Authored by an interdisciplinary team of experts, including historians, classicists, philosophers and theologians, this original collection of essays offers the first authoritative analysis of the multifaceted reception of Greek ethics in late antiquity and Byzantium, opening up a hitherto under-explored topic in the history of Greek philosophy. The essays discuss the sophisticated ways in which moral themes and controversies from antiquity were reinvigorated and transformed by later authors to align with their philosophical and religious outlook in each period. Topics examined (...) range from ethics and politics in Neoplatonism and ethos in the context of rhetorical theory and performance to textual exegesis on Aristotelian ethics. The volume will appeal to scholars and students in philosophy, classics, patristic theology, and those working on the history of education and the development of Greek ethics. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 1 Seiten: 219-228.

John Damascene, one of the most productive Greek theologians of the Middle Byzantine era, also composed a treatise on the Trisagion hymn, or how it should be sung correctly and why; a text that has been little discussed in contemporary scholarship. The present paper provides an overview of the work – with special reference to the notion of identity in John’s description of the Trinitarian doctrine. It also examines the treatise especially in the context of anti-heretical polemics. The author argues (...) that John’s approach to the question of the correct way of singing the hymn is gentle: instead of using pejorative language, he even praises the object of his reproach. (shrink)

This book defends an original and pluralist theory of when and why discrimination wrongs people, in particular, through unfair subordination, through the violation of their right to a particular deliberative freedom, or through the denial to them of access to a basic good.

Aristotle's account of female nature has received mostly negative treatment, emphasising what he says females cannot do. Building on recent research, this book comprehensively revises such readings, setting out the complex and positive role played by the female in Aristotle's thought with a particular focus on the longest surviving treatise on reproduction in the ancient corpus, the Generation of Animals. It provides new interpretations of the nature of Aristotle's sexism, his theory of male and female interaction in generation, and his (...) account of inherited features. It also discusses a range of more general issues which can and should be re-examined in light of Aristotle's account of female animals: his methodology, hylomorphism, teleology and psychology. Aristotle on Female Animals will be valuable to all those interested in Aristotle's philosophy and the history of gender. (shrink)

For the past 40 years, the 14-day rule has governed and, by defining a clear boundary, enabled embryo research and the clinical benefits derived from this. It has been both a piece of legislation and a rule of good practice globally. However, methods now allow embryos to be cultured for more than 14 days, something difficult to imagine when the rule was established, and knowledge gained in the intervening years provides robust scientific rationale for why it is now essential to (...) conduct research on later stage human embryos. In this paper, I argue that the current limit for embryo research in vitro should be extended to 28 days to permit research that will illuminate our beginnings as well as provide new therapeutic possibilities to reduce miscarriage and developmental abnormalities. It will also permit validation of potentially useful alternatives. Through consideration of current ethical arguments, I also conclude that there are no coherent or persuasive reasons to deny researchers, and through them humanity, the knowledge and the innovation that this will generate. (shrink)

We agree with Svirsky, Howard, and Berman that the US Food and Drug Administration plays various roles, only one of which is the technical review and evaluation of product safety and e...

Very often, when a belief or a method of reasoning strikes us as morally wrong, it also seems to wrong someone in particular. For instance, if an acquaintance j.

I argue that T.M. Scanlon's contractualist account of morality has difficulty accommodating our intuitions about the moral relevance of the number of people affected by an action. I first consider the "Complaint Model" of reasonable rejection, which restricts the grounds for an individual's rejection of a principle to its effects upon herself. I argue that it can accommodate our intuitions about numbers only if we assume that, whenever we do not know who will be affected, each individual may appeal only (...) to the _expected effects on her. This assumption, I suggest, leads to counterintuitive results in cases where, although we do not know who will be affected, we do know that _someone will be. I then consider two proposals to supplement the complaint model with a direct appeal to aggregation. I argue that both are open to serious objections. (shrink)

