By considering another version of the Inverted Earth thought experiment in which the protagonist is informed that she is implanted with inverting lenses behind her eyes, I argue that the thought experiment doesn’t successfully pose a challenge to representationalism because after many years, the protagonist’s visual experience of the sky of Inverted Earth would simply represent it as blue.

In the ethical texts, Aristotle claims that all instances of choice (prohairesis) must be preceded by deliberation, but it is not clear why he believes this. This paper offers an explanation of that commitment, drawing heavily from the De Anima and showing that the account emerging from there complements that of the ethical texts. The view is that the deliberative faculty has the capacity to manipulate reasons combinatorially, while the perceptual/desiderative faculty does not, and choice requires the combinatorial manipulation of (...) reasons. (shrink)

Ball (2009) claims that without phenomenal concepts, the knowledge argument fails. In this article, I argue that Ball doesn’t succeed in proving his claim. The reason is that the Marianna case is not a case where the acquisition of the concept required for entertaining a phenomenal belief content Q alone is sufficient for Marianna, given enough physical information about her environment, to infer Q.

本书介绍了资政百代,垂范万里的管理智慧;儒家文化视野下的中国当代管理等两个部分组成。.

Duane Cady views warism and pacifism as polar extremes on a continuum that embraces a full spectrum of ethical positions on the morality of war and peace. Realizing that he could not intellectually defend the notions of just-war theory, he found that he was a reluctant pacifist. In this new edition of From Warism to Pacifism, Cady continues to expose the pervasive, subconscious warism that is the dominant ideology in modern Western culture. He explores the changes over the last twenty (...) years—from the end of the Cold War to the ongoing “war on terror,” as well as Barack Obama winning the Nobel Prize for Peace. Like racism and sexism, the uncritical presumption that war is morally justifiable, even morally required, misguides our attitudes and institutions. In its place, Cady proposes the development of a positive concept of peace. Citing common objections to pacifist values, he describes peace as something more than the mere absence of war and demonstrates that pacifism is a defensible position. (shrink)

Hamacher, Duane Indigenous Australian practices, developed and honed over thousands of years, weave science with storytelling. In this Indigenous science series, we'll look at different aspects of First Australians' traditional life and uncover the knowledge behind them - starting today with astronomy.

Currently, there are two bottleneck problems in the research of college students’ entrepreneurial intention and entrepreneurial behavior: lack of comprehensive and systematic theoretical framework and empirical analysis to reveal the role path that affects entrepreneurial intention, and most studies ignore the gap between entrepreneurial intention and behavior. Based on the literature review, this study adopted the Theory of Planned Behavior as the theoretical framework introduced entrepreneurial situational factors and entrepreneurial implementation intention, and constructed a two-step extended entrepreneurial intention–behavior model. The (...) structural equation was constructed using AMOS24.0 to empirically analyze the antecedent variables of college students’ entrepreneurial intention and the factors influencing entrepreneurial behavior. The empirical results showed that expected material possessions, expected social reputation, expected self-evaluation, mission and responsibility, and career development are the antecedent variables of entrepreneurial attitude. Support from families and friends, college teachers’ views, and the role models are antecedent variables of entrepreneurial subjective norms. Professional ability, entrepreneurial ability, entrepreneurial experiences, and personality traits are the antecedent variables of entrepreneurial perceived behavior control. In the formation stage of college students’ entrepreneurial intention, attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavior control, and entrepreneurial situational factors have significant impacts on the formation of college students’ entrepreneurial intention, while entrepreneurial intention, perceived behavior control, and entrepreneurial situational factors have significant impacts on the transformation phase of entrepreneurial behavior. Entrepreneurial implementation intention plays an intervening role between entrepreneurial intention and behavior of college students. (shrink)

Three times in Book 1 chapter 13 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says desire partakes of reason in a way. There is a consensus view in the literature about what that claim means: desire has no intrinsic rationality, but can partake of reason by being blindly obedient to the commands of reason. I argue this consensus view is mistaken: for Aristotle, adult human desire has its own intrinsic rationality, and while it is to be obedient to reason, it is not (...) blind obedience, for when reason tells desire to obey, it includes an explanation supporting its order which desire can at least potentially understand. Thus, the nature of human desire, and also of the characteristic interaction of desire and reason, is much different than it is standardly taken to be. (shrink)

