The drive to describe cultural history as an evolutionary process has two sources. One from within social theory is part of the impetus to convert social studies into "social sciences" providing them with the status accorded to the natural sciences. The other comes from within biology and biological anthropology in the belief that the theory of evolution must be universal in its application to all functions of all living organisms. The social scientific theory of cultural evolution is pre-Darwinian, employing a (...) developmental model of unfolding characterized by intrinsic directionality, by definable stages that succeed each other and by some criterion of progress. It is arbitrary in its definitions of progress and has had the political problem that a diachronic claim of cultural progress implies a synchronic differential valuation of present-day cultures. The biological scheme creates an isomorphism between the Darwinian mechanism of evolution and cultural history, postulating rules of cultural "mutation", cultural inheritance and some mechanism of natural selection among cultural alternatives. It uses simplistic ad hoc notions of individual acculturation and of the differential survival and reproduction of cultural elements. It is unclear what useful work is done by substituting the metaphor of evolution for history. (shrink)

This essay centres on the English translation of Georg Lukács’s Tailism and the Dialectic. Lukács is generally heralded as a founding theoretician of a ‘Western Marxism’, in opposition to ‘Eastern’ Soviet Marxism, and his most impressive and most influential work, History and Class Consciousness, is generally treated as having rehabilitated Marxist concern with questions of subjectivity. It might therefore come as a surprise when Lukács in Tailism states that the purpose of History and Class Consciousness was to demonstrate ‘that the (...) organisation and tactics of Bolshevism are the only possible consequence of Marxism’. In my view, however, this should already be abundantly clear from History and Class Consciousness. For Lukács’s absorption with proletarian subjectivity was motivated by an obsession with what he saw as its immaturity. And he coined the category of ‘reification’ in order to explain his disappointed expectations, to explain, that is, why the proletariat did not make a ‘socialist’ revolution in the ‘objectively ripe’ situation of an ‘imperialist war’ created by ‘moribund capitalism’. In short, Lukács did raise anew the question of the subjective, but only to then declare that workers, not even ‘the most revolutionary among them’, could never attain proper class consciousness, which he attributed instead to the ‘revolutionary party’ bearing the properly revolutionary theory. For this reason I agree with Slavoj Žižek’s characterisation of Lukács as the ‘ultimate philosopher [my emphasis] of Leninism’ – although I do think that Lenin himself would have found, as he did in connection with one of Lukács’s other works, Marxism ‘present only at a verbal level’. My concern is two-fold: with a critique of the methodological short-cuts that Lukács made in his purely conceptual derivation of the concept of reification, and his purely conceptual attribution of it as the necessary form of working-class consciousness ‘in its immediacy’; and with the dangerous political consequences that Lukács derived from his assessment of the reified character of working-class subjectivity, mainly a theoretical guarantee that the party with the proper revolutionary theory must always be right, or at least more right than anyone else. (shrink)

In his critical response to our skeptical inquiry, “Does Culture Evolve?” , W. G. Runciman affirms that “Culture Does Evolve.” However, we find nothing in his essay that convinces us to alter our initial position. And we must confess that in composing an answer to Runciman, our first temptation was simply to urge those interested to read our original article—both as a basis for evaluating Runciman’s attempted refutation of it and as a framework for reading this essay, which addresses in (...) greater detail issues we have already raised. Runciman views the “selectionist paradigm” as a “scientific” “puzzle-solving device” now validated by an “expanding literature” that has successfully modeled social and cultural change as “evolutionary.” All paradigms, however, including scientific ones, give rise to self-validating “normal science.” The real issue, accordingly, is not whether explanations can be successfully manufactured on the basis of paradigmatic assumptions, but whether the paradigmatic assumptions are appropriate to the object of analysis. The selectionist paradigm requires the reduction of society and culture to inheritance systems that consist of randomly varying, individual units, some of which are selected, and some not; and with society and culture thus reduced to inheritance systems, history can be reduced to “evolution.” But these reductions, which are required by the selectionist paradigm, exclude much that is essential to a satisfactory historical explanation—particularly the systemic properties of society and culture and the combination of systemic logic and contingency. Now as before, therefore, we conclude that while historical phenomena can always be modeled selectionistically, selectionist explanations do no work, nor do they contribute anything new except a misleading vocabulary that anesthetizes history. (shrink)

