_"One of the most important political books of 2018."—Rod Dreher, ___American Conservative__ Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it _is _an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; (...) its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Social‐scientific data, such as those found in Philip E. Converse's 1964 essay, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” have led some to question whether basic assumptions about democratic legitimacy are unfounded. However, by another set of criteria, we have the “democracy” that was intended by the Framers—namely, a liberal representative system that avoids strong civic engagement by the citizenry. At its deepest level, the American system has been designed to ensure elite influence over the main ambitions of (...) American policy: the expansion of public and private power. When social scientists accumulate findings of civic disengagement and ignorance, it is wrongly supposed to be an indictment of the citizenry; rather, those findings should be understood as the expected result of a certain set of commitments throughout American political history, of which civic apathy and ignorance are the desired outcomes. (shrink)

Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed offers a compelling critique of liberalism that casts considerable light on many of our current discontents. Nevertheless, its argument is vitiated by certain shortcomings, namely, a failure to recognize the role of other traditions in inspiring and shaping liberal democracy, and to do justice to the achievements, history, and complexities of the liberal intellectual tradition. Likewise, its account of liberalism fails to address that tradition’s defining philosophical commitments, commitments that determine the limits and (...) possibilities of its political theorizing and explain its historical trajectory toward an ever-deeper individualism. It will not be possible to escape the intellectual prison of Enlightenment Liberalism’s moral emotivism and hyper-individualism until we have transcended the impoverished metaphysics from which they issue. (shrink)

El individualismo imperante en las sociedades liberales contemporáneas se ha vuelto tan evidente, que parece imposible no cuestionarse acerca de sus causas. Lo que en un principio ofrecía el proyecto liberal, ahora demuestra serias consecuencias. En ese sentido, el diagnóstico realizado por el estadounidense, Patrick Deneen y por el actual epígono de la Escuela de Frankfurt, Axel Honneth, converge en un punto: ambos señalan que, desde su origen, el liberalismo presenta contradicciones internas. Si bien pertenecen a una tradición (...) política muy distinta, ambos logran aportar una lectura del individualismo que ayuda a comprender a fondo los fenómenos sociales actuales. Al mismo tiempo, estos autores proponen una reconsideración integral de las democracias liberales en el contexto global poniendo énfasis en lo que observan en la cotidianeidad: el quiebre de los vínculos humanos, la falta del reconocimiento de la dignidad humana y la pérdida de las comunidades. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 6, September 2019, Page 679-680.

Why Liberalism Failed é uma obra publicada em 2018 nos Estados Unidos da América pelo professor de ciência política da Universidade de Notre Dame, Patrick J. Deneen. O autor articula uma ampla crítica à ideologia liberal abrangendo tanto o liberalismo clássico, identificado à direita republicana no cenário americano, quanto ao liberalismo progressista, identificado à esquerda democrata americana. A tradução da obra foi publicada no Brasil pela Editora Âyiné, em março de 2020, sob o título Por que o liberalismo (...) Fracassou?. A presente resenha da referida obra visa a apresentar os argumentos sustentados pelo autor. O texto de Deneen adota uma metodologia exploratória por meio de revisão bibliográfica de obras do pensamento liberal. Apesar de pouco conhecido no Brasil, o livro apresenta importantes críticas teórico-práticas ao pensamento liberal [...]. (shrink)

Gillian Rose was a philosopher, social theorist, memoirist, and Jewish convert to Christianity who died an untimely death in 1995. She offers a novel account of faith, which grows out of her Hegelian philosophical background inflected by her reading of Kierkegaard and her rediscovered Jewish heritage. For Rose, faith is a mode of social practice. Rose's conception of faith is here reconstructed by translating her obscure jurisprudential idiom into the language of social practices and norms. The conception of secular faith (...) developed by Rose is shown to have implications for contemporary discussions of ethics and politics. The contemporary relevance of Rose's work is made clear through comparison with recent work by Robert Brandom, Robert Adams, and Patrick Deneen. (shrink)

In Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen contends that the American founding is fundamentally Hobbesian and that the Constitution is the application of the Hobbesian revolution concerning liberty and anthropology. I contend that Deneen fundamentally mischaracterizes the American founding. The founders and framers affirmed the necessity of consent for political authority and obligation. But they also situated the necessity of consent in the context of a morally and metaphysically realist natural law, maintained that an objective good of the (...) whole constitutes the final end of political association, and described liberty as subjection to the law of nature and the government of God. To be determined by one’s base passions was to be a slave. Moreover, their constitutional thought and the institutional design of the constitutions they built rejected Hobbes’s theory of sovereign power and the metaphysical ground on which it rests. (shrink)