Abstract:International business norms do not exist. Content and development of such norms is a significant research question for business ethics scholarship. Any norms must address difficult practical and moral problems facing multinational enterprises. The author’s thesis is as follows. A key circumstance is that international relations remain a Hobbesian state of nature. The theoretical solution of a global sovereignty for norm formulation and enforcement is unlikely. The business ethics literature proposes other insightful but theoretical and conflicting solutions to abstract wealth-responsibility (...) and universalism-relativism controversies. Theoretical convergence seems unlikely. Evolution of multiple international policy regimes fragmented by policy arena is more probable. Regimes will typically be neither morals by agreement nor a morality of the marketplace. Regime development can occur in various other ways. Moral leadership, by firms, stakeholders, nongovernmental organizations or governments, can be a vital force. Formal ethical theories can inform and guide such leadership initiatives. This process perspective is applied to several recent case examples cited here as supporting evidence: anti-corruption, labor, environmental, human rights, and fiduciary responsibility initiatives. (shrink)

I first argue why Stanley and Williamson fail to eliminate the distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-how. Then I argue that knowledge-how consists in a special kind of ways of thinking of ways of engaging in actions. So the distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-how is twofold: the objects of knowledge-that and knowledge-how are different; the ways in which we entertain the object of knowledge are also distinct when we have knowledge-that and knowledge-how. At the end, I consider two recent intellectualist efforts (...) on knowledge-how and show why they fail. (shrink)

:International business norms do not exist. Content and development of such norms is a significant research question for business ethics scholarship. Any norms must address difficult practical and moral problems facing multinational enterprises. The author’s thesis is as follows. A key circumstance is that international relations remain a Hobbesian state of nature. The theoretical solution of a global sovereignty for norm formulation and enforcement is unlikely. The business ethics literature proposes other insightful but theoretical and conflicting solutions to abstract wealth-responsibility (...) and universalism-relativism controversies. Theoretical convergence seems unlikely. Evolution of multiple international policy regimes fragmented by policy arena is more probable. Regimes will typically be neither morals by agreement nor a morality of the marketplace. Regime development can occur in various other ways. Moral leadership, by firms, stakeholders, nongovernmental organizations or governments, can be a vital force. Formal ethical theories can inform and guide such leadership initiatives. This process perspective is applied to several recent case examples cited here as supporting evidence: anti-corruption, labor, environmental, human rights, and fiduciary responsibility initiatives. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: I argue that the Ability Hypothesis cannot really accommodate the knowledge intuition that drives the knowledge argument and therefore fails to defend physicalism. When the thought experiment is run with, instead of Mary, an advanced robot Rosemary, for whom there presumably is no distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that, proponents of the Ability Hypothesis would have to give a far-fetched and counterintuitive explanation of why Rosemary wouldn’t learn anything new upon release. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article (...) to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.The Knowledge Intuition and the Ability HypothesisVolume 51, Issue 2Huiming Ren DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000467Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. The Knowledge Intuition and the Ability HypothesisVolume 51, Issue 2Huiming Ren DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000467Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. The Knowledge Intuition and the Ability HypothesisVolume 51, Issue 2Huiming Ren DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000467Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

I argue that Diaz-Leon fails to defend the phenomenal concept strategy against Stoljar's criticism because she fails to give us any general reasons for thinking that conditionals that involve psychologically distinct concepts could be a priori.