Efforts to include women in the canon have long been beset by reactionary gatekeeping, typified by the charge “That's not philosophy.” That charge doesn't apply to early and mid‐analytic female philosophers—Welby, Ladd‐Franklin, Bryant, Jones, de Laguna, Stebbing, Ambrose, MacDonald—with job titles like lecturer in logic and professor of philosophy and publications in Mind, the Journal of Philosophy, and Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. It's hopeless to dismiss their work as “not philosophy.” But comparable reactionary gatekeeping affects them, this paper argues, (...) typified by the labels “bad philosophy” and “derivative philosophy.” Virtue and vice epistemology help explain why these women have been neglected and why their own approaches are epistemically virtuous. Their contemporaries and historians are deficient in scholarly virtues in labelling these women's work “bad” or derived from male mentors with no or specious justification. Their disparaged qualities—intellectual humility, modesty, critical self‐reflection, disclosing biases—are often epistemic virtues. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Alice Ambrose is best known as Wittgenstein’s student during the 1930s. Her association with probably the most famous philosopher of the twentieth century contributes to her obscurity. Ambrose is referred to in historiography of this period as ‘follower’ or ‘disciple’ but never considered in her own right as a philosopher. The neglect of her place in the history of philosophy needs to be resisted. This paper explores some of Ambrose’s most interesting ideas from the early 1950s, when she developed (...) and expanded some of Wittgenstein’s inchoate suggestions and contributed to on-going debates about how to do philosophy and the role of language in the discipline. By combining an analysis of the 1950 paper “The Problem of Linguistic Inadequacy” and the 1952 paper “Linguistic Approaches to Philosophical Problems”, it will be seen that Ambrose rejects the idea that ordinary language can be improved and begins to develop the view that philosophical language adapts to usage. Thus, Ambrose does not blindly follow Wittgenstein but breaks with his idea that there is something inherently wrong with the way philosophers communicate. The paper also seeks to show how marginalized philosophers become obscured in the history of the subject through the example of Ambrose. (shrink)

With its pessimistic vision and bleak message of world-denial, it has often been difficult to know how to engage with Schopenhauer's philosophy. Schopenhauer's arguments have seemed flawed and his doctrines marred by inconsistencies; his very pessimism almost too flamboyant to be believable. Yet a way of redrawing this engagement stands open, Sophia Vasalou argues, if we attend more closely to the visionary power of Schopenhauer's work. The aim of this book is to place the aesthetic character of Schopenhauer's standpoint (...) at the heart of the way we read his philosophy and the way we answer the question: why read Schopenhauer - and how? Approaching his philosophy as an enactment of the sublime with a longer history in the ancient philosophical tradition, Vasalou provides a fresh way of assessing Schopenhauer's relevance in critical terms. This book will be valuable for students and scholars with an interest in post-Kantian philosophy and ancient ethics. (shrink)

I propose that meat replacement is to meat, as drag is to gender. Meat replacement has the potential to shake concepts of meat, like drag does for gender. Meat replacements not only mimic meat but disclose how meat itself is performed in carnivorous culture -and show that it may be performed otherwise. My approach is inspired by the show RuPaul’s Drag Race. The argument builds on an imitation of Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity, performed by replacing ‘drag/ gender/ sex/ (...) heterosexism’ terms and relations in Butler’s text with ‘meat replacement/ meat/ species/ carnism’ ones. (shrink)

