continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

February 21st will mark the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the death of Spinoza, which occurred on February 21st, 1677. The visitor to the Hague may still see, in the Paviljoensgragt, the small two-storied house in the top rooms of which Spinoza spent the last six years of his short life. A tablet placed under the top windows commemorates the fact. It was in these rooms that Spinoza completed his Ethica, which may perhaps be regarded as the greatest masterpiece in the (...) history of Metaphysics. The house is in danger of being pulled down, and the Spinoza Society is endeavouring to secure it as a memorial to Spinoza, and a centre of philosophic studies. It is not so long since the house-breakers I had their way with the home of Erasmus in Rotterdam. It would be sad indeed if the abode of another of the greatest Humanists were to meet with a like fate. It is to be hoped that the revived I interest in Spinoza which we are witnessing now may take the I practical form of saving this precious relic, which may well serve to promote the peace and goodwill among men which Spinoza had so much at heart. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kant’s Just War TheoryBrian OrendKant is often cited as one of the first truly international political philosophers. Unlike the vast majority of his predecessors, Kant views a purely domestic or national conception of justice as radically incomplete; we must, he insists, also turn our faculties of critical judgment towards the international plane. When he does so, what results is one of the most powerful and principled conceptions of international (...) justice ever constructed. Kant’s central concept, that it is a demand of our own practical reason that we forge a cosmopolitan federation of free republics, based on the rule of law, human rights, and cultural and commercial development, still resonates today as a plausible and hopeful prescription for humanity’s future.Much of Kant’s international theory has recently received searching analysis and evaluation. But the bulk of this consideration has focused on Kant’s descriptive, as opposed to prescriptive, claims. Lavish attention, for example, has been showered on his assertion that perpetual peace is inevitable—that our natural antagonism will irresistibly incline us, after many failures, to establish an international juridical condition. Comparatively little has been done on thoroughly evaluating Kant’s normative claims of international justice, particularly with regard to his ideal corpus of international law and his concrete recommendations for moving from a global state of nature to a cosmopolitan civil society.1In this paper, I would like to contribute to the latter task by focusing on the moral problem that war poses as, arguably, the most frequent and severe cause [End Page 323] of ruptures in the functioning of the international system.2 In particular, I would like to argue in favour of the controversial, and original, thesis that Kant has a just war theory.3 I would then like to develop that theory in some detail and to explain its strength and suggestiveness. The focus on war seems both helpful and timely. It is helpful in that it provides a specific, graphic example with which one can apprehend more clearly the abstract architecture of Kant’s international vision. It is timely in that, in the wake of the very recent conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda, and in light of the subsequent formation of the International War Crimes Tribunals at The Hague, renewed attention has been paid to considering what, if anything, constitutes a just war and what is permitted, and what punishable, in terms of conduct in war. A rigorous consideration of what one of the true giants of moral philosophy thought about these issues can only serve to illuminate our understanding of these current events.1. THE TRADITIONAL READING OF KANT: NO JUST WARNearly every commentator on Kant’s international theory of justice who discusses the problem of war in any detail believes that Kant not only has no just war theory, but that he is, moreover, a vicious critic of the core propositions of classical just war theorists, such as Augustine, Aquinas, and Grotius. Howard Williams, for example, says that “Kant has no theory of just war … (j)ustice and war are in conflict with one another and it is our duty as human beings to try to overcome war.” Fernando Teson contends that “Kant dismisses the idea that there could be a just war” and Georg Geismann asserts that, for Kant, “there is no such thing as a just war.” Similarly, W. B. Gallie asserts that “Kant agreed … that nothing but confusion and harm resulted from regarding any wars as just … ” There is a bevy of quotes in the Kantian corpus to support this reading.4One prominent anti-just war quote occurs in Perpetual Peace, when Kant [End Page 324] reflects on the contributions of traditional just war theorists and arrives at the following judgment:It is therefore to be wondered at that the word right has not been completely banished from military politics as superfluous pedantry, and that no state has been bold enough to declare itself publicly in favour of doing so. For Hugo Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel and the rest (sorry comforters as they are) are still dutifully quoted in justification of military aggression, although their philosophically or diplomatically formulated codes do not and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 97 supposed by actual idealism is above all moral and involves what Gentile describes as an aspect of divinity or infinity,as well as a concrete, historical aspect. The following chapter treats of the philosophy of "actual" idealism and compares the views of Kant and Gentile on relations between moral conscience and freedom. According to Yalentini, Gentile's idealism is essentially an ethical view. This chapter concludes with noting (...) that Gentile 's solution to the problem of historical knowledge differs profoundly from that of Hegel and Croce. For "reason" is not, for Gentile, a particular interpretation of historical process, but is rather the "reason" of consciousness in activity. In Chapter In, Valentini discusses Gentile's views on art and religion. The section on art concludes with a comparison between Gentile on feeling and Kant on the transcendental unity of apperception. Whereas art is supposed to be one abstract moment of spirit, religion is the other abstract moment. Valentini suggests that Gentile and Feuerbach hold similar religious views on the attributes of divinity, which are nothing other than the loftiest qualities which man feels to possess in his essence. The history of religion is then the history of the progressive humanization of God. Gentile's religion represents a sort of modem Catholicism in that it understands revelation as a fact of conscience, church as a historical institution, dogma as having a negative character and God as a member of the dialogue between God and man. Moreover, Gentile's Catholicism has a national character; it is the religion of the Italian people. Chapter Iv treats of the relations between individual and state. For, according to Gentile, an individual is inconceivableapart from the social relations which lie within him. Here Valentini distinguishes in detail the differences and similarities between the views of Hegel and Gentile on the relations between state and individual. The differences between the views of these two philosophers are due to the differences between their methods. The method of Hegel is empirical and historical, and examines the state (which remains historical) from an external point of view. According to an idealistic method, however, thought is not to be the spectator of a process, but in every instance, an actor, and philosophizing does not result from an analysis of historical reality, but from the negation of this reality in the name of an ideal, which philosophy is to draw from it (reality). The Appendix includes a critical evaluation of the theory of the dialectic. Here Valentini hopes to distinguish between the imaginary and the real or historical applications of the dialectic. He begins his evaluation by asking: Does the doctrine of the dialectic, like the philosophy of idealism, possess negative connotations, which cannot be separated from it? Valentini suggests that in order to answer this question, we must determine the extent to which the dialectical scheme is constitutive of every concept or truth in general. For this is the way in which Hegel intended that the dialectic be understood and evaluated. Some views in Hegel's philosophy of nature are then criticized according to empirical criteria. In conclusion, Valentini attempts to answer both "internal" and "external" criticisms of Marx's view of the dialectic, and shows that there are problems involved in its application, which still have to be resolved. Mv~ M. MILBURN 9 ~an Jos~ ~ate College Husserl und Kant: eine Untersuchung ~ber Husserls Verh~iltni~ zu Kant und zum Neubantianismus. By Iso Kern. (The Hague : Martinus Nijhoff, 1964.Pp. xxiii q- 448.) This is a very important book. In fact, it is indispensable for a study of Husserl and is, at the same time, almost as valuable for a study of Kant, for it deals with the kind of searching questions that must be asked when one deals with transcendental idealism in any one of its forms. But two reasons in particular, make this book significant. One is the fact that Iso Kern was able to make extensive use of hitherto unpublished materials (manuscripts, lecture notes, letters, etc.), available only in the Husserl Archives and here quoted for the first time--and 98 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY quoted in great numbers. The other is Kern's philosophical competence... (shrink)

