The question of Ruyer’s relationship to Bergson remains under-theorized. This article attempts to address that problem by introducing a little-known essay written by Ruyer on the topic of B...

The paper describes a two week course that has been offered as a special study module to intermediate level undergraduate medical students at Dundee University Medical School for the past five years. The course requires students to research the various aspects of ethical dilemmas that they have identified themselves, and to “teach” these issues to their colleagues in a short PowerPoint presentation as well as to prepare an extended 3000 word essay discussion. The course specifically asks students not to disclose (...) their own ethical positions, as these are probably still in formation and the objective is to promote critical thinking capacity in ethical and moral issues as a prelude to the development of practical skills in dealing with clinical problems. The course is easy to resource for the school and has received universally high evaluations from the students since its inception. (shrink)

As of September 2006, non-directed donation of kidneys and other tissues and organs is permitted in the UK under the new Human Tissue Acts. At the same time as making provision for psychiatric and clinical assessment of so-called “altruistic” donations to complete strangers, the Acts intensify assessments required for familial, genetically related donations, which will now require the same level as genetically unrelated but “emotionally” connected donations by locally based independent assessors reporting to the newly constituted Human Tissue Authority. But (...) there will also need to be considerable reflection on the criteria for “stranger donation”, which may lead us to a new understanding of the moral economy of altruistic organ donation, no matter how mixed the motives of the donor may be. This paper looks at some of the issues that will have to be accommodated in such a framework. (shrink)

This book, a sequel to the first volume of Deleuze's Philosophical Lineage (2009), presents studies of 16 key figures drawn on by Deleuze, ranging from Lucretius to Schelling through to Foucault. Each chapter introduces the work of the thinker in question, explains the context in which Deleuze draws on this work and discusses the contribution that it makes to the development of Deleuze's own ideas.

Jon Roffe shows how Empiricism and Subjectivity is the precursor for some of Deleuze's most well-known philosophical innovations. For those already familiar with Deleuze, he emphasises its novelty within his corpus. And, for all readers, he shows how it outlines Deleuze's powerful and striking theory of subjectivity, and of philosophy itself. Empiricism and Subjectivity is Gilles Deleuze's first book, and yet it is infrequently read and poorly understood. In fact, it constitutes a unique project in its own right, deserving of (...) the same close study that is now widely given to other, more well-known works. (shrink)

Badiou's Deleuze presents the first thorough analysis of one of the most significant encounters in contemporary thought: Alain Badiou's summary interpretation and rejection of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Badiou's reading of Deleuze is largely laid out in his provocative book, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, a highly influential work of considerable power. Badiou's Deleuze presents a detailed examination of Badiou's reading and argues that, whilst it fails to do justice to the Deleuzean project, it invites us to reconsider what (...) Deleuze's philosophy amounts to, and to reassess Deleuze's power to address the ultimate concerns of philosophy. Badiou's Deleuze analyses the differing metaphysics of two of the most influential of recent continental philosophers, whose divergent views have helped to shape much contemporary thought. (shrink)

James Pattison's argument for the assignment of a duty of humanitarian intervention is interesting and offers a new perspective in the humanitarian intervention debate. However, Pattison's argument suffers from three main problems, each increasingly serious: his definition of success is vague and raises questions about the content of a duty of humanitarian intervention; his consequentialist foundation raises problems of prospective and retrospective judgment; and his intentional omission of the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties leads to conceptual difficulties.

The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze is increasingly gaining the prestige that its inventiveness calls for in the Anglo-American theoretical context. His wide-ranging works on the history of philosophy, cinema, painting, literature, and politics are being taken up and put to work across disciplinary divides, and in interesting and surprising ways. However, the backbone of Deleuze's philosophy – the many and varied sources from which he draws the material for his conceptual innovation – has until now remained relatively obscure and unexplored. (...) This book takes as its goal the examination of this rich theoretical background. Presenting essays by a range of Deleuze scholars and theorists of his work, it is composed of in-depth analyses of the key figures in Deleuze's lineage, whose significance – as a result of either their obscurity or the complexity of their place in the Deleuzean text – has not previously been well understood. Included are essays on Deleuze's relationship with figures as varied as Marx, Simondon, Wronski, Hegel, Hume, Maimon, Ruyer, Kant, Heidegger, Husserl, Reimann, Leibniz, Bergson, and Freud. (shrink)

