English summary: Provocative Public Philosophy In 2017, I argued that people with Down syndrome cannot live full lives. This sparked a heated debated in the Norwegian public sphere. This gave rise to a debate over what academics should and should not say in public. A certain form of public philosophy, what I will call provocative public philosophy, was criticized for being harmful, imperialistic, for eroding trust in philosophers, and for creating too much noise. In this article I will, in light (...) of the Down syndrome debate, defend provocative public philosophy against these allegations. -/- Norsk sammendrag: En uttalelse om at personer med Downs syndrom ikke kan leve fullverdige liv, satte i gang en stor og opphetet debatt i den norske offentligheten i 2017. Denne ga opphav til en mer overordnet debatt om hva akademikere bør og ikke bør si i offentligheten. En viss form for offentlig filosofi, det jeg vil kalle provokativ offentlig filosofi, er blitt utpekt som synder. I denne artikkelen vil jeg, med utgangspunkt i debatten om fullverdige liv, forsvare provokativ offentlig filosofi mot både epistemiske og etiske innvendinger. (shrink)

Euhemerus, the famous theorist on the nature of the gods who lived around 300 BC, has usually been discussed as a disembodied intellectual figure, with scholars focusing on his literary and philosophical sources and influence. Although he is called “Euhemerus of Messene,” there is uncertainty as to where he was born, lived, and worked, in particular whether he came from Sicilian or Peloponnesian Messene. Until now, the conquests of Alexander the Great and the establishment of the Successor Kingdoms have been (...) considered the only context for Euhemerus. This paper will draw upon literary, historical, and archaeological evidence to argue that Euhemerus belongs in a Sicilian context. The long history of the worship of rulers in Sicily from the oikistai to the tyrants of Syracuse, the wealth of Sicily, the proximity of the Lipari Islands, the multiethnic milieu of Sicily with its vigorous interaction and syncretism, all contributed to Euhemerus' experiences and thought. We suggest that centuries of Sicilian cultural and political experience, not merely the “phenomenon” of Alexander the Great and the dawn of the Hellenistic Age, provided the impetus to the ideas of Euhemerus, and that Euhemerus brought this Sicilian contribution to bear on the new problems of the wider world. (shrink)

Catharine MacKinnon's investigation of the role of sexuality in the subordination of women is a logical culmination of radical feminist thought. If this is correct, the position of her work relative to radical feminism is analogous to the place Parmenides's work occupied in ancient Greek philosophy. Critics of MacKinnon's work have missed their target completely and must engage her work in a different way if feminist theory is to progress past its current stalemated malaise.

In this dissertation I argue that Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of human nature, of human flourishing and of virtue can fill the gap, identified by Elizabeth Anscombe in 1958, between Aristotle’s account of the virtuous life and contemporary sceptical moral philosophy, which is variously described as subjectivism, consequentialism, emotivism, and sophistry. Furthermore, I argue that a Thomist account of the practicably lived virtuous life is both relevant and applicable to officers and soldiers serving in the British Army of today, because it (...) offers a complete account of the human moral life, as opposed to the consequentialist, emotivist and deontological approaches to ethical judgement and reasoning currently prevalent in Western societies, which inform the worldview of both officers and soldiers. These approaches, however, offer only partial accounts of ethics based on impoverished understandings of human nature and, thus, inevitably have a detrimental effect on both the articulation of British military doctrine and on the actual moral conduct of officers and soldiers. I further argue, therefore, that the British Army needs to consciously return to the traditional Western approach to moral education based on the idea of the deliberate formation of virtuous character, which is very different from contemporary Western educational approaches, but which will better prepare British Army officers and soldiers for “the violent school of war”, as Thucydides calls it. (shrink)

Traditionally, kairos has been seen as a “timely” concept, and so invention is said to emerge fromthe timeliness of a cultural and historical situation. But what if invention was thought of as thepotential to shift historical courses through the injection of something new or alien into a situation?This essay argues that kairos has not been able to free itself from its historical constraints becauseit has been bound to a human sense of temporality. By evolving along patterns different from print,the apparatus (...) of the cinema developed in a way where it was not bound to illustrating movement ortimeas it occurs in human-centered experience. Following the work of Gilles Deleuze on cinema,this article argues that the outside of a human sense of time is an untapped source of invention,already present yet dormant within kairos. (shrink)

Logos, generally regarded as the basic principle of the operating world, seems to be closely tied up with development of human being. With the evolutionary history of human, logos evolves into three different dimensional expressions, namely reason, rationality, and reasonableness. In different historical periods, each expression of logos has their own glory days respectively. In the age of ancient Greek sages, reason referred to the whole range of subjects from geometry argumentation to rhetoric. Later on, there emerged a superiority on (...) theoretical abstraction and logical deduction, which was called the dictatorship of rationality. Yet it was found that the bureaucratization of learning had created as many problems as it solved. In recent decades, the years had seen a revived interest in substantial arguments in medical ethics, ecology, and other practical fields. However, we are not inclined to regard reasonableness as a way that it can cure once and for all the crisis of our times. Based on the imperfection of each variant and indeterminacy of the topic, we attempt to track back to logos in a more comprehensive perspective, corresponding to diversity of human activities and modern social production way of life. (shrink)