_The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere_ represents a rare opportunity to experience a diverse group of preeminent philosophers confronting one pervasive contemporary concern: what role does—or should—religion play in our public lives? Reflecting on her recent work concerning state violence in Israel-Palestine, Judith Butler explores the potential of religious perspectives for renewing cultural and political criticism, while Jürgen Habermas, best known for his seminal conception of the public sphere, thinks through the ambiguous legacy of the concept of (...) "the political" in contemporary theory. Charles Taylor argues for a radical redefinition of secularism, and Cornel West defends civil disobedience and emancipatory theology. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen detail the immense contribution of these philosophers to contemporary social and political theory, and an afterword by Craig Calhoun places these attempts to reconceive the significance of both religion and the secular in the context of contemporary national and international politics. (shrink)

This work considers current models for understanding tactical interaction among social movement actors and finds them insufficient for making sense of the tactical work required of the Irish women's movement. Analysis of Irish feminist efforts to expand reproductive freedom calls into question the idea that tactical innovations are solely responses to countermovements or state repression. In this case, feminist activists spent considerable energy avoiding co-optation by sympathetic men and class-based movements and competing with economic and nationalist dilemmas that capture the (...) lion's share of public attention. “Friendly fire” refers to the process by which nonoppositional groups within and around, but not of, a movement threaten movement aims. Observational work focused on feminist campaign meetings and political theater yields significant insights concerning the effects of friendly fire and, specifically, the role of men in women's movements. (shrink)

Systematic analysis of 25 contemporary North American feminist memoirs reveals the significance of this kind of cultural production in the life of the women's movement. In memoir, feminists contest dominant movement narratives, recast and reclaim conventional gender stereotypes, and use their experiences to refine movement ideas and goals. Combining sociological aggregation and pattern identification and interpretivist understandings of memoir's empirical significance, this research indicates that feminists have spent considerable energy focused on transforming not just relations between women and men but (...) among women themselves. To this end, they assert that feminists must acknowledge two difficult “truths”—women are emotionally damaged, and women are not as socially capable as convention would suggest. By analyzing such arguments, this article indicates feminist memoir is a vehicle through which actors do not simply uphold but also contest movement narratives, refining or abandoning movement frames that wear thin as lived experience contradicts them. (shrink)