I propose that the intensification of meat production ironically makes meat concepts available to be populated by plants. I argue that what I call “technologies of effacement” facilitate the intensification of animal farming and slaughter by blocking face-to-face encounters between animals and people (Levinas 1969; Efstathiou 2018, 2019). My previous ethnographic work on animal research identifies technologies of effacement as including (a) architectures and the built environment, (b) entry and exit rules, (c) special garments, (d) naming and labeling procedures, and (...) (e) protocols for handling animals (Efstathiou 2018, 2019). Building on ethnographic research by Dawn Coppin (2003) and Nöellie Vialles (1994), in the United States and France respectively, I propose that (a) Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) buildings, gestation, and farrowing crates; (b) rules for entering and exiting the slaughterhouse; (c) white slaughterhouse garments; (d) unique identification systems; and (e) “trapping” animals before stunning can all operate as technologies of effacement. Though developed to serve other manifest aims, like hygiene, expediency, or safety, these technologies operate to sustain routine, inviting one to look at animals as tokens of a known type while blocking encounters between humans and animals (and also among animals) as radically different, morally significant Others (Efstathiou 2018, 2019). (shrink)

In a broad survey of negative and hostile attitudes toward canines in pagan, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, the author posits that warm ties between humans and canines have been seen as a threat to the authority of the clergy and indeed, of God. Exploring ancient myth, Biblical and Rabbinical literature, and early and medieval Christianity and Islam, she explores images and prohibitions concerning dogs in the texts of institutionalized, monotheistic religions, and offers possible explanations for these attitudes, including concern (...) over disease. (shrink)

This Element provides an account of Aristotle on women which combines what is found in his scientific biology with his practical philosophy. Scholars have often debated how these two fields are related. The current study shows that according to Aristotelian biology, women are set up for intelligence and tend to be milder-tempered than men. Thus, women are not curtailed either intellectually or morally by their biology. The biological basis for the rule of men over women is women's lack of spiritedness. (...) Aristotle's Politics must be read with its audience in mind; there is a need to convince men of the importance of avoiding insurrection both in the city and the household. While their spiritedness gives men the upper hand, they are encouraged to listen to the views of free women in order to achieve the best life for all. (shrink)

Attending to the rich entanglements of scientific and critical theory, contributors to this issue scrutinize phenomena in nature to explore new territory in feminist science studies. With a special focus on relating theory to method, these scholars generate new feminist approaches to scientific practice. Contributors probe this relationship by way of topics from poetics of human-jellyfish interactions to a feminist reconsideration of a well-known thought experiment in thermodynamics. Two contributors analyze plant-insect encounter research to spin their own symbiotically inflected account (...) of “affective ecologies.” Technologies of human memory storage and retrieval lead one writer to interrogate how our understandings of memory and amnesia are currently under revision. Another contributor tracks the lively evolutionary and morphological theories that textile artisans manifest in material models of sea creatures. What emerges from these diverse essays is an approach to critical thinking that inhabits, elaborates, and feeds upon scientific theory, holding feminist theory accountable to science and vice versa. _Sophia Roosth_ is Assistant Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. _Astrid Schrader_ is Visiting Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Sarah Lawrence College. _Contributors_: Karen Barad, Lina Dib, Eva Hayward, Carla Hustak, Vicki Kirby, Natasha Myers, Sophia Roosth, Astrid Schrader. (shrink)

Our main research question is how pliable Norwegian meat consumption practices are. However it is not any type of elasticity we are interested in. We are specifically interested in the scope for what we dub the “4Rs” of responsible meat consumption within existing food systems: 1. Reducing the amount of animal-based proteins used 2. Replacing animal-based protein with plant-based, or insect-based alternatives 3. Refining processes of utilization of animal-based protein to minimize emissions, loss and waste 4. Recognising animal-based protein as (...) precious –i.e. recognising the people and the animals involved in meat production. -/- These four principles are derived by analogy to ethical principles guiding the use of animals in research, the so-called “3Rs”, namely: the imperatives to reduce the number of animals needed to make a scientific inference, to replace animal experiments with other types of research, and where not possible to replace ‘more’ with ‘less’ sentient creatures, and to refine the experimental setup so it minimises the discomfort and/or distress inflicted upon the animals (Russell and Burch, 1959). There are no such principles guiding the use of animals in farming, given the farming industry intrinsically relies on increasing its resources, of which animals are one. The current profile of climate change however opens up a way to re-appreciate meat –indeed what we articulate as the fourth principle of recognizing the preciousness of meat, above, given planetary boundaries. We proceed to reflect on how these 4Rs can be modulated, from a cultural-social perspective, that is, we look at cultural factors that could stretch current food practices along the 4R aspects. (shrink)

