Max Weber’s reply to Werner Sombart’s lecture on technology and culture, presented at the first meeting of the German Sociological Society held in Frankfurt in 1910, is discussed in terms of its conventional and improvised character as a distinctive mode of ‘sociological’ speech. Emphasis is placed on the specific rhetorical circumstances that gave rise to these remarks, especially with regard to Weber’s status as an authorized speaker at the meeting, and their formulation as a response to Marxist theories accepted or (...) criticized by members of the audience. In characterizing the relationship between technology and culture specifically as a topic of sociological discourse, Weber’s comments therefore constitute a speech-act in their own right. They both conform to the protocols of ‘value-free’ academic debate upheld by the Society and experiment with this new genre and forum of intellectual discussion. Weber’s innovative aspirations are ultimately in tension with his efforts to routinize or even rationalize the scholarly vocation ( Beruf) of sociology as both an inward calling and an institutionalized profession that can speak critically to the most pressing and relevant issues of the day. (shrink)

Taking Max Weber's conception of the modern capitalist world system as a classical precedent, and with reference to a series of analytical schemas on capital formation, this essay takes three recent books as a starting point for examining the revival of critical theoretical attention to 'the new capitalism'. The Social Structures of the Economy by Pierre Bourdieu focuses on the erosion of the separation between business and household economies by providing a case study of the construction boom in single-family dwellings (...) which replaced the public housing movement in 1980s France. Also concentrating on recent French history, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, in their monumental book The New Spirit of Capitalism, argue that the post-industrial restructuring of 'formally free' labour was provoked by countercultural protest in the 1960s and further justified by managerial discourses advocating postmodern 'flexibilization' in the 1990s. Finally, Nigel Thrift's Knowing Capitalism enumerates recent examples demonstrating how the 'rational' accounting of economic capital is increasingly expanded and intensified by commodified cultural circuits which facilitate flows of information between business schools, management consultants and entrepreneurial gurus and in a variety of everyday spaces and ordinary practices. While each of these works convincingly projects the resurrection of 'the spirit of capitalism' on local and global scales, they have less to say about the underlying political dynamics or emerging alternatives to this process. (shrink)

'The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel' offers the best contemporary work on Georg Simmel, written by the best scholars currently working in this field. Original, authoritative and wide-ranging, the critical assessments of this volume will make it ideal for Simmel students and scholars alike. 'Anthem Companions to Sociology' offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures (...) in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with both an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society. (shrink)

This article commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of The Sociological Imagination by recalling, renewing and updating C. Wright Mills’ pledge to expand a politically aware, self-reflective and publicly accessible intellectual culture between aestheticism and scientism. We begin by sketching how Mills’ ‘bifocal’ vision of the translation between the close-up perspective on personal milieus and the longer view of social structures contrasts with recent calls for a public sociology which would sustain its professional legitimacy while reviving its critical conscience. To illustrate this (...) point, we argue that his project can be reframed in a way that ‘provincializes’ the universalizing claims and scientific aspirations of much of North American sociology by exposing its imperial unconscious in pre- and post-war movements toward the professionalization and scientization of knowledge. Here our focus turns to the prospects for a ‘sociology of empire’ to trace imperial forms which are symptomatically manifested both in the discipline’s assumptions about historical progress and in Mills’ critique of these assumptions. Finally, with an example from the history of British colonialism in Egypt, we show how, despite its blindspots, Mills’ vision of the sociological imagination implicitly projects an alternative ‘sociological map’ with distinct vantage points that can account for the changing cultural tasks of our time, especially concerning how collectives of human and non-human agents are unequally mediated within networks of power. We conclude by revisiting Mills’ distinctive approach to ‘the craft of sociology’, considered more as a prayer than a profession, and undertaken more as a personal and political calling than as career. (shrink)