What does peace mean in today’s world of endless wars? Why has the project of ‘universal peace’, so ardently hoped for by the drafters of the UN Charter in 1945, failed so profoundly? I reflect on these questions through three stories of peace. The first is told by a series of four stained-glass windows in the Peace Palace in The Hague; the second is of the world’s demilitarised zones; and the third of a peace community in Colombia. These stories (...) provide a springboard to reflect on how we might rethink peace in the context of today’s world, drawing on feminist, queer and postcolonial analyses. My discussion exposes the limits of the UN Charter’s approach to peace, and the impossibility of its methods ever achieving ‘universal peace’. The Charter’s reliance on militarism and collective enforcement, as well as its commitment to peace as an evolutionary process, maintain rather than dismantle global hierarchies of domination. I also question the dualism of war and peace, which obscures much of the violence of what we call peace. The task of rethinking peace is urgent. To do so we need to go beyond the worlds we know, beyond the confines of law and the inevitability of quotidian hierarchies of gender, sexuality and race, to invent new methods of peace-making, outside the ‘frames of war’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 231 that neither Borro nor any of the Aristotelian writers on method mentioned by Randall seems to me to have influenced Galileo. If I were to begin looking for Aristotelian influences, I should think it much more promising to examine carefully those discussions on the relation between "most powerful demonstrations" and the proofs of mathematics carried on at Padua and elsewhere, to which I have already (...) referred. But I should expect even this investigation to produce nothing, for it seems to me that we already have at hand all the materials needed to explain Galileo's remarks on method when we have assembled Euclid, Archimedes, and Pappus. NEAL W. GILBERT University ol CaliIornia, Davis A "Nsw" DESCARTESEDITION?* Few definitive editions of a great philosopher's works have been more successful and influential than the Descartes edition which Charles Adam and Paul Tannery launched in 1896 and which Adam completed alone in 1913, long after the death of his collaborator and friend. The prestige of AT (as the edition is commonly called) is such that its texts in practice supersede even the originals? But this monument to French scholarship is now half a century old--almost seventy years old if we consider the date of the first volume. AT has always been a difficult edition to work with. Texts and comments that belong together are not infrequently scattered through its twelve massive volumes and the Supplement (AT XIII), chiefly because the launching of this edition stimulated a new search and resulted in the finding of documents and in critical work that had to be incorporated as the edition went along. Although what is now known as the Entretien avec Burman had already been discovered when AT got under way, the user will find no reference to it in the tables of contents or even in the list of Descartes' works in AT XIII. It is buried in AT V among the correspondence, and only Adam's own separate edition of it, with his French translation of the original [86], has assured this remarkable document of the wide readership it deserves. By now, AT is also woefully incomplete; important new material has been found since 1913, notably the bulk of Descartes' correspondence with Constantijn Huygens, and the Ballet for Queen Christina * (Editor's note. In view of the importance of both the project to bring out a new edition of the works of Descartes, and of preparing editions of the works of other major philosophers, it is hoped that Professor Sebba's discussion of some of the problems involved will prove helpful in stimulating further interest in these matters.) 1 See my Bibliographia cartesiana: A Critical Guide to the Descartes Literature, 1800-1960 (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, in press), to which numbers in square brackets in this paper refer. For a list and brief discussion of the most useful current editions see [74-92b] in this bibliography. 232 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY of Sweden. Let us also recall the tremendous progress made in editing seventeenth-century texts, especially as regards the necessary explanations. Compared to some of these new editions, the corresponding parts of AT look like a painter's canvas with mere outlines, the details still to be filled in. No wonder that the need for a new definitive Descartes edition has been obvious for some time? This is why the project of a revision of AT, now under way under the auspices of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, deserves careful scrutiny. The needs for a new edition transcend the field of Descartes studies proper. There has been an upsurge in seventeenthcentury studies in general, which is beginning to yield unexpected results in several ways. A great deal of new source material has been found; new critical work is being devoted to major and lesser Cartesians and antiCartesians ; as a result, some reassessments of historical development and doctrinal relationships seem to be in the making? Work on the proposed revision of AT has been entrusted to a group of out2In 1960 I said that "the most pressing desideratum [in Descartes research] is undoubtedly a new edition of the works of Descartes, although the great Adam-Tannery edition... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 327 conceptual impositions and consider nirvana in the light of its own "intentional infrastructure." Interpreted as doctrine, nirvana is a wooden category; as a path, subtle and paradoxical, a factor celebrated in the later Mahayana texts (samsara is nirvana; nirvana is samsara). In pleading for sensitivity to context, Welbon maintains that the Buddha was not a philosopher, much less a nineteenth-century one, but a saint and a (...) "genius as a soteriological tactician": Depending on the context and in particular the needs of the individual(s) to whom he spoke, his emphasis varied. To those full of self, his message was expressed negatively. To those full of fear, the message expressed confidence. To those full of suffering, the message expressed hope. (p. 300) Nirvana's "meanings," then, are many, and include "both annihilation and bliss, negation and affirmation, nonexistence and existence" (p. 302). Yet the author's primary concern is not simply to advance one more theory of nirvana, lined up beside the rest; it is rather to elucidate the role of theory in its relation to intercultural and history of religions data. Interpretations are themselves phenomena whose intentionality, context, or history must be clarified. The differences between the scholars surveyed in this book stem not so much from varying conclusions about given data as from differences of premise and method; they are differences of questions rather than answers. Nirvana, a religious ultimate without the conception of deity, has indeed been a classic stumbling block to Western theories. The encounter, Welbon suggests, documents not only a history of methodological shortcomings, but "the fragile and inadequate nature of our understanding of what religion itself may be" (p. 301). WILLIAM E. PADEN University of Vermont Hamann's Socratic Memorabilia, A Translation and Commentary. By James C. O'Flaherty. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967. Pp. xv+229. $7.50) Johann Georg Hamann, Philosophy and Faith. By W. M. Alexander. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. Pp. xii+212. Gld. 28.25) America continues to contribute more than a fair share to the study of Hamann ---even though the Hamann News-Letter, edited by James C. O'Flaherty, had to stop appearing in 1963. It is now the same O'Flaherty who opens wide the gates for the study of Hamann in the English-speaking world by translating the Socratic Memorabilia and providing an introduction and explanatory notes. The Memorabilia without doubt offer the best first approach to Hamann. t But so great is the obscurity of Hamann that it is by no means sure that the Memorabilia have now become an exotericum. Before reviewing O'Flaherty's book I shall therefore present the content of the Memorabilia. If only we had simple blow-by-blow accounts of all of his writings before we embark on a wholesale interpretation! a For decades they were available in Reclams Universalbibliothek (in c. 1914 at a price of about three cents) and have now (August, 1968) been republished (together with Hamann's Aesthetica in nuce) with excellent notes and a commentary by Sven-Aage Jorgensen (present price: about twenty cents). In 1959 F. Blanke published another amply annotated edition with an extensive thorough commentary. 328 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The purpose of the Memorabilia is to "convert" two friends of Hamann, Kant and Berens, from Enlightenment to Christianity (the two tried to do the opposite to Hamann) and to defend himself and his Christianity from their criticisms. To do so, Hamann decides to use philosophic rather than religious language. In so doing he will present himself as another Socrates, because, as Hamann sees it, it was the mission of Socrates to lead the Athenians to the unknown God, thus prefiguring the mission of St. Paul, and because Socrates opposed the then "enlighteners," viz., the Sophists. In so doing he furthermore compares some of his own character traits (for which he was blamed by Kant and Berens) and some events in his life with Socratic ones. But as he compares (equates) Socrates with the prophets and with Jesus, he by the same token compares (equates) himself with them. Of course, Hamann knows that the Enlightenment also admired Socrates. But it did so for entirely wrong reasons: they praised... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 97 supposed by actual idealism is above all moral and involves what Gentile describes as an aspect of divinity or infinity,as well as a concrete, historical aspect. The following chapter treats of the philosophy of "actual" idealism and compares the views of Kant and Gentile on relations between moral conscience and freedom. According to Yalentini, Gentile's idealism is essentially an ethical view. This chapter concludes with noting (...) that Gentile 's solution to the problem of historical knowledge differs profoundly from that of Hegel and Croce. For "reason" is not, for Gentile, a particular interpretation of historical process, but is rather the "reason" of consciousness in activity. In Chapter In, Valentini discusses Gentile's views on art and religion. The section on art concludes with a comparison between Gentile on feeling and Kant on the transcendental unity of apperception. Whereas art is supposed to be one abstract moment of spirit, religion is the other abstract moment. Valentini suggests that Gentile and Feuerbach hold similar religious views on the attributes of divinity, which are nothing other than the loftiest qualities which man feels to possess in his essence. The history of religion is then the history of the progressive humanization of God. Gentile's religion represents a sort of modem Catholicism in that it understands revelation as a fact of conscience, church as a historical institution, dogma as having a negative character and God as a member of the dialogue between God and man. Moreover, Gentile's Catholicism has a national character; it is the religion of the Italian people. Chapter Iv treats of the relations between individual and state. For, according to Gentile, an individual is inconceivableapart from the social relations which lie within him. Here Valentini distinguishes in detail the differences and similarities between the views of Hegel and Gentile on the relations between state and individual. The differences between the views of these two philosophers are due to the differences between their methods. The method of Hegel is empirical and historical, and examines the state (which remains historical) from an external point of view. According to an idealistic method, however, thought is not to be the spectator of a process, but in every instance, an actor, and philosophizing does not result from an analysis of historical reality, but from the negation of this reality in the name of an ideal, which philosophy is to draw from it (reality). The Appendix includes a critical evaluation of the theory of the dialectic. Here Valentini hopes to distinguish between the imaginary and the real or historical applications of the dialectic. He begins his evaluation by asking: Does the doctrine of the dialectic, like the philosophy of idealism, possess negative connotations, which cannot be separated from it? Valentini suggests that in order to answer this question, we must determine the extent to which the dialectical scheme is constitutive of every concept or truth in general. For this is the way in which Hegel intended that the dialectic be understood and evaluated. Some views in Hegel's philosophy of nature are then criticized according to empirical criteria. In conclusion, Valentini attempts to answer both "internal" and "external" criticisms of Marx's view of the dialectic, and shows that there are problems involved in its application, which still have to be resolved. Mv~ M. MILBURN 9 ~an Jos~ ~ate College Husserl und Kant: eine Untersuchung ~ber Husserls Verh~iltni~ zu Kant und zum Neubantianismus. By Iso Kern. (The Hague : Martinus Nijhoff, 1964.Pp. xxiii q- 448.) This is a very important book. In fact, it is indispensable for a study of Husserl and is, at the same time, almost as valuable for a study of Kant, for it deals with the kind of searching questions that must be asked when one deals with transcendental idealism in any one of its forms. But two reasons in particular, make this book significant. One is the fact that Iso Kern was able to make extensive use of hitherto unpublished materials (manuscripts, lecture notes, letters, etc.), available only in the Husserl Archives and here quoted for the first time--and 98 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY quoted in great numbers. The other is Kern's philosophical competence... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 123 become the origin of the norms of moral freedom and the formal origin of the laws os nature. The totality of the world may be interpreted in terms of the homo noumenon, or in terms of a totality of values, in terms of feeling or as the historical stream of experience. The interrelationship between the various aspects of reality is misconstrued by humanism when the modal (...) laws of the world are absolutized, and a single aspect is made the basic denominator of reality. The neo-Augustinian philosophy of Dooyeweerd recognizes the priority of faith and would unmask the alleged neutrality of theoretical reason as a dogma concealing the religious foundations of theoretical thought. The Archimedean point of Dooyeweerd's philosophy is not cogito ergo sum, nor vivo in [luxu continuo, etiam cogitans, but it is rather: Ego, in Christo regeneratus, etiam cogitans ex Christo vivo. The heart in its Biblical sense is the religious root and center of human existence, the center in which our temporal functions find their religious concentration and consummation of meaning. The Christian philosopher finds the ultimate origin of the world in God's sovereign and creative will, out of which originate all laws, and all things which are subject to law. The Christian philosopher finds the coherence of the modal diversity of the cosmos in a divine world order. The unity of the world is not a construction of philosophical thought, but is rather an enduring effect of God's sovereign power, so that each mode, each aspect of the cosmos is under divine law. Every aspect of the world is a sphere of law, sovereign under God in its own domain. God's laws constitute the universal valid determination and limitation of the individual things subject to them. Consequently, the Christian philosopher cannot hold to a theoretical conception of reality which is emancipated from the Biblical motive of creation, for all such conceptions are at least partially dominated by apostate religious motives. Nash does not attempt to refute Dooyeweerd's main thesis concerning the impossibility of a religiously neutral philosophy; however, his critical remarks do point out that more argumentation is needed in defense of that thesis, and that the introduction of a new terminology, shifts in the meaning of traditional terms, as well as vagueness and ambiguity, necessitate further elaboration on the part of Dooyeweerd and the members of his School. Nash's work successfully accomplishes a two-fold purpose: it calls attention to an important development within the Augustinian tradition of philosophy, and it raises issues which cannot be ignored by members of Dooyeweerd's own school as well as by philosophers who are self-critical of their own presuppositions. Nash's book deserves careful attention and it is to be hoped that it will direct the serious reader to a study of Dooyeweerd's own works and that it will stimulate others to take part in the critical study of a system of thought which "gives important and exciting direction to present and future thought and action and is, in the fullest sense of the word, a Christian Philosophy and a great one." DAWD H. FREEMAN University of Rhode Island Husserl et la pensde moderne--Husserl und das Denken der Neuzeit. Edited by H. L. Van Breda and J. Taminiaux. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959. Pp. x + 250.) This volume contains papers which were read at the Second International Colloquium on Phenomenology which was held at Krefeld in Germany, November 1-3, 1956, under the auspices of the Husserl Archives of Louvain and Cologne. Though the names which 124 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY appear in this volume are among the leading figures in European phenomenology, the content of the volume itself is somewhat disappointing. The editors note that the discussion of these papers was prolonged and lively but they regret that it was impossible to record and publish this part of the Colloquium. The reader of this volume can but share the regret of the editors in this case since many of the papers are but rough drafts, clearly meant to pose questions and lead into discussion and, of themselves, contain very little in the way of new or... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:148 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:1 JANUARY 199o David D. Roberts. BenedettoCroceand the Usesof Historicism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, a987. Pp. xii + 449- NP. This book is a remarkably good survey of Croce's enormous output on the general topics of philosophy, politics, and history. Roberts shows an outstanding mastery not only of Croce's voluminous writings, but of the whole secondary literature about (...) him since the first rebellion of his Italian "followers" in the early years of this century. Roberts's aim is to restore Croce to his proper place in the continuing dialogues and debates about historicism and hermeneutics. So far as one writer can achieve such a goal with one book, he has achieved it; if there are reasons to fear (nevertheless) that his achievement may not have the full effect that he hopes for, they are rooted in Croce's own personality and background, not in any failure on the part of Roberts. "[I]f we are to grasp the dominant concerns of Croce's intellectual life, we must approach him primarily as a Western intellectual who was seeking to address the central challenges facing our culture, not confine him to... his particular Italian, or Neapolitan context.... [O]n the deepest level he would have faced the same challenges had he been reared in The Hague or Philadelphia" (24). The final rhetorical flourish here is one of Roberts's rare tumbles into outright absurdity, for what is (perhaps) true in 1987 was not true in 1887. So we should be glad that the Italian background is never really lost sight of. Roberts's treatment of Croce's intellectual formation is rather impressionistic, but we do always have a vivid image of the mature Don Benedetto, the bourgeois Neapolitan worthy who was made a Senator of the Realm in 191o (a biographical fact that is not mentioned). The one serious fault in Roberts's account of Croce's formation--which is excellent on the influence of Vico and Marx--is his failure to take a properly European view of Hegel. He remains a prisoner of Croce's critique of Hegel, so that he is never able to see clearly how deeply Hegelian Croce was. He sees only the differences, and, as far as "historicism" is concerned, they are largely differences from a straw man. Having said that, almost nothing remains but praise. Croce maintained that philosophy was only the tool-bag of the historian. Roberts, who is an intellectual historian rather than a philosopher, takes Croce at his word, with the results that his book is the first (in English at least) to present Croce's thought in the way that Croce himself saw it. He gives us an insightful review of the "philosophy of the spirit" in about sixty pages, including the development of the concept of"utility" into "vitality" in Croce's last years. Then he embarks on a study of how Croce used his philosophical instruments in the theory and practice of historical and political interpretation. The theory of "absolute historicism" (and of how it can be "absolutely" true) is followed by "the religion of history." This was a kind of historicized Buddhism, in my view, until Croce startled everyone, in a942, by announcing that "we cannot but call ourselves Christians"; but it is only the comparison of Croce's historicism with Buddhism that enables us to see it as a "religion" at all. Roberts does not say this, but he does show clearly how far removed from any faith-religion Croce was. After this comes a long chapter on "Historicist Politics." I think this is the best thing in the book, because Roberts not only clearly displays the near-bankruptcy of Croce's BOOK REVIEWS ~49 actual politics as President of the Italian Liberal Party from 1944 to i947, but demonstrates through a study of Piero Gobetti that neither Croce's own conservatism nor his doctrinal rigidity was a necessary corollary of "absolute historicism" in politics. As the main intellectual beacon of opposition to Fascism during its twenty years of power, Croce enjoyed enormous prestige in 1944; but as Don Benedetto, with his great family estates... (shrink)