This paper compares three recent prescriptive proposals for practicing capitalism: Accountable Capitalism (Senator Elizabeth Warren), Responsible Capitalism (Professor R. Edward Freeman), and Political Corporate Social Responsibility (Professors Andreas Scherer and Guido Palazzo and colleagues). Warren’s Accountable Capitalism is a corporate governance reform proposal. Freeman’s Responsible Capitalism prescribes effective stakeholder management through entrepreneurial value creation. Political CSR (expanded here to Political Capitalism) is a prescription for democratization inside and outside of businesses and provision of public goods in instances of governmental incompetence. (...) The rationale for this examination is the possibility of political crisis in the relationship between democracy and capitalism. (shrink)

This book presents a reading of Martin Heidegger's philosophy as an effort to strike a middle position between the philosophies of Plato and Friedrich Nietzsche. Duane Armitage interprets the history of Western philosophy as comprising a struggle over the meaning of "being," and argues that this struggle is ultimately between materialism and idealism, and, in the end, between atheism and theism. This work therefore concerns the question of the meaning of the so called "death of God" in the context of (...) contemporary Continental Philosophy.. (shrink)

Many authors have argued that Aristotle does not stay true to his official account on which every instance of choice must be preceded by deliberation, and it is a good thing that he does so because his official account has catastrophically bad theoretical implications. I argue that Aristotle does not deviate from his official account, and that the official account does not have the decisively bad implications others have claimed it to have. These objectionable entailments only obtain on a certain (...) conception of what deliberation is like, and I argue that this conception is not Aristotle’s. Once Aristotle’s own conception of deliberation is understood, the terrible putative entailments clearly do not follow from the official account, and so textually Aristotle remains consistent while conceptually he remains plausible. (shrink)

Duane Cady views warism and pacifism as polar extremes on a continuum that embraces a full spectrum of ethical positions on the morality of war and peace. Realizing that he could not intellectually defend the notions of just-war theory, he found that he was a reluctant pacifist. In this new edition of From Warism to Pacifism, Cady continues to expose the pervasive, subconscious warism that is the dominant ideology in modern Western culture. He explores the changes over the last twenty (...) years—from the end of the Cold War to the ongoing “war on terror,” as well as Barack Obama winning the Nobel Prize for Peace. Like racism and sexism, the uncritical presumption that war is morally justifiable, even morally required, misguides our attitudes and institutions. In its place, Cady proposes the development of a positive concept of peace. Citing common objections to pacifist values, he describes peace as something more than the mere absence of war and demonstrates that pacifism is a defensible position. (shrink)

Three times in Book 1 chapter 13 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says desire partakes of reason in a way. There is a consensus view in the literature about what that claim means: desire has no intrinsic rationality, but can partake of reason by being blindly obedient to the commands of reason. I argue this consensus view is mistaken: for Aristotle, adult human desire has its own intrinsic rationality, and while it is to be obedient to reason, it is not (...) blind obedience, for when reason tells desire to obey, it includes an explanation supporting its order which desire can at least potentially understand. Thus, the nature of human desire, and also of the characteristic interaction of desire and reason, is much different than it is standardly taken to be. (shrink)

I offer a novel analysis of the relations between Aristotle’s three species of desire - appetite, temper, and wish - and the three things he says in EN 2.3 lead to pursuit - the pleasant, the beneficial, and the noble. It has long been tempting to think that these trios line up with one another in some way, ideally relating their members in one-to-one fashion. One account, by John Cooper, has gathered prominent adherents, but other authors, notably Giles Pearson, have (...) argued we should give up on even trying to correlate the two trios. I attempt to show that the two trios do relate in interesting ways, but not in a way that correlates their members in a one-to-one fashion. Instead, I argue that both appetite and temper are ultimately for the pleasant, while all things that an agent takes as objects of wish are conceived of as either pleasant, beneficial, or noble. This account conflicts with a dominant understanding of the species of desire as differentiated by their objects. I reply defend the view by showing that there is a second criterion for differentiating the species of desire. (shrink)

Outlines four emerging "opportunity trends," including voluntary simplicity, that readers can utilize to surmount social, economic, and environmental challenges ...

I discuss Burge's argument that our entitlement to self-knowledge consists in the constitutive relation between the second-order review of thoughts and the thoughts reviewed, and defend it against Peacocke's criticism. I then argue that though our entitlement to self-knowledge is neutral to different environments, as Burge claims, the consideration of Burge's own notion of brute error shows that Burge's effort to reconcile externalism and self-knowledge is not successful.

