This article seeks to consider the ways in which substitutes for religion have been found both through a discussion of the treatment of religion in the classical sociological theories of Weber; Durkheim and Marx and then the way in which in modern societies alternative sets of belief and practices which fulfi l the same function as religion have been developed in the Communist and the postCommunist and Western worlds.

Este artículo tiene como objetivo exponer algunas de las principales cuestiones que se debaten bajo el término de multiculturalismo en el marco de un contexto político de gran amplitud. Se centra tanto en el tema de las minorías nacionales y sus demandas de autonomía política como en las minorías étnicas inmigrantes y su establecimiento en el seno de los Estados de acogida. Ambos tipos de minorías son percibidos como fuente de problemas en la Europa Occidental, el sudeste de Europa y (...) la antigua Unión Soviética y los debates que emergen en cada una de estas zonas geográficas impactan sobre su gestión y gobierno en el resto de las áreas mencionadas. Por último, se reconoce que la naturaleza del debate ha sufrido un gran cambio como consecuencia del actual liderazgo estadounidense en la lucha contra el terrorismo. (shrink)

This essay gives a close reading of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex in light of Schelling's discussion of theodicy as teleology. The article raises the question of the connection between ethics and time, and it argues that ethical categories are really temporal ones, so much so that it would make little sense to posit a choice between good and evil as if there were two simultaneous options. Instead, the story of Oedipus shows us how Thebes is always to precede if one is (...) to reach Colonus, that evil precedes and enables the good. (shrink)

Three leading scholars examine one of the oldest professorships, the Lady Margaret's Chair of Divinity at Cambridge, plotting its development in the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history. The current Lady Margaret's Professor Graham Stanton sets the scene with an introduction briefly considering theology at Cambridge before 1502 and after 1649. In the two main chapters Richard Rex - an authority on John Fisher, first holder of the Chair - deploys new evidence to propose changes in the list of (...) early professors and shows how their appointment and dismissal reflected the vagaries of the Reformation; and Patrick Collinson investigates how the Elizabethan and early Stuart professors continued to be caught up in the religious and political turmoil of the times. There is a complete list of holders from 1502 to the present. (shrink)

Human geography, as a subject, has become widely recognized since its connections with the social sciences have widened and deepended the study of people, places and social structures. Horizons in Human Geography provides a clear and accessible sketch map of some of the latest and most promising developments in the subject. The book starts by assessing the role and limitations of techniques, models and theories and proceeds to provide a broad-ranging overview of the major social, cultural, urban, regional, political, economic (...) and environmental issues confronting geographers today. Contents: Introduction; Part I: Beyond The Quantitative Revolution; Part II: People and Places, Societies and Spaces; Part III: Explorations in the City; IV: Landscapes of Production; Part V: Regional Geographies and Global Perspectives; Part VI: Politicising The Environment. Contributors: Derek Gregory, Rex Walford, Michael J. Clark, Alan Wilson, R. J. Johnston, John Eyles, Denis Cosgrove, Linda McDowell, Roger Lee, Keith Bassett, John Short, Richard Dennis, Ian Douglas, Doreen Massey, Richard Meegan, John Harriss, Barbara Hariss, Nigel Thrift, Michael Taylor, Peter Taylor, Graham E. Smith, Stuart Cobridge, Judith Rees, Timothy O'Riordan and Bill Mead. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Background John Rawls History of The Law of Peoples Rawls's Law of Peoples The Importance of The Law of Peoples and its Reception How the Book is Organized Some Areas Still to Be Addressed Notes.

The notion of rule utilitarianism (a twentieth-century addition to the canon of utilitarian thought) has been discussed under two main headings—ideal-rule utilitarianism and 'indirect' utilitarianism. The distinction between them is often hazy. But we can sketch out each perspective along three different dimensions, contrasting the two conceptions of rule utilitarianism at each of three main hinge points: (1) the grounding of rules, (2) the allowed complexity of rules, (3) the conflict of rules. These two profiles constitute ideal types, but they (...) help us see that we can regiment and focus utilitarian intuitions in two quite distinct ways. An interesting test case is provided by J.S. Mill. He has been associated with each of these perspectives (with a utilitarianism of ideal rules by R.B. Brandt and with indirect utilitarianism by John Gray), but careful attention to Mill's main arguments indicates, I believe, that he adheres to neither consistently, though he is closer to the indirect utilitarian position. (shrink)