The concept of quasi-cause is a relatively marginal one in the work of Gilles Deleuze, appearing briefly in The Logic of Sense and then Anti-Oedipus three years later. In part because of this marginality – the meagre degree to which it is integrated into the respective metaphysical system of the two works – it provides us with a useful vantage point from which to examine these systems themselves. In particular, a careful exposition of the two forms that the concept of (...) the quasi-cause takes provides us with an aperture on the shifting role of the concepts of the virtual and the intensive in Deleuze's ongoing project. In this paper, I will argue that, through this aperture, it is possible to see the displacement of the virtual in favour of the intensive. In turn, we can characterise Anti-Oedipus as the birth of a fully actualist Deleuzian metaphysics. (shrink)

A given explanatory theory T falls into circular reasoning if the only way to determine its explanandum is through the application of T. To find an underlying theory T′ that determines T′s explanandum helps us save T from this accusation of circularity. We follow the structuralist view of theories in presenting and dealing with this issue, by applying it to particular theories. More specifically, we focus on the relationship between the Darwinian theory of common ancestry and the determination of homologies.

Much like the parade of claimants for the hand of Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey, the theoretical humanities have been presented with a string of would-be maîtres à pensers, each bringing with them claims of radical originality, and the promise of hope for the disciplines in question. Not only is the philosophy of Alain Badiou among the very few who have serious justifications to the claim of originality, the rigour, scope and goals of his philosophy reveal him as the first thinker (...) in a long time to have the resources necessary to engage with the ailments of theoretical discourse in the contemporary environment of global capitalism, and the steady dismantling of the traditional infrastructure of the human sciences and philosophy. This article provides an outline of the key positions espoused in Badiou's key work Being and Event, and an assessment of its contemporary import. (shrink)

Although Alain Badiou dedicates a number of texts to the philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza throughout his work—after all, the author of a systematic philosophy of being more geometrico must be a point of reference for the philosopher who claims that “mathematics = ontology”—the reading offered in Meditation Ten of his key work Being and Event presents the most significant moment of this engagement. Here, Badiou proposes a reading of Spinoza’s ontology that foregrounds a concept that is as central to, (...) and celebrated in, his philosophy as it is strictly excluded by Spinoza: the void. In nuce, Badiou contends that for all of Spinoza’s efforts to offer an ontology of total plenitude, the void returns in his philosophy under the (at first sight) unlikely name of infinite mode. The presence of this errant name in Spinoza’s philosophy bears witness to the failure of his most profound intellectual endeavour. However striking Badiou’s reading of Spinoza, this paper argues that it fails to adequately grasp Spinoza’s metaphysics, particularly with respect to the central concept of modal essence, a concept which does not appear at all in the Badiouian text. By introducing a consideration of this concept, it becomes able to resolve the status of infinite modes, and to account for the move across the notorious finite–infinite divide. Thus the argument turns to the reading of Spinoza offered by Gilles Deleuze for a more thorough-going and nuanced approach, much superior to Badiou’s procrustean critique. (shrink)

From the point of view of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Raymond Ruyer's work appears to bear out two distinct tendencies of unequal appeal. On the one hand, Ruyer appears to be an anti-Aristotelian thinker of formation, rejecting any hylomorphic account of the production of reality. However, and notably despite his serious commitment to the work of the sciences of his day, he remains wedded to the ultimately conservative Leibnizian principle of closure. Nowhere is this dichotomy more striking than in (...) his account of human society. The aim of this paper is to show how his positive account of form finds a significant and convincing extension in Deleuze and Guattari's notion of social surface or socius in Anti-Oedipus. (shrink)