The articles brought together in this double-length section of the Annual Review of Theory, Culture & Society focus on two intertwined strands of the thought of Georg Simmel, both of them neglected until recent years. A first bears on what might be called Simmel’s metaphysics of the social, or what he himself once called ‘sociological metaphysics’. A second strand centres on the renewed contemporary relevance of Simmel’s ideas about money economies and their relation to precarious individual life-situations in an age (...) of global economic turbulence. Current sensibilities in the wake of global economic crisis and the demise of some of the more euphoric sociologies of globalization of the last two decades provide a timely setting for a reappraisal of Simmel’s thinking. With the completion in 2012 of the Suhrkamp edition of Simmel’s collected works, Simmel’s themes need to be explored more deeply, including particularly his thinking about lived experience, transcendence, death, fragmentary worlds of value, and allegorical representation. This issue of the journal showcases some of the latest scholarly work and foregrounds several pivotal primary pieces unavailable in English until now. (shrink)

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

While the opposing paradigms of globalization and fragmentation compete in often bloody and destructive ways in the world today, this book convincingly reminds us of the importance of finding out more about the complex and changing ways in which we are connected. The authors demonstrate that the more we understand our connectedness and deal with its consequences, the less dependent and helpless we become. The critical, multidisciplinary perspectives they offer cover a wide range of subjects, from the world wide web (...) to medieval poetry, nations and gender, cancer narratives and money, emotion management and the financial markets, and the American civilizing process and the repression of shame. The contributions bear witness to Elias's innovative achievements while the authors continue his stunning explorations, extending them into other areas of the humanities and the sciences, and presenting their own wide-ranging and penetrating insights into our mutual dependence. Contributors are Jorge Arditi, Godfried Van Benthem Van Den Bergh, Reinhard Blomert, Stephen Guy-Bray, Thomas M. Kemple, Hermann Korte, Helmut Kuzmics, Stephen Mennell, Thomas Salumets, Thomas J. Scheff, Ulrich C. Teucher, Annette Treibel, and Cas Wouters. (shrink)

This Element defends a version of the classical theory of divine ideas, the containment exemplarist theory of divine ideas. The classical theory holds that God has ideas of all possible creatures, that these ideas partially explain why God's creation of the world is a rational and free personal action, and that God does not depend on anything external to himself for having the ideas he has. The containment exemplarist version of the classical theory holds that God's own nature is the (...) exemplar of all possible creatures, and therefore that God's ideas of possible creatures are in some sense ideas of himself. Containment exemplarism offers a monotheism fit for metaphysics, insofar as it is coherent, simple, and explanatorily powerful; and offers a metaphysics fit for monotheism, insofar as it leaves God truly worthy of the unconditional worship which Christians, along with Jews and Muslims, aspire to offer to God. (shrink)

This paper examines some aspects of Spinoza's metaphysics of the essences of modes.2 I situate Spinoza's use of the notion of essence as a response to traditional, Aristotelian, ways of thinking about essence. I argue that, although Spinoza rejects part of the Aristotelian conception of essence, according to which it is in virtue of its essence that a thing is a member of a kind, he nevertheless retains a different part of such a conception, according to which an essence is (...) some structural feature of a thing which causally explains other, non-essential features. I go on to develop an account of Spinoza's metaphysics of essence, according to which essences, what he sometimes calls formal essences, are produced by the divine essence prior to and independent of the creation of finite modes, and according to which essences are the formal or exemplar causes of finite modes. I then argue that finite modes, in virtue of the formal essences which they actualize, are genuine causal relata. Finally, I offer some speculations about Spinoza's answer to the question, "Why, in a necessitarian cosmos filled with formal essences, should there be temporal finite modes at all?". (shrink)

Ward examines Scotus's arguments for his distinctive version of hylomorphism, the view that at least some material objects are composites of matter and form. It considers Scotus's reasons for adopting hylomorphism, and his accounts of how matter and form compose a substance, how extended parts, such as the organs of an organism, compose a substance, and how other sorts of things, such as the four chemical elements and all the things in the world, fail to compose a substance. It highlights (...) the extent to which Scotus draws on his metaphysics of essential order to explain why some things can compose substance and why others cannot. Throughout the book, contemporary versions of hylomorphism are discussed in ways that both illumine Scotus's own views and suggest ways to advance contemporary debates. (shrink)

