"This volume brings together a team of international specialists on Deleuze and Guattari to provide in-depth critical studies of each plateau of their major work, A Thousand Plateaus. It combines an overview of the text with deep scholarship and brings a renewed focus on the philosophical significance of their project.'A Thousand Plateaus' represents a whole new way of doing philosophy. This collection supports the critical reception of Deleuze and Guattari's text as one of the most important and influential works of (...) modern theory. Key Features : emphasises the philosophical nature of A Thousand Plateaus, provides detailed coverage of the text as a whole, brings together cutting edge research from some of the leading lights in scholarship on Deleuze and Guattari, an ideal companion to a plateau-by-plateau reading of Deleuze and Guattari's work."--Back cover. (shrink)

There is currently little empirical information about attitudes towards cognitive enhancement - the use of pharmaceutical drugs to enhance normal brain functioning. It is claimed this behaviour most commonly occurs in students to aid studying. We undertook a qualitative assessment of attitudes towards cognitive enhancement by conducting 19 semi-structured interviews with Australian university students. Most students considered cognitive enhancement to be unacceptable, in part because they believed it to be unethical but there was a lack of consensus on whether it (...) was similar or different to steroid use in sport. There was support for awareness campaigns and monitoring of cognitive enhancement use of pharmaceutical drugs. An understanding of student attitudes towards cognitive enhancement is important in formulating future policy. (shrink)

Addiction is increasingly described as a “chronic and relapsing brain disease”. The potential impact of the brain disease model on the treatment of addiction or addicted individuals’ treatment behaviour remains uncertain. We conducted a qualitative study to examine: (i) the extent to which leading Australian addiction neuroscientists and clinicians accept the brain disease view of addiction; and (ii) their views on the likely impacts of this view on addicted individuals’ beliefs and behaviour. Thirty-one Australian addiction neuroscientists and clinicians (10 females (...) and 21 males; 16 with clinical experience and 15 with no clinical experience) took part in 1 h semi-structured interviews. Most addiction neuroscientists and clinicians did not uncritically support the use of brain disease model of addiction. Most were cautious about the potential for adverse impacts on individuals’ recovery and motivation to enter treatment. While some recognised the possibility that the brain disease model of addiction may provide a rationale for addicted persons to seek treatment and motivate behaviour change, Australian addiction neuroscientist and clinicians do not assume that messages about “diseased brains” will always lead to increased treatment-seeking and reduced drug use. Research is needed on how neuroscience research could be used in ways that optimise positive outcomes for addicted persons. (shrink)

Developments in neuroscience have raised the possibility that pharmaceuticals may be used to enhance memory, mood, and attention in people who do not have an illness or disorder, a practice known as “cognitive enhancement.” We describe historical experiences with two medicinal drugs for which similar enhancement claims were made, cocaine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and amphetamines in the mid 20th century. These drugs were initially introduced as medicinal agents in Europe and North America before becoming more (...) widely used for a variety of purposes, including what would nowadays be considered cognitive enhancement. Their trajectory of use conformed to the typical use cycle of psychotropic drugs. There was an initial steep rise in prescribing for medical use, followed by expanded nonmedical use that was fueled by enthusiasm for the drugs’ effects. As the number of regular users increased, problems related to use (such as addiction) became apparent, societal concern increased, and laws were passed banning nonmedical use and eventually, medical use. This historical experience draws attention to the adverse side effects of enhancement use that only become apparent with regular, wide-scale use of a drug. We highlight the similarities between the enthusiasms for cocaine and amphetamines and the current enthusiasms for using prescription stimulants for cognitive enhancement. We argue bioethicists should not encourage the cognitive enhancement use of drugs such as methylphenidate in the absence of evidence on the efficacy and safety of their use for cognitive enhancement purposes. (shrink)