In a seemingly offhand, often overlooked comment, Karl Marx deemed 'human corporeal organisation' the 'first fact of human history'. Following Marx's corporeal turn and pursuing the radical implications of his corporeal insight, this book undertakes a reconstruction of the corporeal foundations of historical materialism. Part I exposes the corporeal roots of Marx's materialist conception of history and historical-materialist Wissenschaft. Part II attempts a historical-materialist mapping of human corporeal organisation. Suggesting how to approach human histories up from their corporeal foundations, Part (...) III elaborates historical-materialism as 'corporeal semiotics'. Part IV, a case study of Marx's critique of capitalist socio-economic and cultural forms, reveals the corporeal foundations of that critique and the corporeal depth of his vision of human freedom and dignity. (shrink)

One of the most common critiques of Marx is that he mistook the birth pangs of capitalism for its death throes, on the basis of which he made the completely erroneous prediction of the increasing immiseration of the working class – a critique that rather superficially reduces immiseration to a simple matter of standard of living. The goal of this essay, however, is to expose the corporeal depths of Marx's notion of immiseration, and, in so doing, to show that immiseration (...) is by no means a long-since disappeared attribute of early capitalism. To do so, I reread the chapters on surplus-value in Capital by following the corporeal leitmotifs suggested in Franz Kafka's short story, 'In the Penal Colony'. Kafka's narration of the condemned learning the meaning of his fate through the corporeal experience of wounding evokes Marx's very graphic narration in Capital of workers experiencing exploitation and immiseration on their own bodies. Raising themes found later in Kafka's narrative, Marx tells of the arranging of the entire workplace 'under the command of capital', of the design and employment of technology both to secure that command and to extract surplus-value; and he shows how capital, like Kafka's torture machine, writes its messages on the body of labour in a script not immediately decipherable by observers. The history that Marx tells in Capital is less graphic in form than Kafka's, but it is in content at least as fantastic and horrific – perhaps even more so. Their common concern with machines painfully inscribing bodies helps to highlight the corporeal dimension of Marx's concept of immiseration. (shrink)

This essay is a kind of sequel to an earlier one entitled "Marx's Aufhebung of Philosophy and the Foundations of a Historical-Materialist Science." Departing from the point reached in that essay, I take a Whitmanesque journey through Marx's writings and the logic of a materialist conception of history. I begin with Walt Whitman's very materialist, very dialectical, and very decentered apostrophe in his Song of the Open Road: "You objects that call forth from diffusion my meanings / And give them (...) shape." Taking this apostrophe as my cue, I proceed to elaborate the complexity and the dimensions of dialectical thinking within a historical-materialist framework. The specific purpose of the essay is twofold: to portray the "decentered" dialectical methodology follows from Marx's historical-materialist redefinition of the subject-object relation; and to map the kinds of analytical tasks, the open-ended "itineraries," that a historical-materialist science of Wissenschaft must pursue. This "dialectical cartography" is developed through a critical and hopefully productive response to poststructuralist critiques of dialectics, particularly to those approaches that exaggerate Saussure's notion of the arbitrariness of signs. In this respect my intention is to indicate how the current confrontational relation between historical materialism and poststructuralism, especially over matters of the production of meaning and the analysis of culture, might be transformed intoone of complementarity. (shrink)

(2013). Life, the Unhistorical, the Suprahistorical: Nietzsche on History. International Journal of Philosophical Studies: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 64-91. doi: 10.1080/09672559.2012.744532.