In his ethical writings, Duns Scotus emphasized both divine freedom and natural goodness, and these seem to conflict with each other in various ways. I offer an interpretation of Scotus which takes seriously these twin emphases and shows how they cohere. I argue that, for Scotus, all natural laws obtain just by the natures of actual things. Divine commands, such as the Ten Commandments, contingently track natural laws but do not make natural laws to be natural laws. I present textual (...) evidence for this claim. I also show how this view of Scotus on the natural law is consistent with a number of troubling passages. Scotus’s ethical theory implies that there are genuinely moral reasons for acting which are not absolutely binding (because subject to a divine command or permission otherwise) and also some moral reasons for acting which are absolutely binding (because not thus subject). (shrink)

This article presents a new interpretation and critique of some aspects of Aquinas’s metaphysics of relations, with special reference to a theological problem—the relation of God to creatures—that catalyzed Aquinas’s and much medieval thought on the ontology of relations. I will show that Aquinas’s ontologically reductive theory of categorical real relations should equip him to identify certain relations as real relations, which he actually identifies as relations of reason, most notably the relation of God to creatures.

The two most important concepts in Duns Scotus's theology of the Atonement are satisfaction and merit. Just what these amount to and how they function in his theory are heavily conditioned by two more general commitments: Scotus's voluntarism, which includes the claim that nearly all of God's relations with the created order are contingent; and his formulation of the Franciscan Thesis, which holds that fixing the sin problem is not the primary purpose of God's Incarnation in Christ and that if (...) Adam hadn't sinned God would have become incarnate anyway. In this essay I will discuss this theoretical background of Scotus's atonement theology before moving on to discuss his understanding of merit and satisfaction, how these are related, and how they relate to the theoretical background. I will engage some important recent scholarly attempts to position Scotus's Atonement theology as not quite as anti-Anselmian as history has characterized it, arguing that one of these attributes to Scotus an understanding of merit which cannot be Scotus's in fact, since it entails a restriction on divine freedom that Scotus certainly would reject. (shrink)

I will argue that a desert-based justification for treating a person in a certain way is a justification that holds this treatment to be justified simply by what the person is like and what he or she has done, independent of (1) the fact that treating the person in this way will have good effects (or that treating people like him or her in this way will have such effects); (2) the fact that this treatment is called for by some (...) (justified) institution or practice; or (3) the fact that the person could have avoided being subject to this treatment by choosing appropriately, and therefore cannot complain of it. I will explore the implications of this understanding of desert for the role of desert-based justifications of blame, punishment, and economic reward. (shrink)

This paper examines some of the metaphysical assumptions behind Aquinas’s denials that a human rational soul unites with matter at conception and that a human rational soul is capable of developing and arranging the organic parts of an embryo. The paper argues that Buridan does not share these assumptions and holds that a soul is capable of developing and arranging organic parts. It argues that, given hylomorphism about the nature of organisms, including human beings, Buridan’s view is philosophically superior to (...) Aquinas’s in several respects. Finally, the paper poses an apparent inconsistency between several of Buridan’s texts on this topic and attempts to show that the inconsistency is merely apparent. (shrink)

Gaunilo’s Lost Island Objection to Anselm’s Ontological Argument aims to show that if Anselm’s argument can establish the existence of a greatest conceivable being then a very similar argument can establish the existence of a greatest conceivable island. The challenge for the defender of Anselm is to identify the relevant disanalogy between Anselm’s argument and Gaunilo’s, in order to explain why Anselm’s can succeed while Gaunilo’s fails. In this essay I take up this challenge. Reflection on the differences between the (...) nature of islands and the nature of being yields the relevant disanalogy. (shrink)

The two most important concepts in Duns Scotus's (1265/6‐1308) theology of the Atonement are satisfaction and merit. Just what these amount to and how they function in his theory are heavily conditioned by two more general commitments: Scotus's voluntarism, which includes the claim that nearly all of God's relations with the created order are contingent; and his formulation of the Franciscan Thesis, which holds that fixing the sin problem is not the primary purpose of God's Incarnation in Christ and that (...) if Adam hadn't sinned God would have become incarnate anyway. In this essay I will discuss the theoretical background of Scotus's atonement theology—his voluntarism and his version of the Franciscan Thesis—before moving on to discuss his understanding of merit and satisfaction, how these are related, and how they relate to the theoretical background. I will engage some important recent scholarly attempts to position Scotus's Atonement theology as not quite as anti‐Anselmian as history has characterized it, arguing that one of these attributes to Scotus an understanding of merit which cannot be Scotus's in fact, since it entails a restriction on divine freedom that Scotus certainly would reject. (shrink)

Could God command us to hate him? Here I offer two arguments that He cannot. I also argue that this restriction on God’s power is consistent with a strong doctrine of omnipotence according to which God can do anything broadly logical possible.