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been proposed as a potential treatment of drug addiction on the basis of its effects on drug self-administration in animals and on addictive behaviours in some humans treated with DBS for other psychiatric or neurological conditions. DBS is seen as a more reversible intervention than ablative neurosurgery but it is nonetheless a treatment that carries significant risks. A review of preclinical and clinical evidence for the use of DBS to treat addiction suggests that more animal (...) research is required to establish the safety and efficacy of the technology and to identify optimal treatment parameters before investigating its use in addicted persons. Severely addicted persons who try and fail to achieve abstinence may, however, be desperate enough to undergo such an invasive treatment if they believe that it will cure their addiction. History shows that the desperation for a cure of addiction can lead to the use of risky medical procedures before they have been rigorously tested. In the event that DBS is used in the treatment of addiction, we provide minimum ethical requirements for clinical trials of its use in the treatment of addiction. These include: restrictions of trials to severely intractable cases of addiction; independent oversight to ensure that patients have the capacity to consent and give that consent on the basis of a realistic appreciation of the potential benefits and risks of DBS; and rigorous assessments of the effectiveness and safety of this treatment compared to the best available treatments for addiction. (shrink)

Impaired control over drug use is a defining characteristic of addiction in the major diagnostic systems. However there is significant debate about the extent of this impairment. This qualitative study examines the extent to which leading Australian addiction neuroscientists and clinicians believe that addicted individuals have control over their drug use and are responsible for their behaviour. One hour semi-structured interviews were conducted during 2009 and 2010 with 31 Australian addiction neuroscientists and clinicians (10 females and 21 males; 16 with (...) clinical experience and 15 with no clinical experience). Although many addiction neuroscientists and clinicians described uncontrolled or compulsive drug use as characteristic of addiction, most were ambivalent about whether or not addicted people could be said to have no control of their drug use. Most believed that addicted individuals have fluctuating levels of impaired control over their drug use but they nonetheless believed that addicted persons were responsible for their behaviour, including criminal behaviour engaged in to fund their drug use. Addiction was not seen as exculpating criminal behaviour but as a mitigating factor. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Comme Elle Respire:Memory of Breath, Breath of MemoryFrédérique Berthet (bio)Translated by David F. Bell (bio)La poésie est un système de respiration, c'est fait pour mieux respirer.[Poetry is a respiration system, it's made for breathing better.]—Erri De Luca- Stop!- What?- I can hear you breathing!...- Stop!- Breathing?- Yes!—Paul Thomas AndersonLittle paper-fish cutouts have been placed on the ground, on the carpet.We're in the reassuring '70s stylishness of a doctor's (...) office. The carpet is soft and glistens like in interior decoration magazines, it's with it, in. We couldn't care less about what Dyson vacuum cleaners and "purifiers" boast they can eliminate several decades later: acarids, those microscopic domestic arthropods, human parasites (notably), and airborne vectors of infectious disease (colds, coughs, respiratory distress). No, in the spring of 1975, innocently and self-satisfyingly, the urbane doctor flaunts the opulent carpet with curly pile in his luxury apartment with its state-of-the-art waiting room.In this grand interior of a medical office, a man in a white coat plies his important trade. For example, that day a little girl is re-learning how to breathe. One might think that exhaling and inhaling is learned for life—je t'aime comme je respire, elle parle comme elle respire, il ment comme il respire1—from the very first cry at birth. But in fact, sometimes in life breathing gets stuck between the nasal cavity and the bronchial tubes, between the respiratory tract and the lungs. Progressively, imperceptibly, the organism is short of air, a malicious infection spreads and impairs [End Page 92] alveolar diffusion to the point of respiratory exhaustion: Is it serious, doctor? We must act quickly, very quickly. How to liquify what stopped up the system one day to the point of blocking it—the doctors know what to do.This doctor undertook long, arduous and learned studies. He knows functionally how a living being breathes, how a child lives organically. He can also re-teach the little girl what she no longer knows how to do: inhale, exhale using the full volume of the thoracic cage, regulating the ventilatory flow, solidifying the invisible membranes. In the child's family, everyone knows (and knows how to do) important things, but no one undertook extensive studies, much less studies of the aerial exchanges in the human body. This special knowledge possessed by the doctor (unless special means something else unspoken that would explain why this specific doctor was chosen rather than any other) surrounds him with a padding of respect that creates (and the little girl feels this) a sort of protective continuum between him and the walls within which he sees her, where he practices his kind of calm and slow urbane medicine. It's far from the formidable hospital she has just left, with its spherical apparatus next to the bed aspirating the red and yellow pleural liquid, the "treatment room" where the surgeon, the "butcher" as the nurses call him among themselves, manipulated the drain without anesthesia, with no regard for the child's suffering. The doctor, and his place in the elevated tower, even though they are not to be confused, make for a cozy reception space in which one is comfortable, even in passing.This doctor—who is, in truth, a massage-physiotherapist—is located in a designer high-rise building with a façade decorated by white, pointed features that manifest a will toward an architectural act. On the ground floor, the entrance hall is finished in dark-veined, clear brown marble, and the entry threshold between the exterior and interior is marked by large transparent glass panes that must be manipulated with care. The entrance hall has an intimidating sonority and a useless cold nudity from which one escapes in an elevator where one is surrounded by mirrors and gold buttons and in which one speeds upward silently toward floors, clouds.The designer high-rise is located at the outskirts, the outskirts of a city of recent Olympic stature, where several years earlier Olympic athletes were welcomed and trained to increase their respiratory capacity and... (shrink)