The seventh edition of this pragmatic guide to determining right and wrong in the workplace is updated with new case studies and ancillary materials to combine stakeholder perspectives with a deep dive on workplace ethics issues. Using a unique stakeholder-based approach, this book takes business ethics out of the theory realm and provides practical ways to analyze any business decision. Including dozens of cases, Joseph Weiss looks beyond the impacts of ethical lapses on share price and profit to focus (...) on relationships between stakeholders, including individuals, groups, corporations, and governments. The new seventh edition includes seven new cases and ten new Point/Counterpoint exercises, which challenge students to argue both sides of a contemporary issue. It incorporates the latest research as well as updated cases dealing with recent scandals at organizations such as Boeing, Facebook, and Uber. Professors will have access to online support, including teaching notes, PowerPoint slides, and sample tests. The book is equipped with a step-by-step guide to implementing stakeholder analysis, tips to help students apply ethical principles in their personal and professional lives, and comprehensive coverage of employee workplace issues. Addressing relevant topics such as risk management, preferential hiring, and sexual harassment in conjunction with the digital divide, bribery, the environment, and more, Business Ethics, seventh edition explores ethical implications in today's increasingly interconnected global business environment. (shrink)

Nietzsche was a philosopher who prided himself, in deliberate contradistinction with previous philosophers, on his ‘historical sense’. But this leaves many questions unanswered about the precise role of the historical in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Perhaps most importantly, can the conception of genealogy in Nietzsche’s later philosophy, as a revised historical method, be taken to represent his mature philosophical methodology in general? I argue, firstly, that there is considerable continuity between Nietzsche’s conceptions of history in the early essay ‘On the uses and (...) disadvantages of history for life’ and those of his later philosophy. The former can therefore be used as a resource for understanding the latter. Through a reading of the early history essay I demonstrate that Nietzsche’s conception of the historical here is intimately bound up with the notion of the ‘unhistorical’ and that it is precisely renewed access to the unhistorical which is required in order for history to be conducive to the flourishing of humanity. I go on to contend that this holds for Nietzsche’s later writings as well, and that genealogy, being purely historical, must therefore be seen as one subsidiary part of a broader philosophy in which the unhistorical will play, literally, a vital role. (shrink)

This book critically assesses arguments for the existence of the God of classical theism, develops an innovative account of objects’ persistence, and defends new arguments against classical theism. The authors engage the following classical theistic proofs: Aquinas’s First Way, Aquinas’s De Ente argument, and Feser’s Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, Augustinian, Thomistic, and Rationalist proofs. The authors also provide the first systematic treatment of the ‘existential inertia thesis’. By connecting the thesis to relativity theory and recent developments in the philosophy of physics, and (...) by developing a variety of novel existential-inertia-friendly explanations of persistence, they mount a formidable new case against classical theistic proofs. Finally, they defend new arguments against classical theism based on abstract objects and changing divine knowledge. The text appeals to students, researchers, and others interested in classical theistic proofs, the existence and nature of God, and the ultimate explanations of persistence, change, and contingency. (shrink)

The book combines philosophical exposition and legal analysis, and pays special attention to issues of tort law.

La scommessa che anima il volume a c. di Sara Guindani e Alexis Nuselovici, come esplicitato nella prefazione, è la ricezione critica di un’eredità o – se così si può parafrasare – la messa in opera di un lascito. Notoriamente, “messa in opera” è espressione atta a evocare reminiscenze heideggeriane. Tuttavia, il più delle volte non si tiene in conto che Heidegger rende con “essere in lavorazione” – dunque in corso d’opera – l’ἐνέργεια aristotelica; v. il § 26 g dei (...) suoi Concetti fondamentali... (shrink)

A distanza di quasi trent’anni dalla prima edizione garzantiana (marzo 1992), Castelvecchi ripubblica un classico di Garroni, Estetica. Uno sguardo-attraverso, arricchito da un’introduzione di Stefano Velotti. I principali temi affrontati nel testo in esame possono essere schematicamente divisi in due punti-chiave: il «dover essere del senso» e l’estetica come filosofia critica. Il «dover essere del senso», su cui molto insiste Garroni, riprende espressamente l’intuizione carabellesiana del «...