McManus presents an intellectual history of the conservative and reactionary tradition, stretching from Aristotle and Confucius to Ayn Rand and Patrick Deneen. Providing a comprehensive critical genealogy of the intellectual political right, McManus traces its core to a nostalgia for the hierarchical cosmos of antiquarian and scholastic thinking. The yearning for a shared vision of the universe where each part of reality has its place maps onto the conservative admiration for orderly political and social stratification. It stamps even (...) the more moderate forms of liberal conservatism which emerged in the aftermath of the revolutionary 18th century, as the political right struggled to accept and later master first the politics of liberal capitalism and later universal suffrage. In its most radical forms this nostalgia for an orderly and hierarchical existence can harden into a resentment at the perceived shallowness of liberal modernity. McManus argues for those who support the project of modernity to commit themselves to better understanding the depth of the political right's critiques, many of which expose uncomfortable but solvable problems with the quest for equality and freedom. A critical guide to the history of conservative and reactionary thought for students and scholars of political science and political history. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas has argued that the passion of hope is the movement of the sensitive appetite and the first of the irascible passion. The first part of the article aims to explore the cause and the mechanism of the passion of hope, and tries to clarify the relationship between the passion of hope and the perception. In human beings, it is possible that the passion of hope is caused by false judgement of the perception, which will lead to the result (...) of false hope. In Aquinas’s argument, the problem of false hope could be solved through the moral virtue and the prudence. In the second part of this article, the aim is to analyse how the virtue of magnanimity, humility and the prudence work impact on the passion of hope and perfect it.Contribution: This research concentrates on the topic of the passion of hope of Thomas Aquinas, and provides a new perspective on the understanding of the relationship between the passion and the virtue. (shrink)

Although wonder is a response to what is extraordinary or regarded as such, this covers a variety of things. Hence, wonder covers a spectrum from mere surprise or puzzlement to stronger responses like dread or amazement; moreover, it is often linked to other powerful responses like fear or admiration, and it can lead people into many pursuits and areas of reflection. I look at the variety of the objects of wonder, and of the neighbouring responses and conceptual connections found here, (...) then I discuss the response of wonder itself, and its causes and effects. Finally, I ask why the sense of wonder can atrophy, and whether it can be suppressed deliberately. (shrink)

Agroecological farming is widely considered to reconcile improved working and living conditions of farmers while promoting social, economic, and ecological sustainability. However, most existing research primarily focuses on relatively narrow trade-offs between workload, economic and ecological outcomes at farm level and overlooks the critical role of contextual factors. This article conducts a critical literature review on the complex nature of agroecological farm work and proposes the holistic concept of sustainable farm work (SFW) in agroecology together with a heuristic evaluation framework. (...) The latter was applied to ten case studies to test its relevance, affirming positive outcomes of agroecology on SFW, such as improved food sovereignty, biodiversity conservation, and social inclusiveness, but also showing trade-offs, including increased workload and potential yield reductions. Further, results show that contextual factors, such as policy support, market regulation, and access to resources, heavily influence the impact of agroecological practices on SFW. This article strongly argues for the importance of a holistic understanding of SFW and its contextualization within multiple socio-ecological system levels. The proposed framework establishes clear relationships between agroecology and SFW. An explicit recognition of these multidimensional relationships is essential for maximizing positive outcomes of agroecology in different contexts and fostering SFW. On a theoretical level, this research concludes that, from a holistic perspective, work is an entry point to studying the potential of agroecology to drive a sustainable agroecological transition in economic, social, and ecological terms. (shrink)

Throughout the history of Western political philosophy, the idea of friendship has occupied a central place in the conversation. It is only in the context of the modern era that friendship has lost its prominence. By retrieving the concept of friendship for philosophical investigation, these essays invite readers to consider how our political principles become manifest in our private lives. They provide a timely corrective to contemporary confusion plaguing this central experience of our public and our private life. This volume (...) assembles essays by well-known scholars who address contemporary concerns about community in the context of philosophical ideas about friendship. Part One includes essays on ancient philosophers including Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. Part Two considers treatments of friendship by Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, and Part Three continues with Thomas Hobbes, Montaigne, the American founders, and de Tocqueville. The volume concludes with two essays that address the postmodern emphasis on fragmentation and the dynamics of power within the modern state. “This is an outstanding anthology in every respect. _Friendship and Politics_ brings into focus a topic that lies at the heart of the political, even while it has not always garnered the attention it deserves. Friendship, the contributors demonstrate, is an indispensable concept for the analysis of the bonds of political association. The case is most convincingly made by drawing upon the analyses of the greatest thinkers within the history of political thought.” —_David Walsh, Catholic University of America _ “Contemporary political theory assumes that friendship is a private affair, a human relationship that should be quarantined from explorations of politics. The essays in this volume—uniformly excellent, by our best political thinkers—put those assumptions to the test. Together, the essays point to a conception of politics that necessarily includes the highest and best form of human companionship as a necessary means, and even worthwhile end, of the good life. They consider friendship to be a good and at times a challenge that should properly be the concern of political thought and political action. This is an indispensable volume on the inescapable relationship between friendship and politics.” —_Patrick J. Deneen, Georgetown University_. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Nietzsche's investigation into the origins of morality bears some striking similarities to contemporary investigations into human evolution. Here I investigate these similarities, using a comparison between Nietzsche's GM and Gould and Lewontin's influential “Spandrels” essay as a departure point. I argue that Nietzsche defends a proto-evolutionary psychology about morality, where the inheritance of enduring biological drives conflicts with our culturally evolved moral system. While Nietzsche's claims about the evolution of morality fit well within a Darwinian framework of natural selection, (...) his claims about our underlying biology do not. Those claims cohere better with the non-Darwinian views found in nineteenth-century German biology and embryology. (shrink)