On August 28, 2008, Michael Marmot, Chair of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health, formally handed over the Commission’s Final Report to Margaret Chan, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. It was a significant moment. Dr. Chan addressed a hall packed with representatives of the world’s communications media in a speech that was remarkably direct. Dr. Chan reiterated the Commission’s position that to improve health and health equity action needs to (...) be taken not just across the health sector but across all social and economic policy areas, and stated, “Social deprivation is not a matter of fate. It is a marker of policy failure.” This was a bold statement from one of the world’s leading diplomats. Policy failure! The phrase echoes the Commission’s assertion that “a toxic combination of poor social policies, unfair economic arrangements and bad politics is killing people on a grand scale.” The Commission’s messages are far reaching. (shrink)

The history of the physics of pendular motion rightly begins with Galileo's discovery of the isochronous character of that motion. There is, however, a ‘pre-history’ of the pendulum, centering on its initial recognition as a significant special case requiring explanation. This occurred in the writings of Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme in the middle of the fourteenth century. Earlier works that might have been construed as discussing pendular motion are considered, as are the explanations for the scholastic ‘discovery’ of pendular (...) motion put forth by Thomas Kuhn and Piero Ariotti. In contrast to these writers, this paper seeks to account for the pendulum's emergence with reference to an imaginary experiment concerning a body moving past the earth's center, medieval theories of impetus, and the proximate physical model of pendular motion, the late medieval heavy suspended church bell. (shrink)