While engaging in rich discussion, Conspiracy Theories analyzes current arguments and evidence while providing real-world examples so students can contextualize and visualize the debates. Each chapter addresses important current questions, provides conceptual tools, defines important terms, and introduces the appropriate methods of analysis.

We examine two competing solutions to Benardete paradoxes: causal finitism, according to which nothing can have infinitely many causes, and the unsatisfiable pair diagnosis (UPD), according to which such paradoxes are logically impossible and no metaphysical thesis need be adopted to avoid them. We argue that the UPD enjoys notable theoretical advantages over causal finitism. Causal finitists, however, have levelled two main objections to the UPD. First, they urge that the UPD requires positing a ‘mysterious force’ that prevents paradoxes from (...) arising. Since such a force is implausible, the UPD is in trouble. Second, they employ recombination or patchwork principles to argue that paradoxical situations would be possible if causal finitism were false. Since such situations are not possible, causal finitism is true, and so a substantive metaphysical thesis is needed to avoid the paradoxes. We argue that the UPD proponent can successfully respond to these objections. (shrink)

The paper examines the connection between art and poiesis, moving from Aristotle’s Metaph. A 1 and Z 7-9. In particular, the analysis of those passages suggests dividing the genesis of artworks into noesis and poiesis. The noesis is the phase in which the artist plans in his mind the eidos (aspect) of the work that he is going to produce; the poiesis is the realization which actualizes – through its extrinsecation – the “aspect” mentally planned by the artist. After the (...) exposition of Aristotle’s theory, the related conceptual elements are developed, also having recourse to musical examples, in order to show the strict link between speculation and artistic praxis. The term enopé occurs in this part of the work as a metaphor which renders the peculiar form of presence of the work of art, whose essence emerges in the course of production. Moreover, a specific section is devoted to illustrating that ready-mades can be conciliated with the poietic nature of art. Finally, the paper focuses on performing (called «re-productive») arts, such as music; those forms of art include two poietic phases: the poiesis of the author (e. g., the composer) and the poiesis of the interpreter. The last paragraph considers the musical avant-gardes and explains that they confirm the poietic foundation of art, instead of denying it. (shrink)

[1] Biographie, Philosophie, Praxis -- [2] Het spel van het naamloze / naar een concept van Joseph Kosuth.

This anthology of essays on the work of David Kaplan, a leading contemporary philosopher of language, sprang from a conference, "Themes from Kaplan," organized by the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University.

It is plausible to think that practices of caring are partly constituted by a caregiver's commitment to a cared-for. However, discussions of caring often contain no explicit discussion of such commitments, and do not attempt to draw any philosophical conclusions from the nature of caring relations as committed. A discussion of caring practices that emphasizes the importance of commitment therefore has the potential to generate important new insights for our understanding of caring. This essay begins that project by arguing that (...) a commitment-centric conception of caring entails the truth of moral partialism. Although many care-ethicists are sympathetic to partialism, the arguments in its defense remain controversial. As I show in this article, however, partialism is necessarily true given the committed nature of caring. This is because the concept of commitment is itself a necessarily partial one: to say that we are equally committed to everyone or everything is equivalent to saying that we are not committed to anything. Thus, when viewed as a species of commitment, it is part of the concept of caring that it requires us to put the needs of those we care for before the needs of those unknown to us. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to fill a certain gap in the assessment of relativism by drawing on Joseph Ratzinger’s (1927–2022) criticism of the normative transformation since Kant. During the Enlightenment, Natural Law was doubted as a cultural feature of Christianity that had no bearing on pluralist society. Consequently, this jurisprudential tradition underwent de-Hellenization and branched out in radical directions, the most decisive of which was Kant’s post-metaphysical system of natural values. Positivism and German Idealism attempted to restore (...) the unity of philosophy that Kant’s philosophy had disrupted. Yet even more influentially, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was Marxism that relativized the doxological aspect of normativity by emphasizing the importance of praxis. Since philosophy became neither an exact science as Kant had conceived it to be, nor a practical programme for social justice as Marxism had promised, the Existentialists, and particularly Sartre, advocated a more radical philosophy of freedom. Ratzinger argues that despite the nuances of post-Kantian philosophy, Positivism, Existentialism, and Marxism failed to comprehend the human condition and that the positivist method resulted in an overwhelming relativism that has reduced normativity to a matter of correct procedures rather than regarding it as the foundation of the inviolable dignity of the human being. (shrink)