This article presents an analysis of the political consciousness and commitments of six gender equity coordinators who served in the same public agency in the United States during a 20-year period in an effort to contribute knowledge about the people who institute movement-inspired laws and the diverse ways in which they come to understand their mandates and the organizational and political milieus within which they work. The author’s findings corroborate existing research indicating that bureaucrats have considerable autonomy to interpret equity (...) law and vary in their approaches. Most significantly, the author shows the ways in which individuals’ commitment to movement ideals can deepen in the course of working as equity bureaucrats. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface This special issue of Feminist Studies presents an eclectic view of women ’s friendships from across Western history and from several different cultures. Several of the articles question whether identity or sameness is a prerequisite for friendship and ask what friendships across difference look like, including charting the difficulties of making and sustaining such friendships. The articles in this issue contrast the variety and functions of women’s friendships (...) with the narcissistic masculinist ideals of classical Western thought about friendship in which friends serve as reflections of a person—typically a male and upper-class person. The authors in this issue present women’s friendships that are more pragmatic and more vulnerable and that contend more fully with difference. Some authors reflect on the high expectations placed on friendship within Second Wave feminism in the United States, noting how competition and feelings of betrayal can suffuse friendships; others trace more autonomous, productive, and forgiving contemporary visions of friendship. The issue opens with Susan Van Dyne’s archival study of student friendships in a pioneering US women’s college, revealing how love, flirtation, and desire between women was expressed in Smith College’s class of 1883. In another historical study, sociologist Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen contrasts the narratives of Norwegian girls and young women from the late nineteenth century with those of present-day women and girls, noting differences between rural and urban contexts. Ivy Schweitzer 272Preface surveys classical Western masculinist ideals of friendship from Aristotle to Montaigne and traces the transformation of this tradition into the present quest for equality without hierarchy. Alexandra Verini addresses models of female friendship in the European Middle Ages, arguing that Christine de Pizan and Margery Kempe illustrate a “viable female alternative ” to classical models. The vulnerability of women’s close relationships comes to the fore in Nancy K. Miller’s moving elegies for deceased feminist friends, while Judith Taylor explores the more open and autonomous friendships adumbrated in contemporary fictions by Zadie Smith and Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, themes also addressed in Judith Kegan Gardiner’s review essay of advice books on friendships between women and other studies of women’s friendships. Richa Nagar’s interview articulates an ideal of feminist friendships that “enable continuous evolution of our beings and mindsets... without feeling threatened by one another.” If our articles focus on the close bonds between women, our News and Views pieces in this issue point to collective ties formed in response to political and social threats: Dalia Abd El-Hameed and Nadine Naber describe responses by Egyptian feminists to government crackdowns, and our forum “Orlando: Observances” offers a selection of first-person accounts from vigils organized to mark the massacre at the Pulse nightclub this summer. This issue also presents internal negotiations of identity, identification, and body image in Stephanie Han’s short story and in the vivid and bold transgressions of Wangechi Mutu’s collages as described by Sarah Jane Cervenak. In “‘Abracadabra’: Intimate Inventions by Early College Women,” Susan Van Dyne takes us on a fascinating journey into the “the early formation of a homosocial student culture and the bonds between women” at Smith College in the late nineteenth century. Mining an archive of diaries, letters, photos, and other materials from a group of friends from the class of 1883, she focuses on two kinds of written evidence: one, the inchoate expressions of homoerotic desire in one student’s journal at a moment when “lesbian” did not yet exist as an identity, and the other, a love poem to two students, written as a parody by one of their women professors, but which reverberated beyond the college and ignited male opprobrium. In her discussions of these developments, rather than ascribing identity, Van Dyne navigates the “messiness” of the archive, keeping her eye trained on the “only partially intelligible strategies of self-representation that can’t be translated or reduced to the modern Preface 273 language of sexual self-recognition.” What is most surprising in her account is not that young women would feel desire for one another, nor that male peers or authorities might find this threatening, but that the fabric of the students’ homosocial community had such resilience, nurturing... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Redeeming the Enlightenment: Christianity and the Liberal VirtuesJudith W. KayRedeeming the Enlightenment: Christianity and the Liberal Virtues Bruce K. Ward Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010. 230 pp. $26.00.Bruce Ward has written a remarkably rich intellectual history whose theological diagnosis yields refreshing interpretations of ethical norms. Each chapter treats one of liberalism’s cherished virtues (equality, authenticity, tolerance, and compassion) and argues for the Christian roots of each in order (...) to show how Christianity is “the fulfillment of what the Enlightenment, at its best, sought” (196).Ward uses the Christian humanism of Dostoevsky to redeem the equality espoused by Rousseau and Kant in light of Nietzsche’s attacks. Equality is grounded neither in a human capacity nor in obedience to a principle, but in the imago Dei. While hardly original, this foundation with attention to immanence can create an enlivened perception of others in their richness while being transformed by love from “the other world.” Ward redeems authenticity with agapic self-dispossession rather than self-assertion, which liberates it from individualism and opens it to the “call of God.” Liberal compassion finds its fulfillment in the love of particular, suffering humans, which requires discernment, respect, and effective action. Such compassion is rooted in and revelatory of divine love.Ward’s most compelling chapter, on tolerance, begins by noting how this ideal often inhibits moral judgment or promotes indifference. Ward is a student of neither Mill’s nor Nussbaum’s libertarian versions of tolerance. Instead, Ward draws upon René Girard to argue that tolerance must account for the perpetrator’s demonization of social outcasts that leads to the victim’s resentment. Victims must lead the way in exposing and then exiting this cycle. Dostoevsky