Deleuze and the Non/Human brings together leading international voices to consider the place of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in the nonhuman turn.It examines recent debates about the figure of the nonhuman in fields such as new materialism, speculative realism, animal studies, and the environmental and ecological Humanities and scrutinizes the debt to Deleuze's work that is evident in these emerging fields. Accordingly, the contributors to the volume are drawn from across the academy. Deleuze's philosophy already anticipated many of the (...) current debates about the non/human. The proposed volume continues this engagement, extending some of these lines of investigation, in disciplines such architecture, literary studies, gender studies, philosophy, geography and cultural studies. At the same time, its goal is to open up a critical line of questioning about what the nonhuman means in Deleuze's work itself. Deleuze and the Non/Human is thus both about the non/human from Deleuze's point of view, and about Deleuze from the point of view of the various problematics that can be included in the nonhuman turn.Deleuze and the Non/Human makes a timely intervention in a broad set of interdisciplinary debates, and demonstrates once again the force of Deleuze's philosophy for our critical examination of the contemporary condition. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre's moving eulogy for Merleau-Ponty on his death was entitled "Merleau-Ponty vivant" – Merleau-Ponty lives. And it is indeed difficult to deny that Merleau-Ponty’s thought remains a live and enduring part of the contemporary philosophical scene, in a manner that could not be said for his more famous contemporary. Despite the enduring significance of Merleau-Ponty and the voluminous writings about his work, the book that was intended to be his magnum opus, The Visible and the Invisible, remains an unfinished (...) project and one that has not had the sustained attention it merits. This may seem like a strange claim, given that many of its key concepts (chiasm, flesh, reversibility, etc.) have often been addressed. Nonetheless, there is a sense in which the strengths and weaknesses of this incipient ontology are not themselves particularly well-known or discussed, especially in English. In this chapter we examine this "indirect ontology," before considering some of the criticisms made by his contemporaries and 'successors': Lacan; Irigaray; Levinas; Derrida; Deleuze. (shrink)

In this chapter we examine Merleau-Ponty's chapter, "The Intertwining/The Chiasm", before considering some of the criticisms made by his contemporaries and ‘successors’: Lacan, Irigaray, Levinas, Derrida and Deleuze.

The first sustained exploration of Simondon's work to be published in English. This collection of essays, including one by Simondon himself, outlines the central tenets of Simondon's thought, the implication of his thought for numerous disciplines and his relationship to other thinkers such as Heidegger, Deleuze and Canguilhem.Complete with a contextualising introduction and a glossary of technical terms, it offers an entry point to this important thinker and will appeal to people working in philosophy, philosophy of science, media studies, social (...) theory and political philosophy.Gilbert Simondon's work has recently come to prominence in America and around the Anglophone world, having been of great importance in France for many years. (shrink)

An interesting metatheoretical controversy took place during the 1980’s and 1990’s between pattern and phylogenetic cladists. What was always at stake in the discussion was not how work in systematics should be carried out, but rather how this practice should be metatheoretically interpreted. In this article, we criticize Pearson’s account of the metatheoretical factors at play in this discussion. Following him, we focus on the issue of circularity, and on the role that phylogenetic hypotheses play in the determination of “primary (...) homologies”. Pearson argues that the recognition of primary homologies cannot be achieved without recourse to previous phylogenetic knowledge, and that to claim otherwise is to state that primary homologies are observable. To show why that view would be inadequate, he appeals to Hanson’s views about theory-laden observation, alongside with a specific case study, which allegedly illustrates the more complex relation between observation and theory. We will argue that the pattern cladists’ point is better addressed by taking a quite different approach: instead of thinking in terms of observability, the topic can be tackled by paying attention to the way in which concepts are determined. We will take the notion of T-theoricity from metatheoretical structuralism and show that, once the issue is discussed with the appropriate metatheoretical framework, the alleged counterexample brought up by Pearson is not problematic at all for pattern cladism. (shrink)

The adequacy of Elliott Sober’s analogy between classical mechanics and evolutionary theory—according to which both theories explain via a zero-force law and a set of forces that alter the zero-force state—has been criticized from various points of view. I focus here on McShea and Brandon’s claim that drift shouldn’t be considered a force because it is not directional. I argue that there are a number of different theses that could be meant by this, and show that one of those theses—the (...) idea that drift cannot bias populations to be taken somewhere in the evolutionary space from one generation to the next—is actually false. Not only has this thesis been implicitly assumed in the discussion of the force analogy thus far, but it is also commonly found in a wider range of philosophical and biological texts. I argue that correcting this view, and the usual images associated with it, will thereby bring heuristic benefits that impact the force analogy discussion, but that also go beyond it. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 17, Issue 1, Page 57-67, March 2012.