According to agent-based approaches to virtue ethics, the rightness of an action is a function of the motives which prompted that action. If those motives were morally praiseworthy, then the action was right; if they were morally blameworthy, the action was wrong. Many critics find this approach problematically insensitive to an act’s consequences, and claim that agent-basing fails to preserve the intuitive distinction between agent- and act-evaluation. In this article I show how an agent-based account of right action can be (...) made sensitive to an act’s consequences. According to the approach which I defend, an action is right just in case it realizes an agent’s morally praiseworthy motive. Conversely, an action is wrong just in case it realizes a morally blameworthy motive. Specifying act-evaluation in terms of the realization, rather than the expression, of an agent’s motives allows an agent-based approach to distinguish between agent- and act-evaluation. This is because an agent may act from a morally praiseworthy motive, but fail to realize that motive. Her action will therefore not have been the right one, despite its being the expression of morally praiseworthy motives. (shrink)

In eighteenth century England, there were thinkers who said they were Christian deists and claimed pure, original Christianity was deism. Most scholars do not believe these thinkers were sincere about their religious beliefs, but there are many good reasons to believe they were. Three English deists have the best claim to be considered Christian deists because they alone called themselves Christian deists or called their ideas those of a Christian deist. These three thinkers, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, and Thomas Amory, (...) developed a theology in which Christianity was deism and natural religion. The important point, though, was that their version of natural religion included supernatural elements as well as true religious piety. When read closely, these three thinkers believed in miracles, revelation, prayer, and continuing direct divine inspiration. The Christian deists were neither conventional deists nor traditional Christians. Nevertheless, it is not legitimate to exclude them from either category as some scholars do. They cannot be excluded from the category of ‘Christian’ on the basis their contemporaries all saw them as non-Christian. They also cannot be excluded from the category of ‘deists’ because they were pious and believed in an active God. (shrink)

Moral distress has been the subject of extensive research and debate in the nursing ethics literature since the mid-1980s, but the concept has received comparatively little attention from those working outside of applied ethics. In this article, I defend a care ethical account of moral distress, according to which the phenomenon is the product of an agent’s inability to live up to one of her caring commitments. This account has a number of attractions. First, it places a greater emphasis on (...) the importance of the relationship between the caregiver and her cared-for than that found in previous accounts. Second, it does not make problematic assumptions about the correctness of a caregiver’s moral judgments, as has been claimed in relation to previous accounts of moral distress. Finally, my account allows for a clear conceptual distinction to be drawn between moral distress and other forms of negative moral emotion such as guilt and regret. Earlier accounts draw this distinction by appealing to the causal aetiology of moral distress, but as I show here, such appeals are ultimately unsuccessful unless they are made from an explicitly care ethical starting point. One of the implications of my account is that moral distress has the potential to occur in the context of any caregiving relationship. This claim is explored in the final section of the paper, in relation to student-teacher and parent-child caregiving. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that care ethics should be understood as a form of value pluralism. Writers on the ethics of care tend not explicitly to address issues in the theory of value, although much of what has been written about care ethics may be taken to suggest that it endorses some form of value monism. I argue against this conception of care ethics by showing that the practical reality of caregiving is more accurately represented by a pluralist account (...) of value. Practices of care are plausibly guided by a number of distinct and potentially conflicting values. These include quality of life, autonomy, dignity, personal development, and the value of nurturant relationships. Whilst caring takes each of these values to be important in its own right, they are not always jointly realisable, and carers are sometimes forced to promote one such value at the expense of another. The possibility of conflict between values is, of course, precisely what a pluralist conception of value tells us to expect. In this respect, then, value pluralism more faithfully reflects the reality of caregiving than does value monism, and care ethicists ought for this reason to endorse it. (shrink)