The concepts of joint probability as implied by the Copenhagen and realist interpretations of quantum mechanics are examined in relation to (a) the rules for manipulation of probabilistic quantities, and (b) the role of the Bell inequalities in assessing the completeness of standard quantum theory. Proponents of completeness of the Copenhagen interpretation are required to accept a modification of the classical laws of probability to provide a mechanism for complementarity. A new formulation of the locality postulate is given, not (...) involving factorizability or conditional probabilities, which clarifies the role of locality in the derivation of the Bell inequalities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:162. THE HUME LITERATURE FOR 1979 The Hume literature from 1925 to 1976 has been thoroughly covered in my book Fifty Years of Hume Scholarship : A Bibliographical Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 1978; ¿J 5. 50), which also lists the main earlier writings on Hume. Publications of the years 1977 and 1978 were listed in Hume Studies for the last two Novembers. What follows here will bring the record (...) up to the end of 1979. Readers are invited to inform me of any omissions, and to send me offprints of their own articles. The intention is to maintain a complete bibliographical record of critical work on Hume, by the regular publication in Hume Studies of an annual bibliography covering the previous year, with addenda consisting of items omitted through ignorance in previous years. References to recentlyappearing reviews (of books from earlier lists) are given at the end. The following abbreviations of journal titles are used here: APQ American Philosophical Quarterly JHI Journal of the History of Ideas JHP Journal of the History of Philosophy JP Journal of Philosophy PAS Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society PB Philosophical Books PQ Philosophical Quarterly PR Philosophical Review RIP Revue Internationale de Philosophie RM Review of Metaphysics TLS Times Literary Supplement Other abbreviations should be obvious enough, and mainly follow the British Standard (no. 4148). AIKEN, H. D. 'An Interpretation of Hume's Theory of the Place of Reason in Ethics and Polities', Ethics 90, 66-80. 163. ARDAO, A. 'Hume en Latinoamerica', Revista Venezolana de Fil., 143-6. BAIER, A. 'Hume on Heaps and Bundles', APQ 16, 285-96. BAIER, A. 'Good Men's Women: Hume on Chastity and Trust', Hume Studies 5, 1-19. BATTERSBY, C. 'Hume, Newton and "the Hill called Difficulty "', in S. C Brown, Philosophers of the Enlightenment (Royal Inst. Phil. Lectures, 12), 31-55. BATTERSBY, C. 'The Dialogues as Original Imitation: Cicero and the Nature of Hume's Skepticism', in D. F. Norton et al., McGiIl Hume Studies, 239-52. BEAUCHAMP, T. L. 'Self Inconsistency or Mere Self Perplexity ', Hume Studies 5, 37-44. BECK, L. W.? Prussian Hume and a Scottish Kant' in D. F. Norton et al.,· op. cit., 63-78. (repr. of 1978 paper. ) BELL, A. 'Some Spurious Hume Documents', Notes & Queries 26, 561. BIRO, J. I. 'Hume's Difficulties with the Self, Hume Studies 5, 45-54. BRANDT, R. 'David Hume: Neuere Bücher, Vorträge, Aufsätze', Philosophische Rundschau 26, 187-97. BROWN, S. C. 'The "Principle" of Natural Order: o£ What the Enlightened Sceptics did not doubt', in S. C. Brown [see BATTERSBY], 56-76. BUTT, J. The Mid-Eighteenth Century, 222-8, 312-14, 354-7. (The Oxf. Hist, of Eng. Lit., 8.) Oxford. CAPALDI, N. 'The Problem of Hume and Hume's Problem', introduction to D. F. Norton et al., op. cit., 3-21. CASULLO, A. 'Reid and Mill on Hume's maxim of conceivability ', Analysis 39, 212-19. CLARK, L. M. G. & LANGE, L. The Sexism of Social and Political Theory. Toronto"^ (includes reprints of Burns 1976 and Lacoste 1976) CONNON, R. W. 'The Naturalism of Hume Revisited', in D. F. Norton et al., op. cit. 121-45. COTTLE, C E. 'Justice as Artificial Virtue in Hume's Treatise', JHI 40, 457-66. 164. CRAIG, E. J. David Hume: Eine Einführung. in seine Philosophie. (144 pp.) Frankfurt am Main. DAVIE, G. E. 'Berkeley, Hume, and the Central Problem of Scottish Philosophy', in D. F. Norton et al., op. cit., 43-62. DEL BARCO COLLAZOS, J. L. 'Sobre la teoría de la imaginaci ón en la filosofía de Hume', Anuario filosofico 12, 131-43. DELEULE, D. Hume et la naissance du libéralisme économique. (400 pp.) Paris. FLEW, A. 'The Red Queen at Substraction? ', Hume Studies 5, 110-11. FORBES, D. 'Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment', in S. C Brown [see BATTERSBY], 94-109. GASKIN, J. C. A. 'Hume, Atheism, and the "Interested Obligation" of Morality', in D. F. Norton et al., op. cit., 147-59. GAUTHIER, D. 'David Hume, Contractarian', PR 88, 3-38. GAWLICK, G. 'Zwischen Empirizismus und Skeptizismus: Neue Literatur zu David Hume- (I) ', Philosophische Rundschau 26, 161-86. GOOSENS, W. K. 'Stove and Inductive Scepticism', Australas... (shrink)

Dans cet article sont commentées trois tentatives de résolution de la Belle au bois dormant, la célèbre énigme d'auto-localisation qui engendre un paradoxe probabiliste troublant : l'arbitrage fréquentiste propose une lecture ontologique des probabilités lorsque l'approche bayésienne atteint une limite ; l'analogie avec le Monty Hall s'efforce de penser de nouvelles règles de révision doxastique communes aux deux problèmes ; enfin, la leçon des compagnons encourage le partage et l'harmonisation d'estimations probabilistes entre agents rationnels. Chacun des trois arguments est (...) rappelé brièvement, puis certaines parties sont examinées plus attentivement, critiquées ou au contraire appuyées par des idées neuves, telles que la variante des Quatre Belles. (shrink)

