The story of Medea has exerted a powerful influence on creative artists since the time of Euripides. It is a tale that has been told in many ways and in several genres. This article offers a discussion of Christa Wolf's 1996 novel, Medea.Stimmen (Medea. Voices), a modern retelling through the voices, and conflicting perspectives, of the major characters involved with Medea, including Jason, Agameda, Akamas, Leukon, Glauce and Medea herself.Medea's role within feminist literary reception and women's literature cannot be (...) overlooked because of the crucial archetype she represents. One task of Feminist criticism has been to expose, deconstruct and rectify prevalent male (mis) interpretations of female archetypes, such as Medea, Medusa and others, and the patriarchal distortions they introduced through 3 000 years of male literature. In the patriarchal realm, Medea represents the Witch, the black Sorceress, and the archetype of the Negative Mother. These negative interpretations or archetypes may be attributed to misogynist perceptions of Medea as the vilest of women, because she committed the most despicable of all crimes — killing her children, the patriarchy's heirs — to take revenge on Jason, the husband who abandons her in Corinth (her place of exile) to marry Glauce, King Creon of Corinth's daughter, for reasons of political expedience.As a writer with her roots in the former East-German regime, Wolf perceives the Medea story as an account of a woman with both extraordinary powers and human shortcomings, who is misunderstood by the Colchians and the Corinthians alike. Wolf explores the distorted patriarchal motives for their loathing of Medea and Medea's ultimate powerlessness to do anything more than accept her tragic destiny. In doing so, Wolf does not attempt to manipulate the Medea story to suit the one-sidedness of some more radical feminist ideologies. (shrink)

Two approaches have emerged to resolve discrepancies between predictions and observations at galactic and cosmological scales: introducing dark matter or modifying the laws of gravity. Practitioners of each approach claim to better satisfy a different explanatory ideal, either unification or simplicity. In this chapter, we take a closer look at the ideals and at the successes of these approaches in achieving them. Not only are these ideals less divisive than assumed, but moreover we argue that the approaches are focusing on (...) different aspects of the same ideal. This realisation opens up the possibility of a more fruitful trading zone between dark matter and modified gravity communities. (shrink)

Much recent work in virtue epistemology has focused on the analysis of such intellectual virtues as responsibility, conscientiousness, honesty, courage, open-mindedness, firmness, humility, charity, and wisdom. Absent from the literature is an extended examination of perseverance as an intellectual virtue. The present paper aims to fill this void. In Sect. 1, I clarify the concept of an intellectual virtue, and distinguish intellectual virtues from other personal traits and properties. In Sect. 2, I provide a conceptual analysis of intellectually virtuous perseverance (...) that places perseverance in opposition to its vice-counterparts, intransigence and irresolution. The virtue is a matter of continuing in one’s intellectual activities for an appropriate amount of time, in the pursuit of intellectual goods, despite obstacles to one’s attainment of those goods. In Sect. 3, I explore relations between intellectually virtuous perseverance and other intellectual virtues. I argue that such perseverance is necessary for the possession and exercise of several other intellectual virtues, including courage. These connections highlight the importance of perseverance in a comprehensive account of such virtues. (shrink)

Giving up the increasingly troubled distinction between “experiment” and “treatment” would make it easier to focus on informed consent and harder to beg questions about uncertainty and shared decisionmaking in medicine.

Aristotle determines eristic argument as argument which either operates upon the basis of acceptable premisses (endoxa) and merely give the impression of being deductive, or argument which truly is deductive but operates upon the basis of premisses which seem to be acceptable, but are not (or, again, argument which uses both of these mechanisms). I attempt to understand what Aristotle has in mind when he says that someone is deceived into accepting premisses which seem to be acceptable but which are (...) really not, and how this disqualifies such arguments from being dialectical. In the first section of the paper I interpret Aristotle’s notion of endoxa in terms of a relational concept of acceptability. Real Índoxa are propositions which are accepted by a qualified group or individual. False endoxa may also be accepted by someone or some group, and may even be true, but they are used to serve the purposes of eristical argumentation, which departs from certain standards of dialectical argumentation articulated in the notion of endoxa as a norm for premiss-acceptance. In particular, eristic arguments may even be valid in the sense of a syllogismos while still failing to be proper dialectical arguments. In the second part of the paper I consider how this can be, in examining certain types of fallacies in the Sophistical Refutations and the relationship between fallacious argumentation and false endoxa. (shrink)