This article elaborates on McShea and Brandon’s idea that drift is unlike the rest of the evolutionary factors because it is constitutive rather than imposed on the evolutionary process. I show that the way they spelled out this idea renders it inadequate and is the reason why it received some objections. I propose a different way in which their point could be understood, that rests on two general distinctions. The first is a distinction between the underlying mathematical apparatus used to (...) formulate a theory and a concept proposed by that theory. With the aid of a formal reconstruction of a population genetic model, I show that drift belongs to the first category. That is, that drift is constitutive of population genetics in the same sense that multiplication is constitutive in classical mechanics, or that circle is constitutive in Ptolemaic astronomy. The second distinction is between eliminating a concept from a theory and setting its value to zero. I will show that even though drift can be set to zero just like the rest of the evolutionary factors, eliminating drift is much harder than eliminating those other factors, since it would require changing the entire mathematical apparatus of standard population genetic theory. I conclude by drawing some other implications from the proposed formal reconstruction. (shrink)

This article elaborates on McShea and Brandon’s idea that drift is unlike the rest of the evolutionary factors because it is constitutive rather than imposed on the evolutionary process. I show that the way they spelled out this idea renders it inadequate and is the reason why it received some objections. I propose a different way in which their point could be understood, that rests on two general distinctions. The first is a distinction between the underlying mathematical apparatus used to (...) formulate a theory and a concept proposed by that theory. With the aid of a formal reconstruction of a population genetic model, I show that drift belongs to the first category. That is, that drift is constitutive of population genetics in the same sense that multiplication is constitutive in classical mechanics, or that circle is constitutive in Ptolemaic astronomy. The second distinction is between eliminating a concept from a theory and setting its value to zero. I will show that even though drift can be set to zero just like the rest of the evolutionary factors, eliminating drift is much harder than eliminating those other factors, since it would require changing the entire mathematical apparatus of standard population genetic theory. I conclude by drawing some other implications from the proposed formal reconstruction. (shrink)

Third-party certification is an increasingly prevalent tactic which agrifood activists use to “help” consumers shop ethically, and also to reorganize commodity markets. While consumers embrace the chance to “vote with their dollar,” academics question the potential for labels to foster widespread political, economic, and agroecological change. Yet, despite widespread critique, a mounting body of work appears resigned to accept that certification may be the only option available to activist groups in the context of neoliberal socio-economic orders. At the extreme, Guthman (...) (Antipode 39(3): 457, 2007) posits that “at this political juncture… ‘there is no alternative.” This paper offers a different assessment of third-party certification, and points to interventions that are potentially more influential that are currently available to activist groups. Exploring the evolution of the Non-GMO Project—a novel certification for foods that are reasonably free of genetically engineered (GE) material—I make two arguments. First, I echo the literature’s critical perspective by illustrating how certification projects become vulnerable to industry capture. Reviewing its history and current context, I suggest that the Non-GMO Project would be better suited to helping companies avoid mounting public criticism than to substantially reorient agrifood production. Second, I explore the “politics of the possible” in the current political economy and argue that while neoliberalization and organizers’ places within the food system initially oriented the group towards the private sector, the choice to pursue certification arose directly from two industry partnerships. Consequently, current trends might favor market mechanisms, but certification is only one possible intervention that has emerged as a result of particular, and perhaps avoidable, circumstances. The article offers tentative delineation of alternatives ways that activists might intervene in agrifood and political economic systems given present constraints. (shrink)

This book aims to provide various clear points of entry into the labyrinth of Gilles Deleuze's thought, but without sacrificing any of its philosophical complexity or integrity in doing so. It discusses Deleuze's own intermittent descriptions of his work and provides characterisations of Deleuze's philosophy. The chapter also explores the similarities and differences between Deleuze's thoughts and philosophy and those of other philosophers including Plato, John Duns Scotus, and David Hume.

The essays cover language, metaphysics, the subject, politics, ethics, the decision, translation, religion, psychoanalysis, literature, art, and Derrida's ...

Due to an unfortunate turn of events, the family name of the first author was erroneously published as ‘RoffÕ’ in the original publication. The correct representation of the first author’s family name is listed above and below.