In this paper, my aim is to offer some comments on the study of Mu‘tazilite kalām, framed around the study of a particular episode in the Mu‘tazilite dispute about man – a question with a deceptively Aristotelian cadence that is not too difficult to dispel. Within this episode, my focus is on one of the major arguments used by the late Baṣrans to hold up their side of the dispute, and on the relationship between the mental and the physical which (...) emerges from it. The most interesting – and most surprising – aspect of this relationship is that the mental and the physical do not seem to be treated as distinct terms, thus creating the space for questions about how the two relate. The first person perspective seems to be identified with the physical body. My interest then is in the response of the reader to this surprising presentation – or rather, in a certain kind of reader response, and thus a certain kind of interpretive mode, whose value and viability it is part of my aim to help clarify. (shrink)

_Synthesizes the most important recent work on wonder and brings a number of disciplines into conversation. _.

ArgumentWhat does “life” become at a moment when biological inquiry proceeds by manufacturing biological artifacts and systems? In this article, I juxtapose two radically different communities, synthetic biologists and Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef crafters (HCCR). Synthetic biology is a decade-old research initiative that seeks to merge biology with engineering and experimental research with manufacture. The HCCR is a distributed venture of three thousand craftspeople who cooperatively fabricate a series of yarn and plastic coral reefs to draw attention to the menace (...) climate change poses to the Great Barrier and other reefs. Interpreting these two groups alongside one another, I suggest that for both, manufacturing biological artifacts advances their understandings of biology: in a rhetorical loop, they build new biological things in order to understand the things they are making. The resulting fabrications condense scientific and folk theories about “life” and also undo “life” as a coherent analytic object. (shrink)

With increasing publication and data production, scientific knowledge presents not simply an achievement but also a challenge. Scientific publications and data are increasingly treated as resources that need to be digitally ‘managed.’ This gives rise to scientific Knowledge Management : second-order scientific work aiming to systematically collect, take care of and mobilise first-hand disciplinary knowledge and data in order to provide new first-order scientific knowledge. We follow the work of Leonelli, Efstathiou and Hislop in our analysis of the use of (...) KM in semantic systems biology. Through an empirical philosophical account of KM-enabled biological research, we argue that KM helps produce new first-order biological knowledge that did not exist before, and which could not have been produced by traditional means. KM work is enabled by conceiving of ‘knowledge’ as an object for computational science: as explicated in the text of biological articles and computable via appropriate data and metadata. However, these founded knowledge concepts enabling computational KM risk focusing on only computationally tractable data as knowledge, underestimating practice-based knowing and its significance in ensuring the validity of ‘manageable’ knowledge as knowledge. (shrink)

The ‘psychologist’s green thumb’ refers to the argument that an experimenter needs an indeterminate set of skills to successfully replicate an effect. This argument is sometimes invoked by psychological researchers to explain away failures of independent replication attempts of their work. In this paper, I assess the psychologist’s green thumb as a candidate explanation for individual replication failure and argue that it is potentially costly for psychology as a field. I also present other, more likely reasons for these replication failures. (...) I conclude that appealing to a psychologist’s green thumb is not a convincing explanation for replication failure. (shrink)