Economic theories of democratic legitimacy have criticized deliberative accounts of democratic legitimacy on the grounds that they do not represent a practical possibility and that they create conditions that make actual democracies worse. It is not simply that they represent the wrong ideal. Rather, they are too idealistic – failing to show proper regard for the cognitive and moral limitations of persons and the depth of disagreement in democratic society. This article aims to show that the minimalist criterion of democratic (...) legitimacy is self-defeating and that even if there are minimal cognitive, moral, and social requirements for the possibility of practicable deliberative democracy, these limitations do not necessarily impose insuperable barriers for democratic deliberation as the normative basis of democratic legitimacy. Thus, the limiting facts do not dictate the structure of appropriate normative models of democracy in the way minimalists have supposed. (shrink)

Debate continues to rage among philosophers of religion over Anthony Flew's famous little paper ‘Theology and Falsification’ and the responses it provoked, most notably R. M. Hare's response that religious claims are in no way like scientific hypotheses. For now, twenty years later, we still find many theists taking a similar tack to Hare's. A particularly interesting example is J. F. Miller in Religious Studies, 1969, who replies to Flew that propositions like ‘God loves mankind’ cannot be subject to falsifiability (...) conditions because they are used as claims expressing ‘religious first-order principles of the Judaeo-Christian Weltanschauung and as such are not amenable to falsification’ (p. 50). Miller seems to put his faith in some kind of great gulf fixed between what he would consider decently falsifiable scientific hypotheses and what he takes to be unfalsifiable first-order principles both of theology and of contemporary science. In what follows we will try to sketch a more rational strategy for modern believers of a liberal empiricist type, for those whose interest in appealing and deferring to experience includes but is not restricted to so-called ‘sense experience’. This will involve accepting analogies between theological statements and so-called hypotheses, insofar as the latter are propositions held and put forward in a somewhat tentative spirit with a view to explaining what we experience. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an account of the structural differences, neglected in the literature, between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Emmanuel Levinas, showing how Bonhoeffer’s account of persons and responsibility is differentiated through creation, fall, and redemption, whereas Levinas’s account of ethical selfhood offers itself as a kind of transcendental account of persons in which the self is structured by its encounter with the other which commands responsibility. This difference (situationally differentiated vs. transcendental) plays out in two ways – the role (...) of the will in ethical selfhood and the identity of the primal governing agent in the encounter with others. Bonhoeffer’s account, through its differentiation into different modes of existence, allows for the possibility of different stages and modes of the encounter with the other, and thus allows for the incorporation of one model of encounter at one stage, and another model at a different stage. As a consequence, Bonhoeffer’s account includes and develops upon the kind of demand-based account Levinas offers. This can serve as an advantage over Levinas’s model insofar as it provides a ‘multi-modal’ framework to absorb other views into one’s own in a way that a transcendentally conceived framework of selfhood does not. (shrink)

Dans le Philèbe de Platon, Socrate fait valoir que la vie bonne doit consister en la connaissance et le plaisir. Une partie de cette démonstration consiste en une analyse des parties de la connaissance où la connaissance peut être plus ou moins pure, plus ou moins mêlée d’éléments étrangers tels que la sensation ou l’expérience. Lorsqu’elle est pure, elle s’attache à la vérité, pure et simple. Car, nous devons l’admettre, la connaissance est vraie, quoiqu’elle puisse être d’autre par ailleurs. La (...) connaissance peut rendre les humains bons, c’est-à-dire leur permettre de bien faire, de manière fiable et souple, mais elle a son bien au-delà de l’existence humaine – elle n’est pas limitée à l’existence humaine. Nous suggérons ici que Platon détermine en fait la connaissance à partir de sa finalité – sa cause finale est utilisée pour déterminer sa cause formelle : ce que vise la connaissance nous dit ce qu’elle est. Au lieu de nous fournir une analyse selon l’aporie finale et insatisfaisante du Théétète (« l’opinion vraie accompagnée de raison »), la connaissance est ainsi dotée d’une justification fonctionnelle. Une partie de cette proposition est que la connaissance se doit d’être vraie ; c’est ce qui garantit sa stabilité : elle est à elle-même sa propre fin. Le bien de la connaissance, c’est la vérité. C’est ce qui lui permet de se comporter comme un guide pour l’âme. Les attributs additionnels de ce clan, qui est celui de la connaissance, découlent de la vérité et de leur relation à elle : exactitude, clarté et pureté. Car dans la mesure où ils sont purs et sans mélange avec des éléments étrangers tels que la pratique ou la sensation, ils ne s’intéressent qu’à des unités exactes, de choses qui sont ce qu’elles sont, de sorte que leur clarté n’est en rien troublée. C’est la dialectique qui recherche et établit cela. (shrink)

