of group membership. This approach differs from both the “politics (...) of difference” which seeks recognition for identity groups and from “associational democracy” approaches which seeks recognition for the voluntary associations of civil society. (shrink)

Nietzsche and Freud saw Christianity as metaphysical escapism, with Nietzsche calling the religion a "Platonism for the masses" and faulting Paul the apostle for negating more immanent, material modes of thought and political solidarity. Integrating this debate with the philosophies of difference espoused by Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ward Blanton argues that genealogical interventions into the political economies of Western cultural memory do not go far enough in relation to the imagined (...) founder of Christianity. Blanton challenges the idea of Paulinism as a pop Platonic worldview or form of social control. He unearths in Pauline legacies otherwise repressed resources for new materialist spiritualities and new forms of radical political solidarity, liberating "religion" from inherited interpretive assumptions so philosophical thought can manifest in risky, radical freedom. (shrink)

A short definitive account of Keith Ward's theology, based on the philosophy of Personal Idealism. It records Ward's views about God, revelation, the kingdom of God, life after death, the incarnation, atonement, and Trinity. In summary, it is a concise and clear account of most central Christian doctrines, formed in the light of modern science and Idealist philosophy.

Global Media Ethics is the first comprehensive cross-cultural exploration of the conceptual and practical issues facing media ethics in a global world. A team of leading journalism experts investigate the impact of major global trends on responsible journalism. The first full-length, truly global textbook on media ethics; Explores how current global changes in media promote and inhibit responsible journalism; Includes relevant and timely ethical discussions based on major trends in journalism and global media; Questions existing frameworks in media ethics in (...) light of the impact of global media; Contributors are leading experts in global journalism and communication. (shrink)