I argue that our physical and social environments play a role in determining the content of most of our thoughts only indirectly—by playing a role in causing, and therefore, determining the content of, our reference-securing beliefs concerning general terms, beliefs that, when true, dictate what a general term will pick out. I also show that the problem of empty natural kind terms can be solved.

continent. 2.2 (2012): 152–154 Levi R. Bryant. The Democracy of Objects . Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. 2011. 316 pp. | ISBN 9781607852049. | $23.99 For two decades post-anarchism has adopted an epistemological point of departure for its critique of the representative ontologies of classical anarchism. This critique focused on the classical anarchist conceptualization of power as a unitary phenomenon that operated unidirectionally to repress an otherwise creative and benign human essence. Andrew Koch may have inaugurated this trend in (...) 1993 when he wrote his influential paper entitled “Post-structuralism and the Epistemological Basis of Anarchism.” Koch’s paper certainly laid some of the important groundwork for post-anarchism’s continual subsumption of ontology beneath the a priori of an epistemological orientation, and his work continues to be cited as an early and important venture into post-anarchist philosophy. The problem is that Koch could not conceive of an anti-essentialist and autonomous ontological system, one not subject to regulation or representation by the human mind. Consequently, he was forced to assert a subjectivist claims-making ego as the foundation of a post-structuralist anarchist politics. Saul Newman was indebted to this heritage insofar as he also posited the ego (extrapolated from the writings of Max Stirner) and the subject (extrapolated from Jacques Lacan’s oeuvre ) as the paradoxical ‘outside’ to power and representation. Todd May fell into a similar trap in his book The Political Philosophy of Post-structuralist Anarchism when he wrote that “[m]etaphysics [...] partakes of the normativity inhabiting the epistemology that provides its foundations.” 1 Whereas Newman’s approach did not necessarily foreclose the possibility of metaphysics—at least to the extent that he began with the subject of the Lacanian tradition (wherein the subject is believed to be radically split between thinking and being)—May completely foreclosed the possibility of any escape from the reign of the epistemological. There laid the impasse of yesterday’s post-anarchism. This impasse at the heart of the project of post-anarchism has forced Koch, Newman, May, and many others, to come to similar conclusions about the place of ontology in post-anarchist scholarship. The post-anarchists have all formulated a response strikingly similar to Koch’s argument that any representative ontology ought to be dismantled and dethroned in favour of “a conceptualization of knowledge that is contingent on a plurality of internally consistent episteme .” 2 By dismissing all ontologies as suspiciously representative and as incessantly harbouring a dangerous form of essentialism, post-anarchists have overlooked the privilege that they have placed on the human subject, language, and discourse, at the expense of the democracy that the human subject shares with other animals, objects, and beings in the world. This epistemological characterization of post-anarchism has held sway for far too long. It is not by chance that post-anarchism, as a concept, was first formulated by Hakim Bey as an “ontological anarchism,” 3 and subsequently repressed by the canon of post-anarchist authors. Perhaps Bey’s ontological anarchism also lacked the ‘rigour’ required of today’s scholarly audience and for these two reasons (at least) he has received very little credit for his inaugurating efforts into post-anarchism. In any case, I want to challenge this reluctance and revive the roots of post-anarchism. Levi Bryant gives us a reason to believe that we can achieve the promise of Bey’s ontological anarchism without sacrificing the scholarly standard of rigour. Levi Bryant’s newest open-access book, The Democracy of Objects , is a tour de force . His book challenges post-anarchists to take their radical critique of representation a step further by questioning the “hegemony that epistemology currently enjoys in philosophy.” Bryant maintains that post-structuralism, and radical anti-humanisms, only appear to reject the subject as the locus of political agency. Their rejection is actually more of a disavowal, a replacement of the human subject with the equally human order of language or discourse. What post-structuralism attempts to elucidate is the manner in which the subject is colonized by the Other of language, discourse and social relations. What here appears as a movement away from the determining subject of humanism and existentialism is only replaced with the determining apparatuses of structures as they are conceived by astute analysts of political culture. Post-structuralism thus re-enters the anthropocentric discourse to the extent that the cultural analyst believes himself capable of conceiving the determinative structures of society. In contradistinction to the claims of post-structuralism and post-anarchism, the role of the ontologist is not to suture the gap between epistemology and the real but to de-suture it, as Bryant puts it: “[o]ntology does not tell us what objects exist, but that objects exist, that they are generative mechanisms.” Above all else, the role of ontology, for post-anarchists, ought to be a real de-centering of the subject in relation to other objects in the non-human world such that the subject becomes conceived as one object among others within a living democracy of equality. This inevitably leads to the conclusion that objects exist whether or not the subject or analyst is there to represent them: they represent themselves and are autonomous from our dictation, just as each object finds its autonomy in relation to other objects. Ontology must now be distinguished from representation. We must shift the terms of the debate and interrogate the hegemony that epistemology has been afforded within post-anarchist philosophy. At least two possibilities are now permitted. On the one hand, one could intervene into the reigning mode of philosophy, namely epistemology, by latching onto concepts from meta-ethical philosophy. Meta-ethics allows one to easily separate the ontological from the epistemological and to answer very particular questions about each in order to formulate an overarching meta-ethical position. 