Early discussions of ?climate justice? have been dominated by economists rather than political philosophers. More recently, analytical liberal political philosophers have joined the debate. However, the philosophical discussion of climate justice remains in its early stages. This paper considers one promising approach based on human rights, which has been advocated recently by several theorists, including Simon Caney, Henry Shue and Tim Hayward. A basic argument supporting the claim that anthropogenic climate change violates human rights is presented. Four objections to this (...) argument are examined: the ?future persons? objection; the ?risk? objection; the ?collective causation? objection; and the ?demandingness? objection. This critical examination leads to a more detailed specification and defence of the claim that anthropogenic climate change violates human rights. (shrink)

In Michel de Certeau’s Invention of the Everyday, improvisational community dance function as a catalyst for the subversive art of the oppressed, via its ancient Greek virtue/power of mētis, being “foxlike.” And in de Certeau’s The Possession of Loudun, this foxlike dance moves to the stage, as an improv chorus that disrupts the events at Loudon when reimagined as a tetralogy of plays at City Dionysia. More precisely, Loudun’s tetralogy could be interpreted as a series of three tragedies and one (...) comedy, the latter of which involves the chorine nuns’ channeling of anomie into a proto-feminist transfiguration. More precisely, the tactical prowess of the nuns’ chorus leader, namely the prioress Jeanne des Anges, elevates her to the status of an angelic prophet, which in de Certeau’s theatrical dancing critique makes her the Loudun tetralogy’s Dionysian, foxlike mage. In conclusion, this analysis suggests de Certeau’s relevance for revolutionary social justice today. (shrink)

This book brings together phenomenological studies of the experience of forgiveness. The contributors, from psychological, philosophical, and theological backgrounds, set aside theoretical presuppositions, approach this topic with fresh eyes, and address problematic aspects of the existing literature.

Dans cet ouvrage directement tiré de sa thèse intitulée « Female Public Nudity in Belle Époque Paris » et soutenue en 2006 à l’université de Floride, Lela F. Kerley retrace et interroge le processus conflictuel qui a accompagné la normalisation de l’exhibition publique de la nudité féminine à Paris entre 1889 et 1914 sous l’effet d’expérimentations artistiques et de la prolifération du nu féminin dans le répertoire des music-halls. L’enquête s’intéresse aussi bien aux pratiques et motivations...

In his profound and deeply personal new book, New York Times bestselling author Rob Bell explores the endless dynamic questions and connections that have shaped his life to provide powerful insight into understanding your purpose and place in the world. Our home is a universe of endless dynamic connections that never stop inviting us to participate in the great mysterious love at the heart of it all. Everything is Spiritual is a brief history of how these ideas about creation, (...) love, and connection shaped the author--and can shape every one of us. In this book, Rob Bell explores the concept that what people really want, more than anything, is to understand their purpose here--so much so that it gives them an abiding sense of awe and wonder. And when you embrace where and who you come from and your wounds and pains and regrets, you will discover that there's an invitation lurking there in the mess of life: an invitation to expand just like the universe has been doing for 13 billions years. There is a space beyond all the parts and divisions and differences and polarization where you see that it's all one connected whole and it's all rigged in favor of your growth, expansion, and joy. (shrink)

A critical account of the key connections between twentieth-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and nineteenth-century German idealist G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation provides a critical account of the key connections between twentieth-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and nineteenth-century German idealist G. W. F. Hegel. While Hegel has been recognized as one of the key targets of Deleuze’s philosophical writing, Henry Somers-Hall shows how Deleuze’s antipathy to Hegel has its roots in a problem the (...) two thinkers both try to address: getting beyond a philosophy of judgment and the restrictions of Kant’s transcendental idealism. By tracing the development of their attempts to address this problem, Somers-Hall offers an interpretation of the sweep of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy, providing a series of analyses of key moments in the history of thought, including the logics of Aristotle and Russell, Kant’s own philosophy of judgment, and the philosophy of Bergson. He also develops a novel interpretation of Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, and situates his philosophy in relation to the broader post-Kantian tradition. In addition to Deleuze’s relation to Hegel, the book makes important contributions to the study of Deleuze’s philosophy of mathematics, as well as to the study of several underappreciated areas of Hegel’s own philosophy. (shrink)