Relativism is the view that the truth of a sentence is relative both to a context of utterance and to a context of assessment. That the truth of a sentence is relative to a context of utterance is uncontroversial in contemporary semantics. This chapter focuses on three points: whether the version of contextualism is vulnerable to the disagreement and retraction arguments, and if so, whether these problems can be avoided by a more sophisticated contextualist theory. The points include: whether relativism (...) really does avoid the four problems posed for the other theories; and whether there are other theories that also avoid the problems, without running into the problems facing relativism or problems of their own. The chapter concentrates on two families of views that have been called relativist: Relativism about propositional truth; and Relativism about utterance truth. (shrink)

Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archeology, anthropology, (...) biology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience into a unified framework that accounts for the biological and cultural evolution of music. We argue that the evolution of musicality involves gene–culture coevolution, through which proto-musical behaviors that initially arose and spread as cultural inventions had feedback effects on biological evolution because of their impact on social bonding. We emphasize the deep links between production, perception, prediction, and social reward arising from repetition, synchronization, and harmonization of rhythms and pitches, and summarize empirical evidence for these links at the levels of brain networks, physiological mechanisms, and behaviors across cultures and across species. Finally, we address potential criticisms and make testable predictions for future research, including neurobiological bases of musicality and relationships between human music, language, animal song, and other domains. The music and social bonding hypothesis provides the most comprehensive theory to date of the biological and cultural evolution of music. (shrink)

This article outlines an approach for implementing business ethics. A company should both organize for ethical business policies and execute them. The organizational dimension refers to structural components including codes of ethics, conferences and training programs and an ethical audit. The corporate culture must support these structural elements with top management playing a central role in implementing ethics. The execution of ethical business policies includes implementation responsibilities and tasks. These responsibilities are leadership in ethics, delegation, communication and motivation of the (...) company's ethical position to employees. Execution tasks are delineated for the marketing function. Although many company examples are provided, a program in place at McDonnell Douglas is highlighted as a model of ethics implementation. (shrink)

Intentional action involves both a series of neural events in the motor areas of the brain, and also a distinctive conscious experience that ''I'' am the author of the action. This paper investigates some possible ways in which these neural and phenomenal events may be related. Recent models of motor prediction are relevant to the conscious experience of action as well as to its neural control. Such models depend critically on matching the actual consequences of a movement against its internally (...) predicted effects. However, it remains unclear whether our conscious experience of action depends on a precise matching process, or a retrospective inference that ''I'' must have been responsible for a particular event. We report an experiment in which normal subjects judged the perceived time of either intentional actions, involuntary movements, or subsequent effects (auditory tones) of these. We found that the subject's intention to produce the auditory tone produced an intentional binding between the perceived times of the subject's action and the tone. However, if the intention was interrupted by an imposed involuntary movement, followed by the identical tone, no such binding occurred. The phenomenology of intentional action requires an appropriate predictive link between intentions and effects, rather than a retrospective inference that ''I'' caused the effect. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to elucidate Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy in terms of an ethics of virtue. This paper consists of four sections. In the first section I outline three major objections Schopenhauer raises for Kant’s moral philosophy. In section two I extract from these criticisms a framework for Schopenhauer’s own position, identifying how his moral psychology underpins a unified and hierarchical conception of virtue and vice. I then ascertain some strengths of this view. In section three I (...) focus in upon the issue of fixed character and moral education as at least one major point of divergence between Schopenhauer’s virtue ethics and typical trends within the tradition. In the fourth and final section, I consider and respond to this ethical framework’s possible susceptibility to the charge of egoism, and adjudicate among competing solutions in the secondary literature. I conclude that refined forms of Schopenhauer’s ethical views offer rich and plausible insights into both virtue and vice which have received less attention than they deserve. Hence, Schopenhauer warrants more serious concern in contemporary discussions of virtue ethics alongside the likes of Aristotle, Hume and Nietzsche. (shrink)