Back to the Rough Ground is a philosophical investigation of practical knowledge, with major import for professional practice and the ethical life in modern society. Its purpose is to clarify the kind of knowledge that informs good practice in a range of disciplines such as education, psychotherapy, medicine, management, and law. Through reflection on key modern thinkers who have revived cardinal insights of Aristotle, and a sustained engagement with the Philosopher himself, it presents a radical challenge to the scientistic assumptions (...) that have dominated how these professional domains have been conceived, practiced, and institutionalized. (shrink)

Research suggests that reducing rates of drug addiction requires a range of physical spaces where drug users and counselors can meet, build community, and work together. The efficacy of this ‘social infrastructure,’ however, depends not just on how its shared spaces facilitate access to social networks, but on how institutional rules and norms govern the social interaction that takes place in those spaces. I suggest that institutional norms nurture sobriety to the extent that the social arrangements they foster are (i) (...) discretionary, since individuals trying to re-establish sobriety have heterogeneous social preferences; (ii) unconditional, since individuals’ efforts to re-achieve sobriety frequently involve setbacks; and (iii) low-pressure, since individuals may find extraneous turmoil damaging to their renascent sobriety. To the extent that institutional norms facilitate contrary social arrangements, shared settings are liable to backfire—to undermine or at least fail to nurture sobriety—which I illustrate using the case of sobriety-oriented organizations in the Boston area. Critically, while the first two aspects are governed largely by intra-organizational norms, the third is governed by norms between multiple sobriety-oriented organizations. Upholding healthful local norms, then, demands commitment at both the organization and system levels. (shrink)

It does not derive its authority, as many authors have supposed, from some logically prior discipline, whether physics, economics, or philosophy, these ultimately depend on law itself, in its fundamental expression of human intellect and purpose. Law, he holds, is inseparably connected to everything in the world that goes to make up personal identity and meaning.

The classic follow-up to the bestselling "The Crack in the Cosmic Egg " - Explains the process of acculturation and the mechanisms that create our self-limiting "cosmic egg" of consensus reality - Reveals how our biological development innately creates a "crack" in our cosmic egg--leaving a way to return to the unencumbered consciousness of childhood - Explores ways to discover and explore the "crack" to restore wholeness to our minds and reestablish our ability to create our own realities In this (...) classic follow-up to his bestselling "The Crack in the Cosmic Egg," Joseph Chilton Pearce explains the process of acculturation and the mechanisms that create our self-limiting "cosmic egg" of consensus reality. Laying the groundwork for his later classic "Magical Child," Pearce shows that we go through early childhood connecting with the world through our senses. With the development of language and the process of acculturation not only do our direct experiences of the world become much less vivid but our innate states of nonordinary consciousness become suppressed. Trapped in a specific cultural context--a "cosmic egg"--we are no longer able to have or even recognize mystical experiences not mediated by the limitations of our culture. Motivated primarily by a fear of death, our enculturation literally splits our minds and prevents us from living fully in the present. Drawing from Carlos Castaneda's writings about Don Juan and the sense of "body-knowing," Pearce explores the varieties of nonordinary consciousness that can help us return to the unencumbered consciousness of our infancy. He shows that just as we each create our own cosmic egg of reality through cultural conditioning, we also innately create a "crack" in that egg. Ultimately certain shifts in our biological development take place to offset acculturation, leaving an avenue of return to our primary state. Pearce examines the creation of the "egg" itself and ways to discover its inherent cracks to restore wholeness to our minds, release us from our fear of death, and reestablish our ability to create our own realities through imagination and biological transcendence. (shrink)