recommends a practice of taking responsibility for all persecution (“all are guilty for all”) as an expression of active love. Such a practice forges points of human contact between groups in conflict, even if prejudices are slow to change. In response to intolerant religions, Christians should assume such universal responsibility rather than rely on the “restrained” violence of the liberal state. Although Ward derides multicultural versions of tolerance that “celebrate difference,” he observes that the universal human of Enlightenment ontology cannot exist except through the particularity of a lived story—precisely multiculturalism’s insight. [End Page 213]The deep lament motivating this book is that an inadequate Christian theology lost its power to explain the world. The resulting defense of humanism by Enlightenment philosophes was deeply shaped by Christian ideals, but they were unable to articulate a foundation for moral norms, which made Nietzschean nihilists appear sane. Both groups are ill equipped to respond to current religious terrorism. As Charles Taylor explores in The Secular Age, the third contenders are those who affirm a good beyond this world. Ward differs from Taylor by arguing that the problem is not a lack of transcendent grounding for norms but an inadequate conceptualization of immanence and transcendence. Ward uses the Trinitarian approach of Dostoevsky to reorder transcendence and immanence, which avoids translating “Christianity into liberalism” or injecting transcendence into secularism.Ward’s project succeeds if one accepts Nietzsche as the major critic of the Enlightenment. Readers who have accepted as legitimate other criticisms of the philosophes may be disappointed. His discussion of compassion lacks Catholic interlocutors such as Edward Vacek who argue that agape avoids the polarity between self-love and compassion; feminists who critique Enlightenment dichotomies between savage and civilized or reason and emotion; and Marxists who argue that capitalism denies human equality, thus making Ward’s “capitalist liberal humanism” sound naive. It is not clear how Ward would redeem the Enlightenment from such criticisms.Nevertheless, Ward’s rereading of the Enlightenment is majestic in its sweep, compelling in its close textual analysis, and brimming with fresh insights. The text assumes much familiarity with the philosophes; its pedagogical use is recommended for graduate students and scholars. [End Page 214]Judith W. KayUniversity of Puget SoundCopyright © 2012 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface At a time when access to safe abortions is being curtailed in the United States under the pretext of a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this Feminist Studies issue focuses on abortion and women’s embodiment. The essays by Melissa Oliver-Powell, Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst, and Jennifer L. Holland each contribute new approaches to the stillvexed topic of abortion, positioning movements for abortion access in relation to historical and (...) ecological change. Two collaboratively written essays, by South American authors María Fernanda Olarte-Sierra and Tania Pérez-Bustos, and by North American and European authors Laura Bisaillon with six colleagues, both center the body within feminist labor, exploring how the embodied experience of work can also be a site of knowledge-making. Other authors push us to move beyond humanistic understandings of affect and the body in feminist work, as Nathan Snaza shows in a review essay of four recent books engaging “Biopolitics without Bodies.” Poems by Rosetta Marantz Cohen, Darlene Taylor, and Abby Minor also feature experiences of bodily violence and bodily pleasure, while Ellyn Weiss discusses the distinctive representations of bodies in the visual art of Swedish-American artist Anna U. Davis. To close the issue, two News and Views pieces by Pang Laikwan and Sealing Cheng on the recent protest movement in Hong Kong provide two complementary perspectives on living through tumultuous political times. Our next issue will include content directly focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first essay, Melissa Oliver-Powell’s “Beyond the Spectacle of Suffering: Agnès Varda’s L’Une chante, l’autre pas and Rewriting the Subject of Abortion in France” addresses the complexities of anti-​ abortion 8 rhetoric in France. Placing Varda’s 1977 film in the historical context of French nationalistic anxiety about low birthrates in the twentieth century, Oliver-Powell argues that the film deconstructs polarized narratives about abortion. While dominant cultural representations of abortion typically depicted it as the result of female irresponsibility or traumatic victimization, Varda’s film rejects the binary concepts of villain and victim and questions the presumption that women always suffer when exercising their reproductive choice. Oliver-Powell situates Varda alongside the 343 eminent French female cultural leaders who composed a famous 1971 Manifesto publicly declaring themselves criminals for having had illegal abortions and presents simultaneous histories of French feminism and French cinema. Varda’s film constructs a feminist representation of abortion that avoids foregrounding women ’s suffering and instead emphasizes empowerment and solidarity. Its narrative features two women friends, both treated unjustly by France’s abortion laws, who participate in the movement for reform over a fourteen -year span. Varda represents the interplay of motherhood with women ’s lives as a continuum, not a disruptive episode, and she blends documentary -style devices with imaginative musical interludes: she shows actual women seeking abortions in Holland and includes songs about abortion, pregnancy, and motherhood. Oliver-Powell claims that Varda dramatizes unprecedented representations “of female friendship without pathology, of abortion without guilt, death or persecution, of motherhood without objectification....” A second essay, Rachel Hurst’s “Abortion as a Feminist Pedagogy of Grief in Marianne Apostolides’s Deep Salt Water,” proposes that the championing of women’s reproductive rights could better account for the context of difficult emotions and an imperfect world. Hurst uses reproductive justice approaches to critique simplistic rights-based arguments for abortion, premised on liberal concepts of choice and autonomy, which fail to understand the material conditions of poor women and especially women of color. Such analyses emphasize the necessity of rights discourses that include the right to bear and parent one’s own children free from violence and economic hardship, and they advocate the transformative possibilities of acknowledging rather than suppressing women’s ambivalence about their own abortions as well as others’ choices. Hurst describes a collaboration between two contemporary Canadian feminists, writer Marianne Apostolides and visual artist  9 Catherine Mellinger, in their mixed-media text, Deep Salt Water, which is organized according to the weeks of a pregnancy and the aftermath of its termination. Rather than falling back into familiar polarizations for and against “choice,” they use the story of Apostolides’s abortion seventeen years earlier... (shrink)