This study examines thirteenth to twentieth century Tibetan and Mongolian monastic memorializations of the bodily violence enacted upon Köten Ejen at the center of the “Buddhist conversion of the Mongols.” Koten Ejen (Tib. Lha sras go tan rgyal po, 1206–1251) was Chinggis Khan’s grandson and a military leader involved in Mongol campaigns against the Song Dynasty and against Buddhist monasteries in eastern Tibet. In 1240, Koten famously summoned the Central Tibetan Buddhist polymath Sakya Pandita, by then already an old man, (...) to his court at Liangzhou. Examining Tibetan and Mongolian accounts about their meeting from the last seven centuries, this study shows that it was neither compelling philosophy nor some turn of faith that converted the Mongols. It was, rather, Sakya Pandita’s violent therapeutic intervention into the space of Koten’s ill body that wrenched the Mongol body politic into the Dharmic fold. (shrink)

Purpose: This paper aims at identifying how the Medieval Christian history provides insights, and suggests solutions in regard to present corruption-related social problems in in the modern world. The study is expected to show that the Church is a human organization that is dynamic rather than static, a community that does not have immunity over other forces operating on earth such as corruption. Methodology: Key data was acquired from literature materials dealing with the history of Christianity during the Middle Ages (...) or medieval period. The second group of literature materials provided information that has to do with the current social moral issues, with special focus on corruption. The study applies narrative method of literature review to fill the gaps on what corruption entails. Both qualitative and quantitative study designs were engaged. Findings: The desire for power and prestige, simony and investiture, feudalism, sale of indulgences, and nepotism are all identified with the medieval period church history. The Church must be given credit for the effort it put in eradicating those evils, and the modern Church’s challenge is to continue fighting for the same. The modern Church has been challenged to learn from the mistakes of the medieval Church and make sure that they are not repeated. Moral depravity, lack of proper education, poverty, land issues, and love of money have been highlighted as the key factors that contribute to the increase of corruption in Kenya and many other countries in Africa. Change of values, instilling of accountability systems, playing a mediating role, and establishing anti-corruption education are stated as the key methods that Christians should incorporate in their fight against corruption. Unique Contribution to theory, practice and policy: The Church of the medieval period portrayed a clear picture that the whole human society was subject to the will of God. In spite of the many pitfalls that accompanied Christianity, there still remained many faithful people who were true ambassadors of Christ. It must also be known that Christianity deserves unreserved credit for her forefront participation in the development of the modern societies. The church is recommended to take a forefront position in the fight against corruption. (shrink)

AT LEAST ONE MODEL OF THE RATIONAL RELIGIOUS BELIEVER EXISTS: PRIMARY COMMITMENT TO DISCOVERING TRUTH AND ACTING RIGHTLY; COMMITMENT TO A RELIGION FLOWING FROM THOSE PRIMARY ONES; SOME DEGREE OF TENTATIVENESS ABOUT FAITH; SEARCHING FOR PROBABILITY, MORE THAN CERTAINTY; FAITH CONSTITUTING A PARTLY MORAL WAGER AIMED AT MAXIMIZING EXPECTED UTILITIES OF CERTAIN KINDS; A TOLERANT WISDOM ABOUT COMMITMENTS (AND ORDERINGS) PARTLY PLEASING TO SUCH SECULAR THINKERS AS MILL, QUINE AND POPPER, ALSO AQUINAS, BARTLEY AND WILLIAM JAMES; PRIMARY LOVE FOR GOD (...) AS THE SUPREME JUSTIFIER OF HUMAN JUSTIFIER OF HUMAN HISTORY--GOD’S POWER BEING TREATED AS SECONDARY TO HIS GOODNESS. (TOPICS INCLUDE: MIRACLES, IS AND OUGHT, PROBABILITY, WAGERS, PROOFS, TIME, WAR). (shrink)

In his response to my article `Against Tolerance', Jonathan Gorman misses my main point by an astonishingly wide margin, and throws in a number of herrings of a most vivid redness. I'll look briefly at the first of these flushed fish before going on to tackle his main misunderstanding.