The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit recently upheld a United States District Court for the District of Maine Judge's decision to dismiss a Maine plaintiff's medical malpractice claim against a Massachusetts hospital defendant for want of personal jurisdiction over the hospital. The Court of Appeals found it unreasonable to hale hospitals into an out-of-state court merely because they accept out-of-state patients.Plaintiff Danielle Harlow is a Maine resident who suffered a stroke at the age of six while (...) undergoing a medical procedure at Children's Hospital of Boston, Massachusetts. The stroke, allegedly caused by the Hospital's negligence, led to brain damage resulting in partial paralysis and cognitive and behavioral impairments. The procedure was supposed to treat Harlow's rapid heartbeat, a condition related to her Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome. Harlow's pediatrician in Maine recommended that she visit Children's Hospital in Boston to treat her arrhythmia. (shrink)

This article argues that hope is of value in clinical ethics and that it can be important for clinicians to be sensitive to both the risks of false hope and the importance of retaining hope. However, this sensitivity requires an understanding of the complexity of hope and how it bears on different aspects of a well-functioning doctor-patient relationship. We discuss hopefulness and distinguish it from three different kinds of hope, or ‘hopes for’, and then relate (...) these distinctions back to differing accounts of autonomy. This analysis matters because it shows how an overly narrow view of the ethical obligations of a clinician to their patient, and autonomy, might lead to scenarios where patients regret the choices they make. (shrink)