Since the very beginning, Confucianism has been troubled by a serious gap between its political ideals and the reality of societal circumstances. Contemporary Confucians must develop a viable method of governance that can retain the spirit of the Confucian ideal while tackling problems arising from nonideal modern situations. The best way to meet this challenge, Joseph Chan argues, is to adopt liberal democratic institutions that are shaped by the Confucian conception of the good rather than the liberal conception of (...) the right.Confucian Perfectionism examines and reconstructs both Confucian political thought and liberal democratic institutions, blending them to form a new Confucian political philosophy. Chan decouples liberal democratic institutions from their popular liberal philosophical foundations in fundamental moral rights, such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and individual sovereignty. Instead, he grounds them on Confucian principles and redefines their roles and functions, thus mixing Confucianism with liberal democratic institutions in a way that strengthens both. Then he explores the implications of this new yet traditional political philosophy for fundamental issues in modern politics, including authority, democracy, human rights, civil liberties, and social justice.Confucian Perfectionism critically reconfigures the Confucian political philosophy of the classical period for the contemporary era. (shrink)

The tension between beauty and technology is evinced in the modern distinction within technē itself between technology and “fine art.” Yet while beauty,as Kant observes, is never a means to an end, neither is it an “end in itself.” Beauty points beyond itself while refusing subordination to human interests. Both its noninstrumentality and its self-transcending character I trace to the intrinsic necessity of the beautiful, which is essentially impersonal while paradoxically being an object of love. I suggest that we conceive (...) of beauty as an “anonymous voice,” and I relate the latter to Heidegger’s critique of modern technology as a projection upon nature of “resource being.” I conclude that technology can be creative rather than destructive of beauty when it lets natural ends, which are inescapably in conflict with one another, transcend themselves through self-sacrifice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 299-303 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History. Edited by Thomas A. Tweed and Stephen Prothero. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 416 pp. Although this book is not about interreligious dialogue per se, it makes several important contributions to it. Two of the necessities for successful interreligious dialogue are a knowledge (...) of the religions of other cultures and an awareness of one's own culture's past misinterpretations of these religions in order to guard against repeating them. This book helps accomplish both of these aims very well. First it helps to understand Asian religions as they are practiced in the United States. This book discusses Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, and Chinese religions in America, and it includes selections on Jainism and Sikhism; (it excludes Islam as a monotheistic religion with Middle Eastern roots). Second, the book adroitly catalogues the ways that Americans have misinterpreted Asian religions in the past. Its selections demonstrate that two of the worst errors that Americans commit in dealing with Asian religions is either romanticizing them as being all "spiritual," and thus categorically different from the "worldly" West, or of ignoring their diversity. Anyone reading these selections will be less likely to repeat these errors.The book is an anthology of primary documents with well-written, brief introductions to the selections. Its aim is not just to describe Asian religions in America, but also to document American encounters with Asian religions since the American Revolution. The book is organized historically in four major sections: 1784-1840, 1840-1924, 1924-1964, and 1965 to the present. Within each historical section, the authors have chosen selections that illustrate how Americans during that time viewed Asian religions, how Asian religions were practiced in the U.S., and how Asian religions influenced American culture during that time period.The first section (1784-1840) is, not surprisingly, the shortest. It has one chapter on how Americans abroad viewed Asian religions and another chapter on how those at home viewed Asian religions. This period is dominated by a belief that Christianity is the one, true religion; Asian religions by contrast, are full of "debasing superstitions and cruel abominations" (p. 58). Even those who try to get beyond such crude views demonstrate a gross ignorance of Asian religions. For example, Hannah Adams (the first woman in America to support herself through writing) claimed that the Dalai Lama was the spiritual leader or "pope" of China as well as Tibet (p. 55). Better informed and more balanced are the comments from two of the period's most important intellectuals, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. Franklin, like other Deists, admired Confucian naturalism and humanism, and he reprinted excerpts of Confucius in the Pennsylvania Gazette. John Adams defended the sublimeness of Indian religion, claiming that it had heavily influenced Greek philosophy because Pythagoras had learnt his most important doctrines there.The second section (1840-1924) has six chapters covering missionaries and their [End Page 299] critics, literary encounters with Asian religions, the World Parliament of Religions, the immigrant experience in America, academic discussions, and American sympathizers and converts to Asian religions. Several selections from nineteenth-century dictionaries and books show how Asian religions were commonly perceived at the time. While there was growing sophistication about Asian religions, the period's most popular book on the subject (James Freeman Clarke, Ten Great Religions) still maintained that only Christianity had the fullness of truth and Asian religions were static and stunted. On the other hand, this section balances out Christian triumphalism with some excerpts from Henry Steel Olcott and other Americans who converted to Asian religions. Substantial selections from Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, and T. S. Eliot reveal how Asian religions deeply influenced the most important writers of the time.The third section (1924-1964) has four chapters dealing with the closing of America to Asian immigrants, Hindu gurus and their disciples in America, Buddhist masters and their students, and one on artists and missionaries. It reprints sections of the Asian exclusion act of 1924... (shrink)