This paper presents an original interpretation of John Duns Scotus’s theory of hylomorphism. I argue that Scotus thinks, contrary to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, that at least some of the extended parts of a substance—paradigmatically the organs of an animal—are themselves substances. Moreover, Scotus thinks that the form of corporeity is nothing more than the substantial forms of these organic parts. I offer an account of how Scotus thinks that the various extended parts of an animal are substantially unified. (...) First, a plurality of substances can become parts of a complex substance if they are essentially ordered to one another in the order of final causality. Second, a plurality of substances do become parts of a complex substance if they are together informed by a soul. The paper closes with some reflections on some of the ramifications of the substancehood of organic parts on the function of soul. (shrink)

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

This paper develops a view of worship according to which worship is a certain sort of _life orientation_, and argues that according to the Bible, the worship of God normatively is _non-instrumental, comprehensive, unconditional orientation of one’s life toward God_. It then develops a biblical view about how this sort of worship of God is _possible_. Finally, it argues that it is _good_ to worship God in this way only if God is an Anselmian being—_that than which nothing greater can (...) be conceived_—and suggests that the God of the Bible, the Psalms in particular, is in fact an Anselmian being. (shrink)

I do not think scholars have thought hard enough about Scotus’s position that there are necessary moral truths over which God has no control. Just about everyone who writes on Scotus’s ethics has noted this position, but none has paid sufficient philosophical attention to it. It turns out that necessary moral truths are logically necessary (in Scotus’s sense of logical modalities), and the fact that they are logically necessary significantly alters how we should understand radical-sounding claims in Scotus to the (...) effect that God can do whatever is logically possible. Demonstrably, what Scotus means is that God can do whatever it is logically possible for God to do, and this class is rather smaller than the class of the logically possible simpliciter. (shrink)

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

I motivate and develop a view, found in John Duns Scotus, concerning God's explanatory role in the possibility of possible natures. A possible nature is a nature which can be instanced. The view is that possible natures have their possibility due to the coherence of their simple parts, but the simples which make up natures are themselves ex nihilo productions of divine intellect.

This paper treats a heretofore-unnoticed concept in the history of the philosophical discussion of human freedom, a kind of freedom that is not defined solely in terms of the causal power of the agent. Instead, the exercise of freedom essentially involves the non-occurrence of something. That being free involves the non-occurrence, that is, the absence, of an act may seem counterintuitive. With the exception of those specifically treated in this paper, philosophers tend to think of freedom as intimately involved with (...) volition, the judging or deciding activity of the will that votes in favor of or against a proposed action. However, there are two thinkers who endorse a view where not willing constitutes human freedom. Our analysis focuses on the views of Malebranche and Locke. Both invoke a notion dubbed here as ‘absential suspension.’ On this view, freedom is associated not with the power of volition, but rather with this kind of suspension. (shrink)

This article reports the results of a study of attitudes of future business executives towards issues of social responsibility and business ethics. The 455 respondents, who were MBA students during 1985 at one dozen schools from various regions in the United States, were asked to respond to a series of open-ended and closed-ended questions. From the responses to the questions the authors were able to conclude that future executives display considerable sensitivity, though to varying degrees, towards ethical issues in business. (...) Women, in particular, tend to evince strong feelings regarding such issues. (shrink)