In most discussions of civil disobedience, certain characteristics are offered as essential to an act of justifiable civil disobedience, or sometimes to any act of civil disobedience. Among these one of the most frequently mentioned is nonviolence. Some thinkers, like Bedau and Wasserstrom, require an act to be nonviolent before they will even count it as an act of civil disobedience; the very concept for them includes the notion of nonviolence. Others, like Stuart Brown, Rex Martin and Michael Bayles, admit (...) the possibility of a violent act of civil disobedience; but hold that, though nonviolent civil disobedience is justifiable, violent civil disobedience is not justifiable. (shrink)

The Ethics of Time" explores a rather uncharted field in philosophy, namely the ethical implications of time. It does so by utilizing the resources of phenomenology and hermeneutics. On the one hand, its rigorous analyses of such phenomena as waiting, memory, and the body are carried out phenomenologically, while on the other hand, it engages in a hermeneutical reading of such classical texts as, Augustine's Confessions and Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, among others. Nevertheless, this book makes a claim to originality, as (...) it does not provide a commentary on any single text or thinker. Even though a strictly philosophical endeavour, this book engages literature, theology and the arts more generally. It takes seriously phenomenology's claim of a consciousness both constituting time and being constituted by time. This claim has some important implications for the "ethical" self or, rather, for the ways in which such a self informed by time, might come to understand anew the problems of imperfection and ethical goodness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Summary Of The Spoken Responses By The Poets To Their CriticsJohn HollanderMark Strand responded to Charles Berger’s comments by mak-ing appreciative remarks about the kind of attention his work had received, adding that he did occasionally in writing perceive “glimmers, in the kind of attention I pay, to what Charles Berger has spoken of.” With regard to certain aspects of prior intention, he said that “vague formal imperatives got (...) fulfilled in the writing” and that knowing at the time “the rightness of what I’ve said,” I was nonetheless able to “know the meaning of what I’d said only weeks afterward.” He also acknowledged the kinds of allusiveness which Berger had adduced in his writing, speaking of how and when in the course of writing the resources of his particular sort of echo and allusion seemed to make themselves available.He then turned to the specific question of one of the sequences of poems that Berger had discussed, the “Great Dog Poem No. 2.” He averred that in choosing a dog as speaker he had “not just meant to be funny” [he avowed later on in his remarks that his poems frequently began with “dark humor”] but had also sought for a mode of introspection more original than the fashionably solemn ones of so much contemporary poetry: “I could look within and bark.” With respect to the final line, he observed “I like to finish with a flourish, to pretend I’m Laforgue or Rimbaud,” manifesting “a desire to be a symbolist poet.” With respect to that concluding verse, “I feel like the end of a gorgeous line,” he added that if a dog said that—particularly “a [End Page 189] platinum retriever”—it could not be self-pitying. He spoke in general of the relation of high and low in the poem (a dog named “Rex,” and so forth) and of the relation of this sequence to a much earlier poem of his called “Eating Poetry” in which the speaker is likewise a dog.With regard to formal design, he concluded by saying that in general he tended to start poems “with rough drafts in blank verse” which he then “roughened up” in various ways, preferring as he said “cadences” rather than “measure” in the framing of lines. But he added that in the De Chirico poems he had read, he felt that if one wrote a villanelle, one should keep strictly to the form, without changing words in the refrain lines, and keeping to the iambic meter, saying that “I don’t think you should cheat” under those circumstances.Strand concluded by thanking Berger for the precise nature of his critical attentiveness.John Hollander started out by acknowledging with pleasure that Eleanor Cook’s analysis of his “Owl” had certainly helped him to understand it better; he observed that he felt he had only started to write what he called “real poetry” in his third book, when he had first written a poem he could not understand at the time, and only came to understand years later. He remarked that “The relation of poet and critic as framed by this panel is this: good criticism is a poem’s best friend. We all depend on our friends to point out to us things about ourselves we may not know or acknowledge; although their cousins and other familial relations are other poems, our poems’ best friends are pieces of critical writing.”He was particularly grateful to Cook for pointing out things he hadn’t himself seen—such as the question of the terminal words in the first stanza—but which as a result of the critical insight he had to acknowledge. And this brought up the crucial question of intentionality at the practical rather than theoretical level: in the case of such observations by critics and acknowledgments by poets, it would seem that the writing of a poem could have an intention of which the writer would be unaware. Hollander adduced the analogy of dreaming to poetic composition, paralleling the question “Did you mean to write that?” with (to anyone reporting a dream) “Did you mean to dream that?”He then observed about the... (shrink)