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Mainstream historians in recent decades have often treated formal categories and rules as something to be 'used' by individuals, as one might use a stick or stone, and the gains of an earlier legal history are often needlessly set aside. Anthropologists, meanwhile, have treated rules as analytic errors and categories as an imposition by outside powers or by analysts, leaving a very thin notion of 'practice' as the stuff of social life. Philosophy of an older vintage, as well as the (...) work of scholars such as Charles Taylor, provides fresh approaches when applied imaginatively to cases beyond the traditional ground of modern Europe and North America. Not only are different kinds of rules and categories open to examination, but the very notion of a rule can be explored more deeply. This volume approaches rules and categories as constitutive of action and hence of social life, but also as providing means of criticism and imagination. A general theoretical framework is derived from analytical philosophy, from Wittgenstein to his critics and beyond, and from recent legal thinkers such as Schauer and Waldron. Case-studies are presented from a broad range of periods and regions, from Amazonia via northern Chad, Tibet, and medieval Russia to the scholarly worlds of Roman law, Islam, and Classical India. As the third volume in the Legalism series, this collection draws on common themes that run throughout the first two volumes: Legalism: Anthropology and History and Legalism: Community and Justice, consolidating them in a framework that suggests a new approach to rule-bound systems. (shrink)

This chapter begins by drawing upon Judith Butler’s work in order to analyze how gender frames women’s lives as not fully livable and, in doing so, differentially exposes women to sexual violence. It proceeds by presenting the ambivalent moral and emotional responses with which sexual violence against women is met within contemporary Western societies such as the United States as an effect of such framing. The chapter concludes by considering how the author’s own analysis is framed and to what (...) effect, and reflects upon possibilities for countering the gendered framing that promotes ignoring, minimizing, and excusing sexual violence against women. (shrink)

Much of the history of Western ethical thought has revolved around debates about what constitutes a good life, and claims that a good life is achievable only by certain human beings. In Feminist Philosophies of Life, feminist, new materialist, posthumanist, and ecofeminist philosophers challenge this tendency, approaching the question of life from alternative perspectives. Signalling the importance of distinctively feminist reflections on matters of shared concern, Feminist Philosophies of Life not only exposes the propensity of discourses to normalize and exclude (...) differently abled, racialized, feminized, and gender nonconforming people, it also asks questions about how life is constituted and understood without limiting itself to the human. A collection of articles that focuses on life as an organizing principle for ontology, ethics, and politics, chapters of this study respond to feminist thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, and Søren Kierkegaard. Divided into three parts, the book debates the question of life in and against the emerging school of new feminist materialism, provides feminist phenomenological and existentialist accounts of life, and focuses on lives marked by a particular precarity such as disability or incarceration, as well as life in the face of a changing climate. Calling for a broader account of lived experience, Feminist Philosophies of Life contains persuasive, original, and diverse analyses that address some of the most crucial feminist issues. Contributors include Christine Daigle, Shannon Dea, Lindsay Eales, Elizabeth Grosz, Lisa Guenther, Lynne Huffer, Ada Jaarsma, Stephanie Jenkins, Ladelle McWhorter, Jane Barter Moulaison, Astrida Neimanis, Danielle Peers, Stephen Seely, Hasana Sharp, Chloë Taylor, Florentien Verhage, Rachel Loewen Walker, and Cynthia Willett. (shrink)

Charles Taylor and John Gray offer competing liberal responses to the contemporary challenge of pluralism. Gray's morally minimal 'modus vivendi liberalism' aims at peaceful coexistence between plural ways of life. It is, in Judith Shklar's phrase, a 'liberalism of fear' that is skeptical of attempts to harmonize clashing values. In contrast, Taylor's 'hermeneutic liberalism' is based on dialogical engagement with difference and holds out the possibility that incompatible values and traditions can be reconciled without oppression or distortion. (...) Although Taylor's theory is superior to Gray's because it recognizes that dialogue is crucial for respecting pluralism, both theories fail to fully articulate the ethical ideal of citizenship that they imply. Citizens who are able to dialogically engage with pluralism must be cultivated through liberal education to possess certain ethical traits, and this requirement inevitably limits the range of pluralism liberal societies can accommodate. The theoretical overemphasis on pluralism in recent liberal theory serves to obscure this point. (shrink)