Must good deeds be rewarded and wrongdoers punished? Would God be unjust if He failed to punish and reward? And what is it about good or evil actions and moral identity that might generate such necessities? These were some of the vital religious and philosophical questions that eighth- and ninth-century Mu'tazilite theologians and their sophisticated successors attempted to answer, giving rise to a distinctive ethical position and one of the most prominent and controversial intellectual trends in medieval Islam. The Mu'tazilites (...) developed a view of ethics whose distinguishing features were its austere moral objectivism and the crucial role it assigned to reason in the knowledge of moral truths. Central to this ethical vision was the notion of moral desert, and of the good and evil consequences--reward or punishment--deserved through a person's acts. Moral Agents and Their Deserts is the first book-length study of this central theme in Mu'tazilite ethics, and an attempt to grapple with the philosophical questions it raises. At the same time, it is a bid to question the ways in which modern readers, coming to medieval Islamic thought with a philosophical interest, seek to read and converse with Mu'tazilite theology. Moral Agents and Their Deserts tracks the challenges and rewards involved in the pursuit of the right conversation at the seams between modern and medieval concerns. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 1-2, Page 55-86, June 2022.

In recent years, Philosophy Departments at universities in China and worldwide have experienced a renaissance in discussion on Confucian thought. As the country draws from indigenous traditions, rather than leaning completely on the importation of Western liberalism and Marxism, Confucianism has critical implications for politics, ethics, and law in modern China. At the same time, democracy never left the conversation. Democratic concepts cannot be ignored and must be disposed of, acknowledged, or incorporated. The relationship between Confucianism and democracy has been (...) described by various authors as one of conflict, critique, compatibility, and hybridity. In this article, we examine a compatibility model, in which compatibility between Confucianism and democracy can be divided into four types: soft, hard, coexistence, and integration. We examine compatibility by examining “what is compatible” and “how compatibility can be achieved” so as to design speculative models for what a contemporary Confucian government would look like. Our focus is mainly political philosophy in order to explain the effect of cross-pollination of Confucian and democratic thought on political society. (shrink)

This paper aims to establish that, for Aristotle, the state of the physical body is crucial to the human capacity for theoretical understanding. In recent years, scholars have begun to recognise the importance of Aristotle’s biological writings for understanding his psychology, after the relative neglect of these connections. The relevance in particular of the so-called Parva naturalia, small works on what is common to body and soul, and the De motu animalium, a work devoted to animal motion in broad terms, (...) has begun to fill in the picture of how the living body is involved in cognition. This paper will support this point of view by adding the De generatione animalium, a work which gives an account of the advent of soul capacities through the development of the body from the blood, under the control of the nutritive soul. An Aristotelian science of human physiology is a study of the “thinking body”, a person as a whole rather than disembodied nous. I will first set out factors that have made it difficult to integrate Aristotle’s biological treatises into our understanding of human thinking. Next, I will distinguish the thinking shared with other animals, from theoretical understanding, which is something only humans can achieve. I will then explain the aspects of the body that must facilitate and eventually bring about the capacity for thinking, before turning to Aristotle’s embryology where nutritive soul is ultimately responsible for the construction and maintenance of the thinking body. It will be concluded that only a human body leads to theoretical understanding and only a healthy human body can do so adequately. (shrink)

EVER SINCE BALME’S GROUNDBREAKING WORK on the subject, there has been substantial progress in our understanding of the importance of biology in Aristotle’s philosophy. Despite a certain reluctance to incorporate treatises on animals into the undergraduate curriculum, it is now inadvisable to avoid any reference to Aristotle’s biological work when discussing most aspects of his thought. The new tendency of scholarship on Aristotle’s biology employs various methodologies but, in the main, argues for the importance of Aristotle’s biological treatises on the (...) basis of the assistance they might provide for understanding some of the more intractable problems in Aristotle’s thought. (shrink)

The prevalence of the term post-truth suggests that we have, in the last few years, moved from being members of societies dedicated to truth to being members of ones that cannot agree on truth’s parameters and, even worse, have given up trying. But is this really what has happened? The author argues that, under the sway of the Enlightenment, truth has actually been unstable and a source of contention in public life ever since the founding moment for modern democracies in (...) the late eighteenth century; the ‘post’ in ‘post-truth’ elides this complex history even as it accurately describes some of the conditions of our moment. What that means, though, is that rather than attempt to turn the clock back to past models and practices for restoring the reign of truth, we should be looking for new, post-Enlightenment paradigms for how to define and locate truth in the context of democracy, as well as new mechanisms for making this possible. (shrink)

In cases of self-gaslighting, the subject worries that other people will be skeptical of one of her beliefs—for instance, the belief that she has been sexually harassed. Prompted by this worry, she...