Central Works of Philosophy is a major multi-volume collection of essays on the core texts of the Western philosophical tradition. From Plato's Republic to the present day, the five volumes range over 2,500 years of philosophical writing covering the best, most representative, and most influential work of some of our greatest philosophers. Each essay has been specially commissioned and provides an overview of the work, clear and authoritative exposition of its central ideas, and an assessment of the work's importance. Together (...) these books provide an unrivaled companion for studying and reading philosophy, one that introduces the reader to the masterpieces of the western philosophical canon. Much of nineteenth-century philosophy may be viewed as either an affirmation or rejection of Kant. This volume therefore begins with Kant's magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason. Michelle Grier provides a masterly distillation of this monumental work. Curtis Bowman explores the central text of the first of the great post-Kantian idealists, Fichte who extended Kantian philosophy in a new direction. Hegel, one of Kant's most formidable critics, is given incisive treatment by Michael Inwood in his presentation of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation, which hoped to solve many of the problems that Kant's philosophy left unsolved is explored in Dale Jacquette's chapter. The moral philosophy of John Stuart Mill, perhaps the only philosopher in this volume to circumvent Kant's influence, is examined in Jonathan Riley's essay on his classic work On Liberty. The philosophical ideas of Kierkegaard, widely credited as the founder of modern existentialism, are explored by Stephen Evans in his essay on Philosophical Fragments. Marx's Capital, one of the most influential books of the modern age, is given expert treatment by Tom Rockmore. The volume closes with Nietzsche, whose appropriation of Kant led to a radical anti-philosophy. Rex Welshon dissects his most philosophical and widely read work, On the Genealogy of Morals. (shrink)

Central Works of Philosophy is a major multi-volume collection of essays on the core texts of the Western philosophical tradition. From Plato's Republic to the present day, the five volumes range over 2,500 years of philosophical writing covering the best, most representative, and most influential work of some of our greatest philosophers. Each essay has been specially commissioned and provides an overview of the work, clear and authoritative exposition of its central ideas, and an assessment of the work's importance. Together (...) these books provide an unrivaled companion for studying and reading philosophy, one that introduces the reader to the masterpieces of the western philosophical canon. Much of nineteenth-century philosophy may be viewed as either an affirmation or rejection of Kant. This volume therefore begins with Kant's magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason. Michelle Grier provides a masterly distillation of this monumental work. Curtis Bowman explores the central text of the first of the great post-Kantian idealists, Fichte who extended Kantian philosophy in a new direction. Hegel, one of Kant's most formidable critics, is given incisive treatment by Michael Inwood in his presentation of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation, which hoped to solve many of the problems that Kant's philosophy left unsolved is explored in Dale Jacquette's chapter. The moral philosophy of John Stuart Mill, perhaps the only philosopher in this volume to circumvent Kant's influence, is examined in Jonathan Riley's essay on his classic work On Liberty. The philosophical ideas of Kierkegaard, widely credited as the founder of modern existentialism, are explored by Stephen Evans in his essay on Philosophical Fragments. Marx's Capital, one of the most influential books of the modern age, is given expert treatment by Tom Rockmore. The volume closes with Nietzsche, whose appropriation of Kant led to a radical anti-philosophy. Rex Welshon dissects his most philosophical and widely read work, On the Genealogy of Morals. (shrink)

In the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli claims that writers who are afraid to condemn Caesar instead criticize Catiline. I argue that Machiavelli follows this advice by inverting it. He openly condemns Caesar and the empire he founded while signaling that he has in mind another inimical example: the Church. He signals his intention by echoing Cicero’s fourth Catilinarian oration, imitating Cicero’s image of the ruin of Rome if Catiline’s conspiracy were to succeed through his own vision of the Italy wrought (...) by wicked Roman emperors who succeeded Caesar. The reader of Machiavelli who recognizes this echo is in a position to see Machiavelli’s own Catilinarian oration against another successor of Caesar. In making my argument, I draw on Rex Stem’s treatment of the functions of exemplementarity as employed by authors of texts and as received by their readers. (shrink)