There is a long history of medical research that involves intentionally infecting healthy people in order to study diseases and their treatments. Such research—what might be called “human challenge studies”—are an important strand of much current research—for example, in the development of vaccinations. The many international and national guidelines about the proper conduct of medical research do not specifically address human challenge studies. In this paper we review the guidelines on the risk of harm that healthy volunteers may be exposed (...) to in the course of medical research. We examine the ethical arguments that are implicit or explicit in these guidelines. We then ask whether there is reason for limiting such studies on grounds independent of risk of harm. We conclude that the major ethical concern with challenge studies is that of risk of harm and that the fact that a study is a challenge study is not a wrong in itself. (shrink)

Abstract:Human and animal research both operate within established standards. In the United States, criticism of the human research environment and recorded abuses of human research subjects served as the impetus for the establishment of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, and the resulting Belmont Report. The Belmont Report established key ethical principles to which human research should adhere: respect for autonomy, obligations to beneficence and justice, and special protections for vulnerable individuals and (...) populations. While current guidelines appropriately aim to protect the individual interests of human participants in research, no similar, comprehensive, and principled effort has addressed the use of (nonhuman) animals in research. Although published policies regarding animal research provide relevant regulatory guidance, the lack of a fundamental effort to explore the ethical issues and principles that should guide decisions about the potential use of animals in research has led to unclear and disparate policies. Here, we explore how the ethical principles outlined in the Belmont Report could be applied consistently to animals. We describe how concepts such as respect for autonomy and obligations to beneficence and justice could be applied to animals, as well as how animals are entitled to special protections as a result of their vulnerability. (shrink)

The study of landscape and place has become an increasingly fertile realm of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. In this new book of essays, selected from presentations at the first annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Geography, scholars investigate the experiences and meanings that inscribe urban and suburban landscapes. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi bring philosophy and geography into a dialogue with a host of other disciplines to explore a fundamental dialectic: while our collective and personal (...) activity modifies the landscape, in turn, the landscape modifies human identities, and social and environmental relations. Whether proposing a peripatetic politics, conducting a sociological analysis of building security systems, or critically examining the formation of New York City's municipal parks, each essay sheds distinctive light on this fascinating and engaging aspect of contemporary environmental studies. (shrink)

Important advances in biomedical and behavioral research ethics have occurred over the past few decades, many of them centered on identifying and eliminating significant harms to human subjects of research. Comprehensive attention has not been paid to the totality of harms experienced by animal subjects, although scientific and moral progress require explicit appraisal of these harms. Science is a public good and the prioritizing within, conduct of, generation of, and application of research must soundly address questions about which research is (...) morally defensible and valuable enough to support through funding, publication, tenure, and promotion. Likewise, educational pathways of re-imagined science are critical. (shrink)

This paper aims to resolve an unremarked-upon tension between Anne Conway’s commitment to the moral responsibility of created beings, or creatures, and her commitment to emanative, constant creation. Emanation causation has an atemporal aspect according to which God’s act of will coexists with its effect. There is no before or after, or past or future in God’s causal contribution. Additionally, Conway’s constant creation picture has it that all times are determined via divine emanation. Creaturely agency, by contrast, is fundamentally temporal, (...) occurring successively over time. It is unclear how creatures can count as emanative causes, which coexists with its effect, given that their agency is limited by time, proceeding from before to after, or past to future. Conway’s account of divine justice in the progress of time, however, requires that creatures are causally responsible. That is, moral responsibility requires causal responsibility. I propose that Conway’s distinction between vital motion and local motion enables a resolution of the tension. Vital motion contributes an atemporal aspect to creaturely agency so that creatures can count as secondary emanative causes. (shrink)

Hope and Gabbert review and distil the relevant research examining the mnemonic consequences associated with conversations within an eyewitness context. In particular, they focus on how co‐witnesses’ retellings of witnessed events impair the quantity and quality of information subsequently reported to law enforcement authorities. Notably, they also provide interventions (e.g., careful witness management and post incident procedures, use of warnings, early individual accounts, etc.) to mitigate these negative, well‐documented mnemonic effects.