4 Post-anarchism is particularly adept at this task because of its resounding ability to frame itself as an ethical political philosophy in relation to the strategic political philosophy of classical Marxism. On the other hand, Bryant argues that “[p]erhaps the best way to defeat [the privilege currently held by epistemology] is to shift the terms of debate.” Shifting the terms of debate is also something that post-anarchists have been very good at doing. Thus, instead of asking the question ‘how do representative ontological systems harbour concealed epistemological orientations toward the political?’ one might ask ‘ do epistemological orientations toward the political always harbour representative and subject-centred ontological systems?” The genius of Bryant’s book rests in its ability to convincingly argue for the radical autonomy of being and of objects. This claim speaks to some of the most compelling theories of the political in anarchist and marxist political philosophy (for instance, hegemony, representation, democracy, and so on) and it re-stages the political drama of our times across a much wider terrain. The fallacy of strategic political philosophy in the Marxist tradition, as Todd May quite correctly points out, is that it remains committed to a concept of power that is unitary in its analysis, unidirectional in its influence, and utterly repressive in its effect. Similarly, Bryant’s ontology allows one to argue that there is a fallacy that occurs “whenever one type of entity is treated as the ground or explains all other entities.” Whereas May’s post-structuralist anarchism moved away from the fallacy of the unitary analysis of power, whereby subjects are constituted by the influence of a single site of power, it nonetheless remained committed to a tactical political philosophy which is monarchical in the final analysis . It remains monarchical to the extent that the human world, the world of epistemology, is treated as the yardstick of democracy. Bryant’s argument is quite instructive: “[w]hat we thus get is not a democracy of objects or actants where all objects are on equal ontological footing [...] but instead a monarchy of the human in relation to all other beings.” The real fallacy is thus not against strategic political philosophy but philosophy itself and the way it has played out over so many centuries. “The epistemic fallacy,” writes Bryant, “consists in the thesis that proper ontological questions can be fully transposed into epistemological questions.” The point that Bryant is making relates to the way ontology is today always reduced to an epistemology and thereby loses its significance as a philosophical question. This book should be applauded for its novelty and its thesis ought to be taken seriously by post-anarchists today. Because of this book, and the attendant post-continental movement that is being called ‘speculative realism,’ we can now distinguish three stages in the life of post-anarchism. First, we can deduce what Süreyya Evren has described as its ‘introductory period.’ The introductory period of post-anarchism is defined by its inability to side-step the ontological problem in the literature of classical anarchism. During this period, post-anarchism needed to distinguish itself from classical anarchism while nonetheless remaining committed to its ethical project. The second period overcomes the problem of the separation of post-anarchism from classical anarchism by re-reading the classical tradition as essentially post-anarchistic. Some of the critiques of post-anarchism—especially that from Cohn & Wilbur 5 —are included into this period insofar as post-anarchism, for them, was always already anarchism. Whereas the first and second phases have included only explicitly anarchist literature under their rubric of worthwhile investigation, in the third period this no longer holds true. To be certain, the second period permitted the incorporation of post-structuralist literature into post-anarchist discussions (but always with a certain amount of reservation). This third period, the one that is to come—the one that is already here if only we would heed its call—will not take such care with attempts at identification or canonization. Indeed, post-anarchism is already here, like a seed beneath the snow, waiting to be discovered. Levi Bryant teaches us that the third period is already here: and yet where is it? NOTES 1) Todd May. The Political Philosophy of Post-Structuralist Anarchism . University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1997. 2. 2) Andrew Koch. “Post-structuralism and the Epistemological Basis of Anarchism” [1993] in Post-Anarchism: A Reader . Eds. Duane Rousselle & Sureyyya Evren. London: Pluto Press. 2011. pp. 23-40. 3) Bey, Hakim. “ Post-Anarchism Anarchy .” 1987. 4) I have attempted to do this in my paper on Bataille’s post-anarchism; see Duane Rousselle. “Georges Bataille’s Post-anarchism.” Journal of Political Ideologies . 17(3): in press. 5) Jesse Cohn & Shawn Wilbur. “ What’s Wrong with Post-anarchism? ” 2010. (shrink)