This article aims to present Judith Butler’s theory of diaspora as a theological paradigm for post-secular social existence. Her accounts of dispossession, statelessness, and exilic identity all afford us a normative challenge for how to think politics and the theological together. We begin by framing Judith Butler’s diasporic theory of politics within Adriennes Rich’s poetic perspective on ecstatic identity. We proceed to argue that by emphasizing both the precariousness and interdependency of social life, Rich and Butler’s shared commitments (...) to universalizing queer forms of collective belonging and affective relations offer an alternative post-secular paradigm to that offered so far by theorists such as Charles Taylor or Jürgen Habermas. Achieving a post-secular “state” may ultimately be a matter of embracing the failure of our own representations, particularly the failures of contemporary religion to represent either the divine or the human, or to constitute a society with its own political theology. It is paradoxically this kind of failure that can open us up to look at ourselves, and to focus on the precariousness and vulnerability of human existence that we see with our very eyes and reproduced by our very own hands. (shrink)

Early in World War I, Virginia Woolf wrote these words: ‘The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be […]’. It is tempting to assume that darkness simply hides the unknown and the threatening. It is more challenging to think of it as Woolf did: rich with possibility in even the most desperate times.We live in what many would readily describe as dark times. These times have brought (among much else) a once-in-a-century public (...) health crisis, the continued redemption of toxic white supremacy, declining trust in and support for public institutions, and growing evidence of impending climate devastation. ‘Dark Futures’ will consider some of the scenes of this devastation and mine them for insights into our predicaments and our prospects. (shrink)

This volume collects the notable published book reviews of Martha C. Nussbaum, a philosopher and high profile public intellectual who comments often on issues in philosophy, politics, gender equality, economics, and the law. Many of her engagements have been through the medium of the book review, which she has published prolifically in academic journals and in high profile venues like The New Republic and The New York Times for over 20 years. This volume collects 25 of what she considers to (...) be her key reviews. The reviews date from 1986 and range to the present, and engage with authors like Roger Scruton, Allan Bloom, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, Richard Posner, Catherine MacKinnon, and other prominent intellectuals of our time. Throughout, her views defy ideological predictability, heralding interesting work from unlikely sources, deftly critiquing where it is deserved, and generally providing a compelling picture of how intellectuals might engage with broad social concerns. Nussbaum will provide a new introduction that explains her selection, and provides her view of the role of public intellectuals. (shrink)

The characterization of the vices as ‘deadly’ has been explained in terms of the fatal harm they bring to those who possess them. Little has as yet been said about their effect on others, though there have been indications that at least potentially, they are likely to be harmful to others as well. A question is raised on whether the disposition of the vicious is such that by possessing a particular vice, they have further vicious tendencies as well.

This chapter explores the particular vice of acedia or sloth. Sloth is a paralyzing vice, with the slothful carrying the burden of a useless self. Awareness of this condition explains occurrent moods of indolence, hopelessness, and despair. If, like Oblomov, they manage nonetheless to achieve a relatively contented state of mind then this is because they have found some mental busyness and are given to idle daydreams, which may, at least for periods of time, conceal their burden from themselves.

The structural similarities between the different vices means that there will be overlaps between them, or that those in the grip of one of these vices should also naturally be exposed to another. One example is the relation between resentment and envy. The resentful and the envious share feelings of impotence and of hostility towards others. These are miserable feelings, and suffering them will reinforce both their sense of failure and their vengeful attitude towards the world. The avaricious, envious, proud, (...) and resentful can all be said to be inordinate in their desire to have a certain position for themselves secured or maintained. Covetousness is a prominent component of lust and gluttony, and thus be that which links these to the other vices. (shrink)

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the vices considered in this essay, namely, sloth, envy, avarice, pride, anger, lust, and gluttony. It argues that these so-called ‘deadly sins’ were correctly named and correctly classed together. Irrespective of their theological background, they are similar in structure in that the agent’s thoughts and desires, while differing in content depending on the vice in question, focus primarily on the self and its position in the world. They are similar also in that (...) in each case they are destructive of that self and prevent its flourishing. (shrink)