The 'Art of Life' is John Stuart Mill's name for his account of practical reason. In this volume, eleven leading scholars elucidate this fundamental, but widely neglected, element of Mill's thought. Mill divides the Art of Life into three 'departments': 'Morality, Prudence or Policy, and Æsthetics'. In the volume's first section, Rex Martin, David Weinstein, Ben Eggleston, and Dale E. Miller investigate the relation between the departments of morality and prudence. Their papers ask whether Mill is a rule utilitarian (...) and, if so, whether his practical philosophy must be incoherent. The second section contains papers by Jonathan Riley and Wendy Donner, who explore the relation between the departments of morality and aesthetics. They discuss issues ranging from supererogation to aesthetic pleasure and humanity's relationship with nature. -/- The papers in the third section consider the Art of Life's axiological first principle, the principle of utility. Elijah Millgram contends that Mill's own life refutes his claim that the Art of Life has a single axiological first principle. Philip Kitcher maintains that Mill has a dynamic axiology requiring us to continually refine our conception of the good. In the final section, three papers address what it means to put the Art of Life into practice. Robert Haraldsson locates an 'Art of Ethics' in On Liberty that is in tension with the Art of Life. Nadia Urbinati plumbs the classical roots of Mill's view of the good life. Finally, Colin Heydt develops Mill's suggestion that we regard our own lives as works of art. (shrink)

This article offers a critical appraisal of approaches to ‘friendship’ (amicitia) in Cornelius Nepos’s Atticus and Cicero’s De Amicitia, as found in the scholarship of Rex Stem and Grant Nelsestuen. In light of the former’s untimely passing in 2020, it uses an exchange of personal correspondence in 2019 between these two scholars – as well as John Alexander Lobur’s 2021 book on Nepos – as a basis for sketching new approaches to the role that friendship plays in Nepos’s biographies. (...) Friendship thus turns out to be both an important aspect of Nepos’ political thought and a crucial means for advancing scholarly understanding of Nepos’ project in Atticus and his other biographies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How Philosophers Trivialize Art: Bleak House, Oedipus Rex, "Leda and the Swan"Michael D. HurleyIIt is a Perverse but unsurprising irony that answers to the question of whether art can give us knowledge characteristically trivialize that which draws us to individual artworks in the first place. The experience of art is sidelined in favor of the apparent after-effect of that experience. Even those writing against each other tend to converge (...) on this. In an essay contesting Nelson Goodman's epistemic claims for art, Gordon Graham nonetheless agrees that, "The question to be asked of such a work is not, 'Does this effectively capture the scene portrayed?', but 'Does this make us see this sort of occasion differently?'"1 Even attempts to distinguish art as "gift" as opposed to commodity predictably figure its value in terms of what might be taken away: "I went to see a landscape painter's works, and that evening, walking among pine trees near my home, I could see the shapes and the colors I had not seen the day before."2This state of affairs is perversely ironic for two reasons. Firstly, because the possibility of art's cognitive content is only prompted at all by the immediate experience it offers: without this, art would not excite us the way it does and there would be no debate to be had. Secondly, and more significantly, because a defining part of what constitutes an interest in art is, I should like to suggest, an experience of knowledge; or, more accurately, an experience of knowing. This irony is unsurprising because it is merely another expression of a recalcitrant prejudice in western epistemology that idealizes knowledge as an objectively true, justified belief—perforce excluding the possibility of knowing as a subjective [End Page 107] experience of believing. No wonder the author of Theætetus elsewhere finds poets incapable of offering anything but lies.Plato's lingering legacy assures that the cognitive content of art be assized according to what might be extracted from the artwork—cashed in like so many casino chips—when we are done with our experience of it. This applies whether the knowledge-bearing being argued for, or against, is conceptual or propositional (e.g., Putnam, Novitz, John),3 or imaginative (e.g., Goodman, Robinson, Currie),4 as well as for the claim that art can offer us moral instruction (e.g., Beardsmore, Eldridge, Nussbaum, Sharpe, Kieran, John).5 There is less consensus as to whether the capacity of art to give us knowledge enriches the aesthetic value of that artwork, but those who would advance this position have been on the back-foot in recent years following a wave of criticisms from, among others, Beardsley, Lamarque and Olsen, Diffey, and Gaut.6This article addresses art's capacity to give us knowledge as well as the conjunct of whether such knowledge might inform its value qua art. In so doing, it presses a case that has already been disallowed by the terms in which the question of the relationship between art and knowledge is typically put. Whatever efferent knowledge art might offer, it also provides the conditions for a kind of knowing that cannot be translated beyond itself. Only such an experience of knowledge-as-knowing, which is realized through the untranslatable singularity of an artwork, may be considered constitutive of art's aesthetic value. Couched another way: epistemology meets aesthetics not where it has most often been located, in the perfective, at the congruence of the thought and the felt, but in the present continuous, in the engagement of thinking and feeling. Connecting the epistemic and the aesthetic in this way is, then, exactly the opposite proposition to that presented by Douglas Morgan, for whom, "although many words in many arts can and do give us knowledge of many kinds, nonetheless if this knowledge were the key and limit to the love of art, the world of art would be even sorrier than it now is."7IILiterature has generated by far the greatest volume of commentary in the debate on art and knowledge. This is to be expected given the bias towards categorizing knowledge as something like data... (shrink)