Many social practices treat citizens with cognitive disabilities differently from their nondisabled peers. Does John Rawls's theory of justice imply that we have different duties of justice to citizens whenever they are labeled with cognitive disabilities? Some theorists have claimed that the needs of the cognitively disabled do not raise issues of justice for Rawls. I claim that it is premature to reject Rawlsian contractualism. Rawlsians should regard all citizens as moral persons provided they have the potential for developing the (...) two moral powers. I claim that every citizen requires specific Enabling Conditions to develop and exercise the two moral powers. Structuring basic social institutions to deny some citizens the Enabling Conditions is unjust because it blocks their developmental pathways toward becoming fully cooperating members of society. Hence, we have a duty of justice to provide citizens labeled with cognitive disabilities with the Enabling Conditions they require until they become fully cooperating members of society. (shrink)

This paper analyses the main perceptions of capitalism and crises from a mainstream and heterodox perspective. Broadly defined within the neoclassical structure, the mainstream approaches support the idea of long-term stability of capitalism and describe crises as exogenous events. The heterodox perceptions, on the contrary, perceive crises as an internal feature of capitalism and propose to reframe the global economy within the limits of the socio-environmental systems. Despite the historical recurrence of crises, the neoclassic capitalist framework and the related mainstream (...) perceptions are still dominating the international economic debate. Most of the crises have then been addressed with reforms oriented to adjust some elements of the system without changing the overall economic structure. On the contrary, limited numbers of initiatives have been implemented to reorganise the economy according to the heterodox perspectives. Within this context, further analysis would be needed to investigate the feasibility of the proposed heterodox solutions. By discussing the main perceptions of capitalism and crises and by considering the ethical implications of the mainstream and the heterodox approaches, the present paper contributes to the existing debate around stability of capitalism and provides a starting point for analysis oriented to investigate the feasibility of alternative economic structures. (shrink)

The wide consensus in research with regard to the modernity of keeping companion animals lies behind the prevailing conclusions about attitudes toward the canine species in pre-modern societies. These were reviewed mainly from a utilitarian perspective. Characterized, in part, by the protective shelter of the extended household and, as such, free of the tensions affecting the nuclear family in industrial cities, pre-modern societies supposedly lacked in the emotional stress and indigence that condition or encourage dog keeping. A careful examination of (...) the sources, both narrative and pictorial, however, suggests more ambivalent attitudes thus challenging widespread research premises and justifying further analysis. This study, covering rural and urban societies in the ancient and medieval periods, examines references to dogs as companion animals in traditional societies. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgley discussed Aristotle's ethics as an alternative to modern moral philosophy. This idea is best known from Anscombe's 1958 paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. The main...

We link Ivancovsky et al.'s novelty-seeking model (NSM) to computational models of intrinsically motivated behavior and learning. We argue that dissociating different forms of curiosity, creativity, and memory based on the involvement of distinct intrinsic motivations (e.g., surprise and novelty) is essential to empirically test the conceptual claims of the NSM.

Building on appraisal theory of emotions and theories on moral emotions, we contend that ethical leadership triggers other-praising moral emotions directed at the supervisor and leads to feedback-seeking behavior. We further predict that the affective processes of ethical leadership have implications for workplace behaviors, namely organizational citizenship behavior directed at the supervisor and employee voice. We develop a new measure of supervisor-directed, other-praising moral emotions and test the validity of the measure. Then, we test and find support for the proposed (...) hypotheses using a sample of 231 full-time employees in China with a time-lagged survey design and structural equation modeling. Theoretical and practical implications for ethical leadership and moral emotions are discussed. (shrink)