A recent literature applies economic reasoning to restrict corporate social responsibility (CSR) to profitable opportunities. The underlying theory of the firmassumes widespread public company ownership and a net positive contribution to social welfare in relatively unfettered markets. This modern economic approach posits strict fiduciary responsibility of agents. Management, in this fiduciary role, should have no CSR discretion beyond the requirements of minimalist laws and customary ethics. Any profitable CSR option can be undertaken. Any unprofitable CSR action is defined as discretionary (...) altruism prohibited to fiduciary agents and recommended against for shareowners acting through the corporate form. The modern economic position shifts all unprofitable social issues into the sphere of public policy—which is then influenced by business on the basis of economic self-interest. There are two points of relaxation in this position. First, a firm may need to practice prudential altruism to forestall more costly action by governments and stakeholders. Second, management must consider productivity effects of employee sentiments about social issues and stakeholders. (shrink)

What makes a word easy to learn? Early‐learned words are frequent and tend to name concrete referents. But words typically do not occur in isolation. Some words are predictable from their contexts; others are less so. Here, we investigate whether predictability relates to when children start producing different words (age of acquisition; AoA). We operationalized predictability in terms of a word's surprisal in child‐directed speech, computed using n‐gram and long‐short‐term‐memory (LSTM) language models. Predictability derived from LSTMs was generally a better (...) predictor than predictability derived from n‐gram models. Across five languages, average surprisal was positively correlated with the AoA of predicates and function words but not nouns. Controlling for concreteness and word frequency, more predictable predicates and function words were learned earlier. Differences in predictability between languages were associated with cross‐linguistic differences in AoA: the same word (when it was a predicate) was produced earlier in languages where the word was more predictable. (shrink)