ABSTRACTThe concept of need is often proposed as providing an additional or alternative criterion to cost‐effectiveness in making allocation decisions in health care. If it is to be of practical value it must be sufficiently precisely characterized to be useful to decision makers. This will require both an account of how degree of need for an intervention is to be determined and a prioritization rule that clarifies how degree of need and the cost of the intervention interact in determining the (...) relative priority of the intervention. Three common features of health care interventions must be accommodated in a comprehensive theory of need: the probabilistic nature of prognosis ; the time course of effects; and the fact that the most effective treatments often combine more than one intervention. These common features are problematic for the concept of need. We outline various approaches to prioritization on the basis of need and argue that some approaches are more promising than others. (shrink)

The risks of harm to nonhuman primates, and the absence of benefits for them, are critically important to decisions about nonhuman primate research. Current guidelines for review and practice tend to be permissive for nonhuman primate research as long as minimal welfare requirements are fulfilled and human medical advances are anticipated. This situation is substantially different from human research, in which risks of harms to the individual subject are typically reduced to the extent feasible. A risk threshold is needed for (...) the justification of research on nonhuman primates, comparable to the way risk thresholds are set for vulnerable human subjects who cannot provide informed consent. Much of the laboratory research conducted today has inadequate standards, leading to common physical, psychological, and social harms. (shrink)

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is devoted to the topic of human happiness. Yet, although Aristotle's conception of happiness is central to his whole philosophical project, there is much controversy surrounding it. Hope May offers a new interpretation of Aristotle's account of happiness - one which incorporates Aristotle's views about the biological development of human beings. May argues that the relationship amongst the moral virtues, the intellectual virtues, and happiness, is best understood through the lens of developmentalism. On this view, happiness (...) emerges from the cultivation of a number of virtues that are developmentally related. May goes on to show how contemporary scholarship in psychology, ethical theory and legal philosophy signals a return to Aristotelian ethics. Specifically, May shows how a theory of motivation known as Self-Determination Theory and recent research on goal attainment have deep affinities to Aristotle's ethical theory. May argues that this recent work can ground a contemporary virtue theory that acknowledges the centrality of autonomy in a way that captures the fundamental tenets of Aristotle's ethics. (shrink)

It is suggested that wittgenstein's picture theory of meaning is, In part a synthesis and resolution of the early metaphysics of moore and the theory of judgment held by russell about 1910. Moore's theory of the objective existence of concepts and their propositional role is considered. Russell's unsuccessful attempt at the problem of the false proposition is discussed. The ptm offers a more successful solution, Through the concept of logical form, Akin to the russellian concept of order. But this solution (...) still fails because it does not hold for ordinary language. (shrink)

I attempt first to disentangle three aspects of Kant’s distinction between perfect and imperfect duty. There is the central distinction between principles of duty contrary to that which is contradictory in conception/consistent in conception but contradictory in will. There is also a distinction between essential and non-essential duties: those which cannot, or occasionally can, be passed over consistent with the requirements of morality. Finally, there is a distinction between duties that exhibit a scalar aspect – degrees of goodness or virtue (...) – and duties that do not. My aim is to show how these distinct considerations can be reconciled as aspects of a single distinction, and I conclude that the remarkable complexity of Kant’s perfect/imperfect distinction is actually a strength, rather than a weakness. (shrink)

The intent of this book focuses on Australia’s First Nations truth, voice, recognition, diversity, and respect. Hope O’Chin explains that knowledge about Australian First Nations culture and learning can be seen through new conceptual lens, which she refers to as an Ontology of Dreaming Hope for Australians. The book proposes to move from ontological propositions embedded in pedagogies and methodologies that center on the relevance of Indigenous epistemes and ways of doing. O’Chin offers a conceptual framing for engaging (...) with Indigenous peoples, and forming communities of belongingness and relationality. She offers suggestions for ways in which art and education can act as ‘healing’ and a way forward towards a more inclusive civil society. Reflexive practice, ethnographic principles, and action research is described in a way that methodologies provide an understanding of a sense of Belonging. O'Chin argues that theoretical research, art, and educational practice can add to the value of determining a strategy of Indigenous art investment within Australia, and to address how art and education can be used to validate contemporary expression of Aboriginality within contemporary Australian society. Ultimately, the book is about Indigenous strengths and what Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing can offer, and how one might go about honouring and working in this way respectfully. (shrink)

Health care systems across the world are unable to afford the best treatment for all patients in all situations. Choices have to be made. One key ethical issue that arises for health authorities is whether the principle of the “rule of rescue” should be adopted or rejected. According to this principle more funding should be available in order to save lives of identifiable, compared with unidentifiable, individuals. Six reasons for giving such priority to identifiable individuals are considered. All are rejected. (...) It is concluded that the principle of the rule of rescue should not be used in determining the allocation of health resources. (shrink)

Issues in medical ethics are rarely out of the media and it is an area of ethics that has particular interest for the general public as well as the medical practitioner. This short and accessible introduction provides an invaluable tool with which to think about the ethical values that lie at the heart of medicine. Tony Hope deals with thorny moral questions, such as euthanasia and the morality of killing, and also explores political questions such as: how should health (...) care resources be distributed fairly? (shrink)