Semantics is the discipline that studies linguistic meaning generally, and the qualification ‘formal’ indicates something about the sorts of techniques used in investigating linguistic meaning. More specifically, formal semantics is the discipline that employs techniques from symbolic logic, mathematics, and mathematical logic to produce precisely characterized theories of meaning for natural languages or artificial languages. Formal semantics as we know it first arose in the twentieth century. It was made possible by certain developments in logic during that period. This article (...) chronicles those developments and how they led to the development of formal semantics. (shrink)

In response to the so-called “paradox of deontology,” many have argued that the agent-relativity of deontological constraints accounts for why an agent may not kill one in order to prevent five others from being killed. Constraints provide reasons for particular agents not to kill, not reasons to minimize overall killings. In this paper, I tease out the significance of an underappreciated aspect of this agent-relative position, i.e. it provides no guidance as to what an agent ought to do when faced (...) with the prospect of killing one in order to prevent herself from killing five. After rejecting mere agent-relativity, the view that agents are morally permitted to violate constraints in order to minimize their overall violations, I offer a view that this is both agent- and time-relative, and show how this view exemplifies the underlying motivations for deontological constraints while successfully responding to both the inter- and intra-personal paradoxes of deontology. (shrink)

Just as humans can draw conclusions responsibly or irresponsibly, so too can computers. Machine learning systems that have been trained on data sets that include irresponsible judgments are likely to yield irresponsible predictions as outputs. In this paper I focus on a particular kind of inference a computer system might make: identification of the intentions with which a person acted on the basis of photographic evidence. Such inferences are liable to be morally objectionable, because of a way in which they (...) are presumptuous. After elaborating this moral concern, I explore the possibility that carefully procuring the training data for image recognition systems could ensure that the systems avoid the problem. The lesson of this paper extends beyond just the particular case of image recognition systems and the challenge of responsibly identifying a person’s intentions. Reflection on this particular case demonstrates the importance (as well as the difficulty) of evaluating machine learning systems and their training data from the standpoint of moral considerations that are not encompassed by ordinary assessments of predictive accuracy. (shrink)

Metaethical constructivism aims to explain morality’s authority and relevance by basing it in agency, in a capacity of the creatures who are in fact morally bound. But constructivists have struggled to wring anything recognizably moral from an appropriately minimal conception of agency. Even if they could, basing our reasons in our individual agency seems to make other people reason-giving for us only indirectly. This paper argues for a constructivism based on a social conception of agency, on which our capacity to (...) recognize ourselves as having reasons ties us inescapably to others. It argues that mutual recognition is a pervasive feature of linguistic concepts, and builds this into a view called transformative expressivism. (shrink)

Dear Readers,With this issue, the Journal of Nietzsche Studies buries its twentieth year and continues to strive to be a resource and standard-bearer for Nietzsche scholarship. Its contents reflect this mission and commitment, as readers will find articles that engage a host of important topics, contemporary research, and on-going controversies; an abundance of reviews of recent scholarship; and important philological work.I am pleased to announce several changes. The first two stem from enhancements in our use of technology to present and (...) distribute research. We will soon launch a revamped Web site that will allow greater ease for updating. This should result in our ability to share more information and with .. (shrink)

Dear Readers, For nearly a decade, I have had the distinct privilege and pleasure of serving as the editor for the journal. During this time, with the support of a terrific team, the journal has matured to become the leading venue of English-language philosophical research in the area. Our authors benefit from expert critical feedback, and readers have enjoyed more content and an expanded perspective on international research. The journal’s readership continues to grow as we have enhanced electronic access and (...) indexing. Serving as editor has given me terrific opportunities to meet new people, learn about important scholarship, and contribute to shaping the field—these are opportunities that should... (shrink)

