Want to be cunning? You might wish you were more clever, more flexible, able to cut a few corners without getting caught, to dive now and again into iniquity and surface clutching a prize. You might want to roll your eyes at those slaves of duty who play by the rules. Or you might think there's something sleazy about that stance, even if it does seem to pay off. Does that make you a chump? With pointedly mischievous prose, Don (...) class='Hi'>Herzog explores what's alluring and what's revolting in cunning. He draws on a colorful range of sources: tales of Odysseus; texts from Machiavelli; pamphlets from early modern England; salesmen's newsletters; Christian apologetics; plays; sermons; philosophical treatises; detective novels; famous, infamous, and obscure historical cases; and more. The book is in three parts, bookended by two murderous churchmen. "Dilemmas" explores some canonical moments of cunning and introduces the distinction between knaves and fools as a "time-honored but radically deficient scheme." "Appearances" assails conventional approaches to unmasking. Surveying ignorance and self-deception, "Despair?" deepens the case that we ought to be cunning--and then sees what we might say in response. Throughout this beguiling book, Herzog refines our sense of what's troubling in this terrain. He shows that rationality, social roles, and morality are tangled together--and trickier than we thought. (shrink)

Emma Goldman's stance toward anarchism was oddly mystified, even loving. Precisely this enchantment led her to see clearly the deep vices of Soviet Russia, when so many on the sane and sober Left were blind to them. So pedestrian liberals ought to relish having the extreme likes of Goldman in their midst. They-we-can faithfully recite their lessons from Mill about free speech, eccentrics, and the proliferation of viewpoints. But more recent liberals and deliberative democrats, insisting on the political centrality of (...) reasonableness, would have problems embracing her. That should give us pause at the politics of reasonableness. And Goldman's infatuation with her own politics offers a tweak on Aristotle: a bad person can make a good citizen. (shrink)

_Has the concept of sovereignty outlived its usefulness?_ SSocial order requires a sovereign: an actor with unlimited, undivided, and unaccountable authority. Or so the classic theory says. But without noticing, we’ve gutted the theory. Constitutionalism limits state authority. Federalism divides it. The rule of law holds it accountable. In vivid historical detail—with millions tortured and slaughtered in Europe, a king put on trial for his life, journalists groaning at idiotic complaints about the League of Nations, and much more—Don Herzog (...) charts both the political struggles that forged sovereignty and the ones that undid it. He argues that it’s no longer a helpful guide to our legal and political problems, but a pernicious bit of confusion. It’s time, past time, to retire sovereignty. (shrink)

THE LIBERTARIAN IDEA by Jan Narveson Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988.367 pp., $34.95. Libertarianism is an austerely rigorous account of liberalism, but what justifies it? Troubled by the intuitionistic appeals of many libertarians, Jan Narveson attempts to provide foundations for libertarianism by turning to social contract theory. He argues that parties out to advance whatever goals they have, with their current knowledge and motivations, would converge on typically libertarian positions, including a very strong set of private property rights and no (...) affirmative obligation to come to the aid of others. But his arguments simply fail. Nothing justifies libertarianism; indeed its conceptual structure is oddly reminiscent of that of fundamentalist religion. (shrink)

HOBBES AND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT TRADITION by Jean Hampton Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 299 pp., $42.50 THE RHETORIC OF LEVIATHAN: THOMAS HOBBES AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION by David Johnston Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. 234 pp., $25.00 HOBBESIAN MORAL AND POLITICAL THEORY by Gregory S. Kavka Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. 460 pp., $45.00, $12.95 HOBBES by Tom Sorell London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986. 163 pp., $34.lb50.

The seven deadly sins have provided gossip, amusement, and the plots of morality plays for nearly fifteen hundred years. In Wicked Pleasures, well-known philosopher, business ethicist, and admitted sinner Robert C. Solomon brings together a varied group of contributors for a new look at the old catalogue of sins. Solomon introduces the sins as a group, noting their popularity and pervasiveness. From the formation of the canon by Pope Gregory the Great, the seven have survived the sermonizing of the Reformation, (...) the Inquisition, the Enlightenment, the brief French reign of supreme reason, the apotheoses of capitalism, communism, secular humanism and postmodernism, the writings of numerous rabbis and evangelical moralists, two series in the New York Times, and several bad movies. Taking their cue from this remarkable history, the contributors, including Thomas Pynchon, allowed one sin apiece, provide a non-sermonizing and relatively light-hearted romp through the domain of the deadly seven. (shrink)

Infamously, Rawls assumed a democratic society to be “a complete and closed social system,” in that “entry into it is only by birth and exit from it is only by death.” Since the beginning of the present millennium, however, debates about the ethical issues related to immigration have been prominent. In this context, these methodological departure points seem long outdated, if not simply biased. This paper will rework Rawls’s theory of migration for application to the case of provisional immigrants by (...) reworking its theoretical underpinnings. I will argue that once his assumptions are adjusted, Rawlsian notions of ‘stability’ in conjunction with his idea of a ‘society understood as a fair system of cooperation’ justify inclusive membership regimes. In other words, Rawlsian domestic justice requires inclusive membership regimes for provisional immigrants. (shrink)

This essay is part of a dossier on Cristina Lafont's book Democracy without Shortcuts.

Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza (1632–1677) was one of the most systematic, inspiring, and influential philosophers of the early modern period. From a pantheistic starting point that identified God with Nature as all of reality, he sought to demonstrate an ethics of reason, virtue, and freedom while unifying religion with science and mind with body. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, ethics, politics, and the analysis of religion remain vital to the present day. Yet his writings initially appear forbidding to contemporary (...) readers, and his ideas have often been misunderstood. This second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza includes new chapters on Spinoza's life and his metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of religion, and biblical scholarship, as well as extensive updates to the previous chapters and bibliography. A thorough, reliable, and accessible guide to this extraordinary philosopher, it will be invaluable to anyone who wants to understand what Spinoza has to teach. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the relationships that Derrida establishes between three analytic discussions and three autoimmunities. The analytic discussions are (1) the antinomy of hospitality, related to what happens when the subject faces demands from strangers; (2) the antinomy of the death penalty, related to the meeting between the right to life and the right to end the life of another; (3) the antinomy of animality related to laws and what lies beyond them. The autoimmunities are (1) the autoimmunity of (...) inclusion: democracy is open only to its sovereign citizens while it claims to welcome all who are excluded; (2) the autoimmunity of rights and liberties: in liberal democracy, rights and liberties are meant to challenge sovereignty’s absolutism, but any attack on sovereignty is an attack on rights and liberties; (3) the autoimmunity of globalization: for democracy to work it requires protection provided by a supersovereignty, which limits the sovereignty of states, and hence, democracy. The paper follows Derrida’s connections between the questions of hospitality, the death penalty, and animality on the one hand, and the autoimmune aspects of democratic politics on the other, to argue that his deconstruction of democracy is an ethicization of democracy activated by the concept of sovereignty, and a deconstruction of sovereignty via ethics. (shrink)

Introduction: situating Heidegger and the philosophy of technology -- Heidegger's philosophy of technology -- The historical-ontological priority of technology over science -- Deromanticizing Heidegger -- Interlude: the earth inherited -- Was Heidegger prescient concerning technoscience? -- Heidegger's technologies: one size fits all -- Concluding postphenomenological postscript: writing technologies.

This book is about the postructural Franco-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. This book covers Jewish ethics in the twentieth century and also cultural philosophy.

Authors like Iris Young and Philip Pettit have come up with proposals for theorizing ‘structural injustice’ and social relations marred by ‘domination’. These authors provide conceptual tools for f...

Original essays by leading philosophers of science explore the question of whether metaphysics can and should be naturalized--conducted as part of natural science.

The evaluation of labour markets and of particular jobs ought to be sensitive to a plurality of benefits and burdens of work. We use the term 'the goods of work' to refer to those benefits of work that cannot be obtained in exchange for money and that can be enjoyed mostly or exclusively in the context of work. Drawing on empirical research and various philosophical traditions of thinking about work we identify four goods of work: 1) attaining various types of (...) excellence; 2) making a social contribution; 3) experiencing community; and 4) gaining social recognition. Our account of the goods of work can be read as unpacking the ways in which work can be meaningful. The distribution of the goods of work is a concern of justice for two conjoint reasons: First, they are part of the conception of the good of a large number of individuals. Second, in societies without an unconditional income and in which most people are not independently wealthy, paid work is non-optional and workers have few, if any, occasions to realize these goods outside their job. Taking into account the plurality of the goods of work and their importance for justice challenges the theoretical and political status quo, which focuses mostly on justice with regard to the distribution of income. We defend this account against the libertarian challenge that a free labour market gives individuals sufficient options to realise the goods of work important to them, and discuss the challenge from state neutrality. In the conclusion, we hint towards possible implications for today’s labour markets. (shrink)

We characterize rings over which every cotorsion module is pure injective in terms of certain descending chain conditions and the Ziegler spectrum, which renders the classes of von Neumann regular rings and of pure semisimple rings as two possible extremes. As preparation, descriptions of pure projective and Mittag–Leffler preenvelopes with respect to so-called definable subcategories and of pure generation for such are derived, which may be of interest on their own. Infinitary axiomatizations lead to coherence results previously known for the (...) special case of flat modules. Along with pseudoflat modules we introduce quasiflat modules, which arise naturally in the model-theoretic and the category-theoretic contexts. (shrink)

He adds, "I show my worries to be less about the loss of subjects or authors, than I do about (there) not being bodies or perceivers". The book has two parts.

_Contemporary discussions of self and consciousness have for some time incorporated Hindu-Buddhist dialogue on the existence and nature of self (Ram-Prasad 2012). The ideal of responsibly_ _incorporating this dialogue raises an interpretive dilemma: on the one hand, we should eschew the simplistic picture of a “sterile contest” in which all Hindu schools are committed to the doctrine of the self (ātmavāda) and all Buddhists are invariantly committed to denying its existence (2012: 3). To treat Hindu ātmavādins as monolithically opposed to (...) Buddhist no-self theorists without attending to disagreements within the two camps would be to woefully underrepresent the complexity of the terrain at hand. Yet, we should not forget that what we are dealing with is still a structured debate of some sort. I propose that two Jaina “disambiguation strategies” (Balcerowicz 2017)—the theory of viewpoints (naya-vāda) and the theory of sevenfold predication (syād-vāda), also called the sevenfold formula (__sapta-bha__ṅ__g__ī__)—can together facilitate a re-imaginative reconstruction of Hindu-Buddhist dialogue on the self as something other than a two-sided battle or an arbitrary cluster of views. Following superimposition of the __sapta-bha__ṅ__g__ī__ onto what I temporarily term “the debate,” wherein each figure (bha__ṅ__ga)__ is understood as indexed in part by a specific viewpoint (naya) or a set thereof, we find a dynamic description of an indeterminate phenomenon, embracing affirmation and negation of the “self” (ātman) without antecedent commitment to the substantive existence of the referent of the term. This exercise in working with Jaina tools has implications for broader methodological concerns facing cross-cultural philosophical projects, and bears on how we might fruitfully re-imagine otherwise stymied contemporary debates. _. (shrink)