Raanan Gillon is stepping down as editor of this journal after twenty years. Thirty years ago he had the vision to see that critical thinking in ethics should be central to medical practice. Through his enormous abilities as writer, editor, philosopher and doctor he has been one of the pioneers, working in the UK, who has made that vision a reality. In the 1970s many medical schools in the UK set up student-run groups that focused on medical ethics. These followed (...) the lead given by Ted Shotter who had founded the flagship London Medical Group. I first met Ra when he was the keynote speaker at a national conference of these student groups in Windsor Great Park. I was a medical student at the time. After Ra's talk I asked a question, which Ra answered perfectly satisfactorily. In the afternoon, when we were let off the hook (so that Ted could watch the Oxford versus Cambridge Boat Race), Ra suggested that we go for a walk. He thought that I deserved a fuller answer to my question. I was greatly impressed by the careful thought, lively interest, and time, that he gave to the issue that I had raised. I came to know Ra very well when I joined him as associate editor of this journal. Shortly after I started, he sent me a paper to review. He told me that this was a paper by a young doctor who had not previously published in medical ethics. He was keen to be encouraging. If I did not think the paper should be taken by the journal as it was, could I provide constructive feedback so the author could develop the article with a view to publication? The example and lead that Ra gave were clear. …. (shrink)

The “best interests” of the patient are widely seen as a cornerstone of medical practice. They are the explicit legal standard for medical care in the case of patients who lack capacity to consent to treatment.The best interests of the individual patient have, of course, long been compromised for the sake of other potential patients—in infectious disease control for example. The question of the ethics of such compromise became a hot issue, for UK doctors, about fifteen years ago in the (...) context of health care rationing. At that time the fact that there are insufficient resources to provide all patients, in all circumstances, with the best possible treatment became explicit. Faced with this uncomfortable truth, doctors tended to divide into two camps. Some wanted to play no role in decisions about resource allocation. They continued to be guided by the single ethic of each individual patient's best interests. However, “best interests” could be interpreted as “best” given the treatments that were made available by those who determined the allocation of resources. Others took the opposite approach: since choices had to be made as to the best use of available resources, doctors ought to be playing a significant role in making these choices.This polarisation has softened over time. Doctors have become more at ease with the idea that some treatments are not, given the overall resources, cost-effective, even if they are the best available. Clinical guidelines increasingly are influenced by cost-effectiveness. To provide the best health care overall, within the available resources, doctors aim to provide good care for each individual patient, but they do not always provide the best care. (shrink)

New Zealand is a South Pacific nation with a history of British colonization since the 19th century. It has a population of over four million people and, like other indigenous societies such as in Australia and Canada, Māori are now a minority in their land, and their experience of colonization is that of being dominated by settlers to the detriment of their own systems of society.

It feels like there’s two of you inside—like there’s another half of you, which is my anorexia, and then there’s the real K [own name], the real me, the logic part of me, and it’s a constant battle between the two. The anorexia almost does become part of you, and so in order to get it out of you I think you do have to kind of hurt you in the process. I think it’s almost inevitable. We came to the (...) concept of authenticity belatedly, one might say. We had been talking to people who had a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa about their experiences of living with their condition, and though we had not raised issues of authenticity or identity ourselves, they often did. They struggled with questions of .. (shrink)

The quickening of interest in the great philosophical figure of Aquinas which has taken place during the last few years is a wellattested phenomenon. Of recent years there has been a distinct recognition that this mediaeval period was a most important time in the development of the human race, and that it has many urgent lessons for a modern age which has begun to realize that science and industry and mechanical efficiency have not succeeded in building such a perfect society (...) as the optimistic Victorians had hastily hoped. (shrink)

Anne Conway’s commitment to the moral responsibility of creatures, or created beings, is seemingly in tension with her unique metaphysics. Conway is committed to individual moral responsibility. Conway insists that an innocent person ought not be punished for someone else’s sin. Interesting recent work highlights a unique aspect of Conway’s position that creatures are multiplicities: not only are creatures integrated into the larger whole of creation, but also their parts are mutually integrated into one another. The latter, which I will (...) call ‘ontological overlap,’ renders the boundaries between creatures unclear. However, creatures must be distinct enough from each other to provide a proper subject for individual moral responsibility. This contribution suggests that Conway’s account of vital power can resolve an apparent tension between ontological overlap and individual moral responsibility and, more broadly, that Conway has a relational metaphysics of moral subjecthood. (shrink)

This paper makes explicit some issues of gender that have been implicitly raised in recent discussions concerning the recovery of European women's contributions to the history of seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century philosophy. A useful way to bring these issues to light is to distinguish between the project of recovering women's contributions and the project of justifying their inclusion. The former project is an important effort to provide a more accurate understanding of the history of philosophy. Within the latter project, there is (...) a distinction between justifying the inclusion of a specific author and justifying women's inclusion in general. The suggestion that we need to justify women's inclusion in general is fundamentally illegitimate because it presumes that either women's philosophical ability is up for debate or that their contributions require special explanation, both of which are misogynist. (shrink)

Conway characterizes freedom in apparently contradictory ways. She describes God as the most free, yet he is necessitated to act perfectly due to his wisdom and goodness. Created beings, by contrast, sin. They are not necessitated to do so. This suggests that Conway has a binary account of freedom: divine freedom is a matter of being necessitated by wisdom and goodness, whereas creaturely freedom consists in indifference, understood as a power to act, or not act. Despite the apparently conflicting remarks, (...) I argue that Conway has a single account of freedom as spontaneity. Conway defines spontaneity in terms of causing one’s own action independent of external causes. I suggest that spontaneity is more precisely understood as an intrinsic power aimed at the good in Conway’s metaphysics, and that this account of freedom can combine necessity and contingency. Rather than a binary, Conway offers an account of freedom in creation that has it on a continuum with divine freedom. (shrink)