The theme of this issue of Ethical Perspectives is the French tradition in liberal thought, and the unique contribution that this tradition can make to debates in contemporary liberalism. It is inspired by a colloquium held at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in December of 2008 entitled “In Search of a Lost Liberalism: Constant, Tocqueville, and the singularity of French Liberalism.” This colloquium was held in conjunction with the retirement of Leuven professor and former Dean of the Institute of Philosophy, André (...) Van de Putte, who found much inspiration in this tradition. A revised version of his valedictory lecture from the conference serves as the final contribution to this issue. Much contemporary liberal political philosophy is currently done in conversation with a line of liberal thinkers starting with John Locke, running through Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill, and culminating in the work of John Rawls and his followers. The reasons for the enormous appeal of this philosophical tradition are, among other things, the combination of the central role of the intuitively appealing value of individual liberty with a strong rationalistic, universalistic, and normative character. The thread running through most of these liberal theories is a commitment to what the French liberal Benjamin Constant referred to as “the liberty of the moderns,” that is, liberty in a negative sense, as a lack of interference in one’s activity from others and from government. This focus has expanded over time to include a richer body of civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights, for instance, in the work of liberal thinkers who have tried to integrate the insights of communitarian thought and discourse ethics in their work. However, the emphasis on individual liberty in the negative sense continues to be the normative and theoretical touchstone and default position for many contemporary liberal theories. The limitation of the canon of liberal thought to the aforementioned authors and themes deprives the contemporary debate of a rich source of ideas: the French liberal tradition. Montesquieu, considered to be the father of this tradition, provides a good example of how it can enrich current debates in liberal theory. Montesquieu’s work evinces a keen eye for the dynamics of power relations and the limitations of the power of the better rational argument. His insight that power can sometimes only be checked by an equal and opposing power, so that a system of separation and balance of powers is necessary in order to preserve liberty, is reflected in the foundations of most modern democracies. Montesquieu also argues that contingent environmental, historical, social and economic conditions play a dramatic role in determining what kind of government is appropriate for a particular society. On his view, ignoring these facts when framing a government can inadvertently end in despotism. Montesquieu’s observations challenge us to reexamine some of contemporary liberalism’s universalist and rationalist claims. Benjamin Constant is most famous for his distinction between two kinds of liberty: the liberty of the ancients and the liberty of the moderns. The ancient form of liberty manifested itself in the active political participation of citizens in the ancient republic. While this form of government and decision-making was suitable for small, homogeneous city-states, Constant argues that it is impracticable for large modern nation-states. Hence, the concept of modern liberty shifts to an emphasis on the rule of law and the non-interference of the state in private matters. This form of liberty is familiar to us from contemporary liberalism – and Constant cherishes this form of freedom as much as any liberal does today. However, his position is complex: he also argues that the liberty of the ancients should not be neglected. Active political participation is needed to ensure that the government is executing its duty of preserving the modern form of liberty by publicly pointing out violations. The contemporary relevance of Constant’s work is clear when we consider the alleged “democratic deficit” that plagues the EU and international institutions such as the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank. Not only does this democratic deficit threaten the modern form of liberty by placing decision-making processes out of sight of the people, it also threatens citizens’ sense of self-respect derived from self-governance. Constant’s argument for the necessity of combining the liberty of the ancients with that of the moderns provides a fruitful resource for confronting these contemporary issues. Tocqueville’s work on liberalism benefits from his opportunity to observe a society founded on liberal democratic principles – the United States of America – in action. In his Democracy in America, he examines the social consequences, both intended and unintended, of building a society on ‘the equality of conditions’, as he defines ‘democracy’. Tocqueville sees a tension between the democratic value of equality and the aristocratic value of the rule of the best. He observes that democratic societies do not necessarily choose the best leaders and instead promote mediocrity instead of virtue, talent, and excellence. Democracy also confronts citizens with the threat of ‘soft despotism’, where a government that preserves the outer signs of the liberty of the moderns nevertheless controls the behavior of its citizens in minute detail through a system of detailed rules ostensibly aimed at their welfare. This paternalism is an even more insidious threat to liberal values than the hard variety of despotism, since it is so difficult to detect and done in the name of liberal values themselves. Taking Tocqueville’s observations seriously would add complexity to attempts to theorize about the modern social-democratic welfare state. The contributions to this issue supplement and critique mainstream liberal thought and its relation to contemporary issues through a serious engagement with the French