Introduction -- 1. Problem of the New -- 2. Problem of Relations -- 3. Problem of Emergence -- 4. Problem of One and Many -- 5. Plato and the Third Man Argument -- 6. Bradley and the Problem of Relations -- 7. Moore, Russell and the Birth of Analytic Philosophy -- 8. Russell and Deleuze on Leibniz -- 9. On Problematic Fields -- 10. Kant and Problematic Ideas -- 11. Armstrong and Lewis on the Problem of One and Many -- (...) 12. Determinables and Determinates -- 13. The Limits of Representational Thought -- 14. Learning from a Cup of Coffee -- 15. Carnap and the Fate of Metaphysics -- 16. Truth and Relevance -- Conclusion. (shrink)

Liberalism and ecologism are widely regarded as incompatible. Liberalism and (anthropocentric) environmentalism might be compatible but liberalism and (non-anthropocentric) ecologism are not. A liberal state cannot promote policies for ecological or ecocentric reasons. An individual cannot be both a liberal and a committed advocate of ecologism. This paper challenges these claims. It is argued that Rawls’s ‘political liberalism’ is compatible with ecologism and, in particular, the idea of ‘ecological justice’. A Rawlsian state can promote ecological justice. A committed political liberal (...) can also be a committed advocate of ecological justice. The argument is developed through a close textual examination of Rawls’s brief discussion of our duties to ‘animals and the rest of nature’. Rawls leaves far more scope for liberal ecologism than his critics have suggested. The proposed version of liberal ecologism is defended against charges of substantive and procedural bias toward humans and against nonhuman nature. Liberal ecologism may not be enough for some ecologists-especially ‘ecological constitutionalists’ seeking constitutional protection for nonhuman nature-but it is a serious and defensible political and moral theory. (shrink)

This issue of Philosophical Papers assembles eight essays that are part of the larger conversation on African philosophy and the analytic tradition. Several leading philosophers have contributed to this issue with provocative remarks, beginning with a three-way debate on the nature of philosophy itself as understood and practiced in the African context. It continues with essays on consensual democracy, authoritarianism, race and cultural identity, the cosmopolitan ideal, and belief and witchcraft.

In Michel de Certeau’s Invention of the Everyday, improvisational community dance function as a catalyst for the subversive art of the oppressed, via its ancient Greek virtue/power of mētis, being “foxlike.” And in de Certeau’s The Possession of Loudun, this foxlike dance moves to the stage, as an improv chorus that disrupts the events at Loudon when reimagined as a tetralogy of plays at City Dionysia. More precisely, Loudun’s tetralogy could be interpreted as a series of three tragedies and one (...) comedy, the latter of which involves the chorine nuns’ channeling of anomie into a proto-feminist transfiguration. More precisely, the tactical prowess of the nuns’ chorus leader, namely the prioress Jeanne des Anges, elevates her to the status of an angelic prophet, which in de Certeau’s theatrical dancing critique makes her the Loudun tetralogy’s Dionysian, foxlike mage. In conclusion, this analysis suggests de Certeau’s relevance for revolutionary social justice today. (shrink)

In this latest installment of the Homebrewed Christianity series, Eric E. Hall approaches the question of God from various perspectives, including philosophy, personal revelation, Christian tradition, and other religions. At the end of this romp through history and pop culture, Hall argues that the God you need may be the very God you rejected years ago.--Back cover.