The ‘liberal-communitarian’ debate arose within anglophone political philosophy during the 1980s. This essay opens with an account of the main outlines of the debate, showing how liberals and communitarians tended to confront each other with opposing interpretations of John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1999; originally published in 1971) and Political Liberalism (2005; originally published in 1993). The essay then proceeds to discuss four forms of ‘liberalism after communitarianism’: Michael Freeden’s account of liberalism as an ideology; Joseph Raz and Will Kymlicka’s (...) perfectionist liberalisms; the liberalism of value pluralists such as Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams; and Judith N. Shklar’s liberalism of fear. It concludes with the suggestion that there are times when liberals of every kind should set aside their ideology, even if only temporarily, in order to listen to their interlocutors with truly open minds. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In my contribution to this volume, I (BHS) comment on on the stultifying rhetoric of contemporary analytic moral theory as illustrated in Judith Jarvis Thomson's Tanner Lectures, with particular reference to Thomson's anxieties about the moral relativism exhibited by college freshman and to her efforts--quite strained, in my view, and inevitably unsuccessful--to demonstrate the existence of objective judgments in matters of morality and taste .

Recently, several authors have utilized the notion of dependence to respond to the traditional argument for the incompatibility of freedom and divine foreknowledge. However, proponents of this response have not always been so clear in specifying where the incompatibility argument goes wrong, which has led to some unfounded objections to the response. We remedy this dialectical confusion by clarifying both the dependence response itself and its interaction with the standard incompatibility argument. Once these clarifications are made, it becomes clear both (...) (1.) that the dependence response does not beg the question against the proponent of the incompatibility argument and (2.) that the dependence response advances the dialectic whether it is developed as a version of Ockhamism or as a version of multiple-pasts compatibilism. (shrink)

How does an object persist through change? How can a book, for example, open in the morning and shut in the afternoon, persist through a change that involves the incompatible properties of being open and being shut? The goal of this reader is to inform and reframe the philosophical debate around persistence; it presents influential accounts of the problem that range from classic papers by W. V. O. Quine, David Lewis, and Judith Jarvis Thomson to recent work by contemporary (...) philosophers. The authors take on the question of persistence by examining three broad approaches: perdurantism, which holds that change over time is analogous to change over space; exdurantism, according to which identity over time is analogous to identity across possible worlds; and endurantism, which holds that ordinary objects persist by enduring. Each of these approaches appears to be coherent, but each also has its own metaphysical problems. Persistence includes papers that argue for perdurantism, exdurantism, or endurantism, as well as papers that explore some metaphysical difficulties challenging each account. In this way the collection allows readers to balance the trade-offs of each approach in terms of intuitiveness, theoretical attractiveness, and elegance.Contributors:Yuri Balashov, William Carter, Graeme Forbes, Sally Haslanger, Katherine Hawley, H. S. Hestevold, Mark Hinchliffe, Mark Johnston, Roxanne Marie Kurtz, David K. Lewis, Ned Markosian, D. H. Mellor, W. V. O. Quine, Theodore Sider, Richard Taylor, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Peter van Inwagen, Dean Zimmerman. (shrink)

The attempt to understand and develop Plato's philosophical views has a long history, starting with Aristotle and Plato's institutional successors in the academy towards the end of the fourth century bc. This article traces the history and development of the idea of Platonism. The development of a specifically Platonic philosophy took place mainly within the academy. As a result, the idea that Plato's dialogues already presented a well defined, comprehensive, and essentially correct philosophical system seems not to have arisen until (...) the first century bc. And it was probably not until toward the beginning of the second century ad that a disparate set of philosophers who identified themselves as “Platonists” conceived the project of advocating and defending a specifically Platonic philosophy of this kind by systematically interpreting and explaining Plato's texts. (shrink)

Although convinced by Frankfurt-style cases that moral responsibility does not require the ability to do otherwise, semicompatibilists have not wanted to accept a parallel claim about moral responsibility for omissions, and so they have accepted asymmetrical requirements on moral responsibility for actions and omissions. In previous work, I have presented a challenge to various attempts at defending this asymmetry. My view is that semicompatibilists should give up these defenses and instead adopt symmetrical requirements on moral responsibility for actions and omissions, (...) and in this paper I highlight three advantages of doing so: first, it avoids a strange implication of the truth of determinism; second, it allows for a principled reply to Philip Swenson’s recent ‘No Principled Difference Argument’; third, it provides a reason to reject a crucial inference rule invoked by Peter van Inwagen’s ‘Direct Argument’ for the incompatibility of moral responsibility and determinism. (shrink)