liberal tradition. Annelien De Dijn’s contribution discusses Bertrand de Jouvenel, a lesser-known 20th Century representative of the French political tradition she terms ‘aristocratic liberalism’. This tradition has its roots in the work of Montesquieu, and emphasizes the importance of intermediary bodies, most importantly the aristocracy, in providing a check to the top-down power of despotic state authorities and the bottom-up power of revolutionary leveling tendencies, both of which threaten liberty. De Dijn situates Jouvenel in this tradition, but then indicates an important difference between his thought and that of his predecessors: his most significant work, On Power, is not only on French history, but on European history. Pointing to the enthusiastic reception of this work in the Anglophone world, she suggests that the rise of totalitarianism in Europe gave the anti-totalitarian features of aristocratic liberalism a broader appeal. Valentino Lumowa’s paper concerns Constant’s classic text, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns. Lumowa argues that in order to understand Constant’s piece, we must be aware that its two parts were written under different historical circumstances and decipher the argumentative thrust inherent in the text. Following Stephen Holmes, he argues that to understand the shift Constant made in the second part of the text, we should read it within the context of the increasing influence of the ultra-Royalists in the legislature during the Bourbon Restoration. However, in contrast to Holmes, he contends that the spirit of both civic and individual freedom, which enlivens representative system, is the backbone of the text in its unity. Demin Duan’s essay investigates an apparent ambivalence between liberal and imperialist tendencies in the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, which has already drawn some attention from Tocquevillian scholars. These interpretations of Tocqueville and his writings on empire generally agree that Tocqueville stands in a recognized tradition of liberalism, which is characterized by respect for human rights, individual freedom and a sense of universal humanism. On this standard view, Tocqueville’s support of imperialism represents nothing but an unfortunate breach of his own otherwise consistent liberal thinking. Duan’s article questions this standard position. By questioning the assumption of Tocqueville’s liberalism in the first place, he tries to gauge the influence of both the old republican tradition and the new liberal perspective on his thinking. In conclusion, he argues that Tocqueville’s overall thought, especially his notion of freedom, is very much informed by an old republican tradition. His support of French imperialism could be better understood from this perspective rather than be rendered simply as a deviation from liberal norms. Pawel Marczewski’s contribution is an attempt to show that Tocqueville’s conception of liberty transcends the divisions between negative and positive aspects of freedom. He begins by juxtaposing this conception with the opposition drawn by Constant between liberty of the ancients and liberty of the moderns. While Tocqueville and Constant shared a concern for the preservation of individual rights, Tocqueville was much more reluctant to accept the modern loss of the communal dimension of liberty. He did not accept the view that jouissances privées, private pleasures, are the main compensation that the modern world has to offer for the lost ancient treasure of political participation. The essay then looks into the relevance of Tocqueville’s standpoint for current debates between liberal defenders of negative freedom and republican advocates of freedom as non-domination. Participants on both sides of the debate seem to be so devoted to showing that their particular approach provides the best guarantees against actual and possible threats to liberty that they overlook the fact that their definitions of freedom remain significantly similar. By arguing that ‘to be free is to be guided by one’s own will’, contemporary republicans, as well as their liberal counterparts, move along the lines drawn by Constant towards private pleasures. By questioning the inevitability of this turn, Tocqueville provides us with a valuable contribution to these discussions in contemporary political philosophy. Finally, André Van de Putte’s contribution, an adaptation of his emeritus speech that closed the conference on French Liberalism, appeals to Tocqueville in order to draw attention to the importance of intermediary, dialogical bodies in mitigating the implicit despotic tendencies of the democratic drive to equality. In Tocqueville’s view, the transition from the feudal corporate inequality to democratic individual equality was not a clean break. Rather, this transition is a continual process of democratization that is driven by a desire for equality, or egalité des conditions. This dissolution of distinctions of estate, class and status has the unintended consequence of concentrating the diffuse power of these entities into a centralized state, which is responsible for ensuring the equality of all under the law. This process leaves increasingly isolated and atomized individuals to face the power of a monolithic state in defense of their freedom, and moves toward a soft, paternalistic despotism. Constant’s freedom of the moderns is not sufficient to protect individuals from this centralized power. Democracy also requires the political freedom of the ancients. Van de Putte argues for a system in which atomized individuals organize themselves into intermediary bodies that, in a Montesquieuian balance of powers, can enter into dialogue with each other and the state on more equitable terms. Van de Putte’s contribution closes with a plea for a conception of democracy as a regime of dialogue. (shrink)

Ethics and rationality -- Moral frameworks -- Experience in context -- Aesthetic aspects of ethical thought -- Morals and metaphors -- Ethics and pluralism -- Moral thinking -- Afterword: diversity, relativism, and nonviolence.