En este ambicioso libro, el biólogo Daniel W. McShea y el filósofo de la biología Robert N. Brandon desafían las explicaciones explícitas encontradas en la litera-tura acerca del origen de la diversidad y la complejidad en los seres vivos. Estas explicaciones recurren en su mayoría a la acción de la selección natural, como ser, a la selección diversificadora/disruptiva, a la selección de niveles superiores favoreciendo a especies/clados con mayor propensión a la especiación, o a las ventajas de una mayor división (...) del trabajo, entre otras alternativas (p. 1). Si bien estas explicaciones pueden ser correctas, no constituirían toda la historia, según los autores, pues habría una tendencia de fondo no reconocida en la literatura (pero invocada en las explicaciones de casos concretos) hacia un aumento de la diversidad y la complejidad. Esta tendencia surgiría simplemente de que las variaciones azarosas, cuando se heredan, se acumulan en diferentes direcciones en diferentes poblaciones, con el resultado de que la diversidad se incrementa. Para expresar esta tendencia, los autores proponen una ley, que denominan ZFEL (por zero-force evolutionary law) y que formulan de la siguiente manera: “En cualquier sistema evolutivo en el que hay variación azarosa y he-rencia, en ausencia de fuerzas y constricciones, la diversidad y la complejidad tenderán a aumentar” (p. 4). (shrink)

This paper will seek firstly to understand Deleuze’s main challenges to phenomenology, particularly as they are expressed in The Logic of Sense and What is Philosophy?, although reference will also be made to Pure Immanence and Difference and Repetition. We will then turn to a discussion of one of the few passages in which Deleuze directly engages with Merleau-Ponty, which occurs in the chapter on art in What is Philosophy? In this text, he and Guattari offer a critique of what (...) they call the “final avatar” of phenomenology – that is, the “fleshism” that Merleau-Ponty proposes in his unfinished but justly famous work, The Visible and the Invisible. It will be argued that both Deleuze’s basic criticisms of phenomenology, as well as he and Guattari’s problems with the concept of the flesh, do not adequately come to grips with Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy. Merleau-Ponty is not obviously partisan to what Deleuze finds problematic in this tradition, despite continuing to identify himself as a phenomenologist, and is working within a surprisingly similar framework in certain key respects. In fact, in the more positive part of this paper, we will compare Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, and Deleuze’s equally infamous univocity of being, as a means to consider the broader question of the ways in which the two philosophers consider ontological thought, its meaning and its conditions. It is our belief that through properly understanding both positions, a rapprochement, or at least the foundation for one, can be established between these two important thinkers. (shrink)

This paper seeks firstly to understand Deleuze’s main challenges to phenomenology, particularly as they are expressed in The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition. We then turn to a discussion of one of the few passages in which Deleuze and Guattari directly engage with Merleau-Ponty, which occurs in the chapter on art in What is Philosophy? In this text, he and Guattari offer a critique of what they call the “final avatar” of phenomenology – that is, the “fleshism” that (...) Merleau- Ponty proposes in his unfinished but justly famous work, The Visible and the Invisible. We argue that both Deleuze’s basic criticisms of phenomenology, as well as he and Guattari’s problems with the concept of the flesh, do not adequately come to grips with Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy. Merleau-Ponty is not obviously partisan to what Deleuze finds problematic in this tradition, despite continuing to identify himself as a phenomenologist, and is working within a surprisingly similar framework in certain key respects. In fact, in the more positive part of this paper, we compare Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, and Deleuze’s equally infamous univocity of being, as a means to consider the broader question of the ways in which the two philosophers consider ontological thought, its meaning and its conditions. It is our argument that through properly understanding both positions, a rapprochement, or at least the foundation for one, can be established between these two important thinkers. (shrink)

Roffe et al. develop a rather creative line of response to Pearson’s :475–492, 2010) critique of pattern cladisma response centering on a structuralist approach to the homology concept. In this brief reply I attempt to demonstrate, however, that Roffe, and Ginnobili, and Blanco subtly mis-characterize the target of Pearson’s critique. The consequence of this mischaracterization is that even though the structuralist framework may help make sense of pattern cladism, it does not undermine Pearson’s critique of it.

Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own thought processes. Yanofsky describes (...) simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve; perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense; different levels of infinity; the bizarre world of the quantum; the relevance of relativity theory; the causes of chaos theory; math problems that cannot be solved by normal means; and statements that are true but cannot be proven. He explains the limitations of our intuitions about the world -- our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known. Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there. (shrink)

We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealised explanation game in which players collaborate to find the best explanation for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal (...) patterns of variable granularity and scope. We characterise the conditions under which such a game is almost surely guaranteed to converge on a optimal explanation surface in polynomial time, and highlight obstacles that will tend to prevent the players from advancing beyond certain explanatory thresholds. The game serves a descriptive and a normative function, establishing a conceptual space in which to analyse and compare existing proposals, as well as design new and improved solutions. (shrink)

Deleuze does not mention Schopenhauer very frequently. Certainly Schopenhauer does not appear to be in the counter-canon of life-affirming philosophers that Deleuze so values – indeed, far from it. Nor does he appear to be even a favoured ‘enemy’ as he describes Kant, or as he sometimes appears to view Hegel. In Jones and Roffe’s collection on Deleuze’s historical antecedents, Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage, Schopenhauer is mentioned exactly once (in the chapter on Hume) and certainly not in the dignified role of (...) one of the twenty leading influences on Deleuze. Nevertheless, I think Schopenhauer’s break from Kant is crucial for understanding not only Deleuze’s account of Nietzsche, but also for a proper grasp of the core Deleuzian distinction between the actual and the virtual, at least in its guise as the distinction between desiring-production and social production in Anti-Oedipus. (shrink)

In 'Een handvol filosofen' staan de filosofen centraal die sinds de oprichting van de Vrije Universiteit in 1880 aan deze instelling verbonden zijn geweest. Het gaat hierbij niet alleen om de inhoud van hun werk, maar ook om de personen zelf. Er waren filosofiedocenten die zich met de universiteit identificeerden en zich volledig konden ontplooien. Er waren er echter ook voor wie dit niet gold, die geïsoleerd of in gewetensnood raakten. Veel filosofiestudenten waren actief betrokken bij wat er in hun (...) faculteit gebeurde. Zij namen initiatieven, protesteerden soms tegen de gang van zaken en kozen partij in conflictsituaties. Sinds het eind van de jaren zestig van de twintigste eeuw verloor de Vrije Universiteit geleidelijk haar christelijk karakter. Tegenwoordig werken alle stafleden vanuit hun eigen motivatie mee aan een hoofdzakelijk seculier geworden universiteit, die ruimte biedt voor religieuze en levensbeschouwelijke diversiteit. (shrink)

Richard Janko's acclaimed translation of Aristotle's _Poetics_ is accompanied by the most comprehensive commentary available in English that does not presume knowledge of the original Greek. Two other unique features are Janko's translations with notes of both the _Tractatus Coislinianus_, which is argued to be a summary of the lost second book of the Poetics, and fragments of Aristotle’s dialogue On Poets, including recently discovered texts about catharsis, which appear in English for the first time.

The foundation of the Christian counselling movement -- Christian counselling in the UK -- The aims of Christian counselling -- Integrating psychological and biblical truth -- Sigmund Freud--the founding father of psychotherapy -- The individual psychology of Alfred Adler -- Abraham Maslow--the man with new age tendencies -- Carl Rogers--a man who believed in himself -- Albert Ellis--the aggressive atheist -- The Bible's verdict on psychological 'truth' -- The case against Larry Crabb -- Self-esteem: the secular foundation -- Self-esteem and (...) the Christian counselling movement -- Self-esteem dogma in the light of scripture. (shrink)

Capital punishment—the legally authorized killing of a criminal offender by an agent of the state for the commission of a crime—stands in special need of moral justification. This is because execution is a particularly severe punishment. Execution is different in kind from monetary and custodial penalties in an obvious way: execution causes the death of an offender. While fines and incarceration set back some of one’s interests, death eliminates the possibility of setting and pursuing ends. While fines and incarceration narrow (...) one’s routes to happiness, death eliminates its possibility. Not surprisingly, there is much debate about the moral permissibility of capital punishment. This entry maps the terrain of this debate. The first section discusses justifications of the death penalty as they appear in major theories of punishment. The second section surveys moral objections to execution that apply to most justifications. The third addresses procedural criticisms, which do not target the morality of execution so much as the justice of its implementation. (shrink)