Caregiving relationships are often characterized by an imbalance of power between the caregiver and her cared-for. The danger that this power will be abused is a source of serious moral concern. In this article, I argue that the risk of an abuse of power sometimes stems not from the possession of power itself, but from the very nature of caring relationships. This is because carers must be prepared to exercise non-minimal amounts of power over their cared-fors, even if doing so (...) is likely to cause the cared-for distress or even pain. This means that caring itself, rather than the malign influence of power dynamics, generates a risk of unintentional abuse. One of the ways in which this risk can be reduced, I argue, is by trying to avoid an exclusive focus on the outcomes of care, and by paying more attention to the way in which that care is delivered. (shrink)

The thesis of the present volume is critical and dual. (1) Present day philosophy of man and sciences of man suffer from the Greek mis taken polarization of everything human into nature and convention which is (allegedly) good and evil, which is (allegedly) truth and fal sity, which is (allegedly) rationality and irrationality, to wit, the polar ization of all fields of inquiry, the natural and social sciences, as well as ethics and all technology, whether natural or social, into the (...) totally positive and the totally negative. (2) Almost all philosophy and sci ences of man share the erroneous work ethic which is the myth of man's evil nature - the myth of the beast in man, the doctrine of original sin. To mediate or to compromise between the first view of human nature as good with the second view of it as evil, sociologists have devised a modified utilitarianism with deferred gratification so called, and the theory of the evil of artificial competition (capitalist and socialist alike) and of keeping up with the Joneses. Now, the mediation is not necessary. For, the polarization makes for abstract errors which are simplistic views of rationality, such as reductionism and positivism of all sorts, as well as for concrete errors, such as the disposition to condemn repeatedly those human weaknesses which are inevitable, namely man's inability to be perfectly rational, avoid all error, etc. , thus setting man against himself as all too wicked. (shrink)

This is a new edition of Joseph Fletcher's 1966 work that ignited a firestorm of controversy at the time of its publication.

When I say ‘pain’, it is clearly a singular phenomenon. Yet if I ask for an example, you can provide many varying instances that confound the idea of its singularity. How can a pinprick be of the same thing as depression or grief? This study maintains the singularity of pain by exploring the process and structure of its experience to account for its variance and its subjectivity. Heidegger’s Being and Time provides the pathway to achieving this, where we comprehend how (...) pain’s myriad manifestations, and their inherent subjectivity, relate to our way of Being – the meaningful horizon through which we encounter pain. The study comes to tie the process of encountering pain with a structure that suffering provides, which explains both the variance and the subjectivity of the pain experience. This can then be mapped onto individual experiences of a singular phenomenon to understand how they arose and what has conditioned them. (shrink)

Proceedings of a conference held in Apr. 2008 in Washington, D.C.