Conceptions of acceptability-based moral or political justification take it that authoritative acceptability constitutes, or contributes to, validity, or justification. There is no agreement as to what bar for authoritativeness such justification may employ. The paper engages the issue in relation to (i) the level of idealization that a bar for authoritativeness, ψ, imparts to a standard of acceptability-based justification, S, and (ii) the degree of discursive purchase of the discursive standing that S accords to people when it builds ψ. I (...) argue that (i) and (ii) are interdependent: high idealization values entail low discursive purchase, while high degrees of purchase require low idealization values. I then distinguish between alethic conceptions of justification that prioritize ends that commit to high idealization values, and recognitive conceptions that favour high discursive purchase. On this basis, I argue for a moderately recognitivist constraint on idealization. To render the recognitive discursive minimum available to relevant people at the site of justification, S should set ψ low enough so that it is a genuine option for actual people to reject relevant views in ways that S recognizes as authoritative. (shrink)

" Our various cultures are symbolic environments or "spiritual ecologies" within which the Human Eros can thrive. This is how we inhabit the earth. Encircling and sustaining our cultural existence is nature.

Discussion of real cases encountered by medical students has been advocated as a component of medical ethics education. Suggested benefits include: a focus on the actual problems that medical students confront; active learner involvement; and facilitation of an exploration of the meaning of their own values in relation to professional behaviour. However, the approach may also carry risks: students may focus too narrowly on particular clinical topics or show a preference for discussing legal problems that may appear to have clearer (...) solutions. Teaching may therefore omit areas generally considered to be important components of the curriculum. In this paper, the authors present an analysis of the moral problems raised by medical students in response to a request to describe ethically problematic cases they had encountered during two clinical attachments, for the purpose of educational discussion at case-based seminars. We discuss the problems raised and compare the content of the cases to the UK Consensus Statement on core content of learning. The authors also describe the approaches that the students used to undertake an initial analysis of the problems raised, and consider possible implications for the development of medical ethics education. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Many scholars and managers endorse the idea that the primary purpose of the firm is to make money for its owners. This shareholder wealth maximization objective is justified on the grounds that it maximizes social welfare. In this article, the first of a two-part set, we argue that, although this shareholder primacy model may have been appropriate in an earlier era, it no longer is, given our current state of economic and social affairs. To make our case, we employ a (...) utilitarian moral standard and examine the apparent logical sequence behind the link between shareholder wealth maximization and social welfare. Upon close empirical and conceptual scrutiny, we find that utilitarian criteria do not support the shareholder model; that is, shareholder wealth maximization is only weakly linked to social welfare maximization. In view of the dubious validity of this sequential argument, we outline some of the features of a superior corporate objective—a variant of normative stakeholder theory. In the second article, we will advance and defend our preferred alternative and then discuss some institutional arrangements under which it could be implemented. (shrink)

By the mid-1600s, the commonsense, manifest picture of the world associated with Aristotle had been undermined by skeptical arguments on the one hand and by the rise of the New Science on the other. What would be the scientific image to succeed the Aristotelian model? Thomas Lennon argues here that the contest between the supporters of Descartes and the supporters of Gassendi to decide this issue was the most important philosophical debate of the latter half of the seventeenth century. (...) Descartes and Gassendi inspired their followers with radically opposed perspectives on space, the objects in it, and how these objects are known. Lennon maintains that differing concepts on these matters implied significant moral and political differences: the Descartes/Gassendi conflict was typical of Plato's perennial battle of the gods and giants, and the crux of that enduring philosophical struggle is the exercise of moral and political authority. Lennon demonstrates, in addition, that John Locke should be read as having taken up Gassendi's cause against Descartes. In Lennon's reinterpretation of the history of philosophy between the death dates of Gassendi and Malebranche, Locke's acknowledged opposition to Descartes on some issues is applied to the most important questions of Locke exegesis. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

This paper explores the idea of robust discursive equality on which respect-based conceptions of justificatory reciprocity often draw. I distinguish between formal and substantive discursive equality and argue that if justificatory reciprocity requires that people be accorded formally equal discursive standing, robust discursive equality should not be construed as requiring standing that is equal substantively, or in terms of its discursive purchase. Still, robust discursive equality is purchase sensitive: it does not obtain when discursive standing is impermissibly unequal in purchase. (...) I then showcase different candidate conceptions of purchase justice, and draw conclusions about the substantive commitments of justificatory reciprocity. (shrink)

Argues that there is a puzzle about how our own thick concepts, which motivate us simply because they are our own, can be legitimated in any stronger sense than that, from a perspective which is not an “insider perspective.”.