In this astonishingly rich volume, experts in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, political theory, aesthetics, history, critical theory, and hermeneutics bring to light the best philosophical scholarship on what is arguably Nietzsche's most rewarding but most challenging text. Including essays that were commissioned specifically for the volume as well as essays revised and edited by their authors, this collection showcases definitive works that have shaped Nietzsche studies alongside new works of interest to students and experts alike. A lengthy introduction, annotated (...) bibliography, and index make this an extremely useful guide for the classroom and advanced research. (shrink)

In this paper we attempt to identify which peer collaboration characteristics may be accountable for conceptual change through interaction. We focus on different socio‐cognitive aspects of the peer dialog and relate these with learning gains on the dyadic as well as the individual level. The scientific topic that was used for this study concerns natural selection, a topic for which students’ intuitive conceptions have been shown to be particularly robust. Learning tasks were designed according to the socio‐cognitive conflict instructional paradigm. (...) After receiving a short instructional intervention on natural selection, paired students were asked to collaboratively construct explanations for certain evolutionary phenomena while engaging in dialectical argumentation. Two quantitative coding schemes were developed, each with a different granularity. The first assessed discrete dialog moves that pertained to dialectical argumentation and to consensual explanation development. The second scheme characterized the dialog as a whole on a number of socio‐cognitive dimensions. Results from analyses on the dyadic as well as the individual level revealed that the engagement in dialectical argumentation predicted conceptual learning gains, whereas consensual explanation development did not. These findings open up new venues for research on the mechanisms of learning in and from peer collaboration. (shrink)

Moderate deontologists hold that while it is wrong to kill an innocent person to save, say, five other individuals, it is indeed morally permissible to kill one if, say, millions of lives are at stake. A basic worry concerning the moderate’s position is whether the view boils down to mere philosophical wishful thinking. In permitting agents to ever kill an innocent, moderates require that agents treat persons as means, in opposition to traditional deontological motivations. Recently Tyler Cook argued that deontologists (...) can be moderate. However, there remains a gap in the literature concerning how such a view might function in practice, as well as why a deontologist might (or perhaps, should) hold the view. This paper works to fill these gaps. I first develop the view that agents can be constrained from an action even though there are instances in which an infringement of this constraint is permissible. Crucially, I appeal to the moral emotions that are fitting in cases of constraint infringements. I then go on to show how this view can be grounded in traditional deontological foundations. Respect for the dignity of persons, I argue, requires not only that we not treat others in certain ways, but also that we acknowledge the direct and indirect effects our actions and inactions have on all persons. This deontological motivation, in turn, leads to a moderate constraint on the actions of agents. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking work, Christa Davis Acampora offers a profound rethinking of Friedrich Nietzsche’s crucial notion of the agon. Analyzing an impressive array of primary and secondary sources and synthesizing decades of Nietzsche scholarship, she shows how the agon, or contest, organized core areas of Nietzsche’s philosophy, providing a new appreciation of the subtleties of his notorious views about power. By focusing so intensely on this particular guiding interest, she offers an exciting, original vantage from which to view this (...) iconic thinker: Contesting Nietzsche. Though existence—viewed through the lens of Nietzsche’s agon—is fraught with struggle, Acampora illuminates what Nietzsche recognized as the agon’s generative benefits. It imbues the human experience with significance, meaning, and value. Analyzing Nietzsche’s elaborations of agonism—his remarks on types of contests, qualities of contestants, and the conditions in which either may thrive or deteriorate—she demonstrates how much the agon shaped his philosophical projects and critical assessments of others. The agon led him from one set of concerns to the next, from aesthetics to metaphysics to ethics to psychology, via Homer, Socrates, Saint Paul, and Wagner. In showing how one obsession catalyzed so many diverse interests, Contesting Nietzsche sheds fundamentally new light on some of this philosopher’s most difficult and paradoxical ideas. (shrink)

This essay examines a recent line of thought in aesthetics that challenges realist-leaning aesthetic theories. According to this line of thought, aesthetic diversity and disagreement are good, and our aesthetic judgments, responses, and attachments are deeply personal and even identity-constituting. These facts are further used to support anti-realist theories of aesthetic normativity. I aim to achieve two goals: (1) to disentangle arguments concerning diversity, disagreement, and personality; and (2) to offer realist-friendly replies to all three.