My aim in this paper is to explore how we might understand the relation of Deleuze’s early works to ethics, and to develop the connections between this way of understanding Deleuze and the work of Søren Kierkegaard. I will claim that we can view both figures as arguing that the sense or meaning we take from the world, and the metaphysical structure we ascribe to it, is secondary to an ethical stance we take in the face of a world of (...) becoming. As such, the central preoccupation of both Kierkegaard and Deleuze is how we make sense of an existence which is necessarily temporal. As we shall see, recognizing the importance of temporality involves a move away from the traditional resolution of the problem of sense that operates by making temporality an accidental aspect of a world. In the first half of this paper, I want to explore this claim in relation to Deleuze’s reading of Plato, tying his claim that Plato is essentially developing an ethical rather than metaphysical doctrine with the claim that “the task of modern philosophy has been defined: to overturn [renversement] Platonism” (DR 59). My emphasis in this section is how Deleuze, rather than “overturning” Platonism by simply rejecting the priority it gives to Forms or essences over appearances, the renversement of Deleuze’s reading inverts the relation to show how the search for essence is in fact grounded in an ethical decision, or “selection,” in the world of appearances/simulacra itself. As such, both Plato and Deleuze can be seen as presenting different trajectories for making sense of a world of becoming, either by grounding it in a transcendent, atemporal realm, or by seeing it as an intensive field of processes. In the second half, I will argue that Kierkegaard’s philosophy rests on a claim, similar to the one we find in Deleuze’s work, that we need to develop a logic of sense in response to a world of becoming. I will conclude that Deleuze’s reading of Kierkegaard is limited by a focus on the theological aspects of his thought, and that Kierkegaard provides a sophisticated and complementary taxonomy of the ways in which we try to make sense of our existence in a world of becoming by developing diverse ethical postures. (shrink)

Communitarian thinkers have argued that liberalism devalues community in modern societies. This essay assesses the three main strands of the contemporary debate betweeen communitarianism and liberalism: (1) the communitarian critique of the liberal universalism, (2) the communitarian critique of liberal individualism, and (3) the communitarian critique of liberal politics. In each case, it is argued that the debate has moved from fairly abstract philosophical controversies to more concrete engagement with political disputes in Western as well as East Asian societies.

The focus of this book is Royce's imaginative proposal to preserve world peace by virtue of international insurance and his reasons for choice of insurance as an instrument of peace. He attempted to combine the art of statistics with the precepts of insurance as a means to craft a scheme for international peace.

"No soy de los que deploran la especialización; en todo caso, dudo que sea posible, aunque fuere deseable, frenar la persecución de un saber especializado, en complejas sociedades. Pero es que la filosofía del Derecho ha descansado tradicionalmente en una perspectiva muy amplia, y hay que lamentar de modo especial la pérdida de sus funciones unitivas debido a la extraordinaria necesidad presente de comprender y mejorar las instituciones jurídicas. La situación actual no clama por la desvalorización de la especialización, sino (...) que, por el contrario, desafía a los estudiosos a trascender las especializaciones de la filosofía del Derecho, y cualquiera fuere la utilidad que con ello pudiera lograrse, a construir una jusfilosofía que satisfaga más adecuadamente las presentes demandas". Jerome Hall. (shrink)

Akhenaten -- Hermes Trismegistus -- Orpheus -- Zoroaster -- Buddha -- Confucius -- Lao-Tse -- Plato -- Jesus -- Mohammed -- Padmasambhava -- Quetzalcoatl.

This book addresses the question of what unifies the French philosophical tradition across the twentieth century by exploring these two questions. Kant claimed that the structure of experience mirrored the categories of thought because the cognitive faculties of the subject played a constitutive role in structuring experience. As such, the structure of thought for Kant is fundamentally tied to the nature of metaphysics. In developing his account of what thinking entailed, Kant took judgement, the attribution of a predicate to a (...) subject, to be the paradigm act of thinking. Throughout the nineteenth century, efforts to move beyond Kant's model of thinking as judgement centred on the attempt to augment that model. For instance, Hegel saw Kant's account of judgement as an essentially fixed form of the true nature of thinking, and therefore developed a more processual account of thinking. His account still ultimately operates by putting judgement into motion, however, rather than rejecting the model of thinking as judgement itself. Conversely, philosophers such as Schelling who do not understand thinking solely in terms of judging often retreat into an indeterminate mysticism, thus retaining the idea that anything positive that can be said about thought must take judgement as a model. (shrink)

This article proposes to recontextualize Tractarian ethics within the anthropological frame that develops through Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Grammar to the Philosophical Investigations. The Tractarian vision of absolute value, ethical propositions as nonsense, and the transcendentality of ethics seems incapable of being instantiated within the particulars that surround human action. This difficulty is resolved by showing that the Tractarian theme of the coextension of ethics and language (and of ethics and life) combined with Wittgenstein’s later ideas of language-games, rule-following, and forms of (...) life instantiates Tractarian ethics within this later anthropological frame. (shrink)