Patrick Aidan Heelan’s The Observable offers the reader a completely articulated development of his 1965 philosophy of quantum physics, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity. In this previously unpublished study dating back more than a half a century, Heelan brings his background as both a physicist and a philosopher to his reflections on Werner Heisenberg’s physical philosophy. Including considerably broader connections to the contributions of Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Albert Einstein, this study also reflects Heelan’s experience in Eugene Wigner’s laboratory (...) at Princeton along with his reflections on working with Erwin Schrödinger dating from Heelan’s years at the Institute for Advanced Cosmology in Dublin. A contribution to continental philosophy of science, the phenomenological and hermeneutic resources applied in this book to the physical and ontological paradoxes of quantum physics, especially in connection with laboratory science and measurement, theory and model making, will enrich students of the history of science as well as those interested in different approaches to the historiography of science. University courses in the philosophy of physics will find this book indispensable as a resource and invaluable for courses in the history of science. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Nietzsche’s claim that suffering is closely related to the realization of certain perfectionist values, such as artistic excellence. According to Bernard Reginster, creative achievement consists in overcoming suffering, and therefore, suffering is an essential ingredient of creative achievement. Because suffering forms an essential part of a valuable whole in this way, Reginster argues that we must in turn value suffering ‘for its own sake’. This paper argues that Reginster’s position is open to the following objection: from (...) the fact that suffering is an essential part of a valuable whole, it does not follow that suffering is itself valuable. Rather, by taking advantage of the principle of organic unities, it would have to form an essential part of a valuable whole in a particular way. The author considers two ways the principle might be attributed to Nietzsche’s views on suffering: first, as an ‘enabling condition’, in which suffering allows for a whole that outweighs its disvalue; and second, as ‘a contributor’, in which suffering positively contributes value to the whole. The paper explores how Nietzsche’s ethics turns out to be crucially informed by this conceptual distinction. (shrink)

Why a hermeneutical philosophy of the natural sciences? It is necessary to address the philosophic crisis of realism vs relativism in the natural sciences. This crisis is seen as a part of the cultural crisis that Husserl and Heidegger identified and attributed to the hegemonic role of theoretical and calculative thought in Western societies. The role of theory is addressed using the hermeneutical circle to probe the origin of theoretic meaning in scientific cultural praxes. This is studied in Galileo's discovery (...) of the phases of Venus; the practice of measurement; the different theories and practices of space perception; the historicality and temporality of scientific research communities which ground paradigm change; and the process of discovery. The paper draws particularly from the work of Heidegger. Though envisaging all science and scholarship, the highlighted theme is research in the natural sciences. (shrink)

It is well-known that the global structure of every space-time model for relativistic cosmology is observationally underdetermined. In order to alleviate the severity of this underdetermination, it has been proposed that we adopt the Cosmological Principle because the Principle restricts our attention to a distinguished class of space-time models (spatially homogeneous and isotropic models). I argue that, even assuming the Cosmological Principle, the topology of space remains observationally underdetermined. Nonetheless, I argue that we can muster reasons to prefer various topological (...) properties over others. In particular, I favor the adoption of multiply connected universe models on grounds of (i) simplicity, (ii) Machian considerations, and (iii) explanatory power. We are able to appeal to such grounds because multiply connected topologies open up the possibility of finite universe models (consistent with our best data), which in turn avoid thorny issues concerning the postulation of an actually infinite universe. (shrink)

The problem of free will lies at the heart of modern scientific studies of consciousness. An influential series of experiments by Libet has suggested that conscious intentions arise as a result of brain activity. This contrasts with traditional concepts of free will, in which the mind controls the body. A more recent study by Haggard and Eimer has further examined the relation between intention and brain processes, concluding that conscious awareness of intention is linked to the choice or selection of (...) a specific action, and not to the earliest initiation of action processes. The exchange of views in this paper further explores the relation between conscious intention and brain activity. (shrink)

The best arguments for the 1/3 answer to the Sleeping Beauty problem all require that when Beauty awakes on Monday she should be uncertain what day it is. I argue that this claim should be rejected, thereby clearing the way to accept the 1/2 solution.

In a sample of 615 Belgians a model for fair trade buying behaviour was developed. The impact of fair trade knowledge, general attitudes towards fair trade, attitudes towards fair trade products, and the perception of the quality and quantity of fair trade information on the reported amount of money spent on fair trade products were assessed. Fair trade knowledge, overall concern and scepticism towards fair trade, and the perception of the perceived quantity and quality of fair trade information, influence buying (...) behaviour directly and indirectly through product attitudes. Interest in fair trade products, price acceptability and product liking have a significant impact on fair trade buying behaviour. Product interest is the most important variable influencing buying behaviour. Implications for the campaigns of governments and for the marketing strategy of fair trade organisations are offered. (shrink)