Drawing on Rex Stem’s analysis of exempla, I explore Mercy Otis Warren and John Marshall’s narrations of the Society of the Cincinnati, and Washington’s place within it, to draw out the lessons they sought to impart. Beginning with an exploration of Cincinnatus’ exemplum in antiquity, its relationship to late 18th-century portrayals of Washington, and its invocation in the establishment of the Society of the Cincinnati, I also discuss the exemplum by a prominent critic of the Society of the Cincinnati, (...) Aedanus Burke. I then turn to Warren and Marshall’s accounts of the Cincinnati. I do so with a particular focus on how a single exemplary American – George Washington – is depicted in two different ways, exemplifying two different sets of moral teaching. I conclude by suggesting that Warren, Marshall, and Burke’s battle over the exemplum of Cincinnatus is a battle over the moral ordering of America’s future. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was a British philosopher, political economist, civil servant, and Member of Parliament.

We will next speak of Liberality. Now this is thought to be the mean state, having for its object-matter Wealth: I mean, the Liberal man is praised not in the circumstances of war, nor in those which constitute the character of perfected self-mastery, nor again in judicial decisions, but in respect of giving and receiving Wealth, chiefly the former. By the term Wealth I mean all those things whose worth is measured by money.

Loneliness in medicine is a serious problem not just for patients, for whom illness is intrinsically isolating, but also for physicians in the contemporary condition of medicine. We explore this problem by investigating the ideal physician-patient relationship, whose analogy with friendship has held enduring normative appeal. Drawing from Talbot Brewer and Nir Ben-Moshe, we argue that this appeal lies in a dynamic form of companionship incompatible with static models of friendship-like physician-patient relationships: a mutual refinement of embodied virtue that draws (...) both persons together. The ideal physician-patient relationship has a dialectical character that fosters each member's improvement of phenomenologically recognizing and embodying moral virtues. A key component of this dynamic is a commitment to the common goal of the patient's health, realized through joint interactivities and conversations over time. The physician's presence to the patient's suffering—understood best as an alienating phenomenological condition for the patient—orients and discloses possibilities for virtuous caregiving by structuring the meanings of the goals, conversations, and joint narrative constitutive of their relationship. Presence to suffering, paradoxically, is perhaps an important prerequisite for this dynamic partnership. These activities dialectically build an interpretive horizon of understanding through which moral goods and character refinement—in and for the other—may become revealed for both persons in their shared being-in-the-world. This analysis of suffering, mood, and revealing of (possible) moral goods has implications for addressing the modern problem of loneliness for patients and physicians, who are increasingly inhibited from building flourishing relationships with each other. (shrink)

Two jarring results concerning the main theses of Georg Henrik von Wright's Explanation and Understanding are reached through an examination and criticism of his project. It is shown, contrary to his settled judgment both in EU and subsequently, that the schema of practical inference is a causal principle, and that it is nomological in character. But one feature of von Wright's overall analysis holds up and continues to show promise: his idea of understanding explanation. This idea combines the EU account (...) of the schema and its instantiation with the notion of an intelligible connection of these instantiating elements with one another. Here the schema is deployed in conjunction with the test of intelligible connection as one of its conditions of application. The schema, so deployed, is revisable on the basis of experiences that do not conform to what we expect them to be when they are regimented in accordance with the model of understanding explanation; thus, even though the schema is not a general law, we have a basis for characterizing it as nomological, nonetheless. (shrink)

At his death in 2010, the Anglo-American analytic philosopher John Haugeland left an unfinished manuscript summarizing his life-long engagement with Heidegger’s Being and Time. As illuminating as it is iconoclastic, Dasein Disclosed is not just Haugeland’s Heidegger—this sweeping reevaluation is a major contribution to philosophy in its own right.