The Western evangelical church has lost both the passion for and the art of reading Scripture orally in worship. This exploration of the biblical roots of reading Scripture orally examines both the Old and the New Testament evidence, noting particularly the paradigm established by Moses in Deuteronomy 31:9-13 and modeled by Ezra in Nehemiah 8 that reflects the formative reading of Scripture. Since literacy was limited and few had access to written copies of the Scriptures in ancient Israel and in (...) the early church, public hearing of the Word of God provided the primary means of inspiration and spiritual formation. The essay concludes with a discussion of the implications of the biblical evidence for evangelicals today, including specific guidelines for developing the art of reading the Scriptures in corporate worship. (shrink)

We have synthesized a 582,970-base pair Mycoplasma genitalium genome. This synthetic genome, named M. genitalium JCVI-1.0, contains all the genes of wild-type M. genitalium G37 except MG408, which was disrupted by an antibiotic marker to block pathogenicity and to allow for selection. To identify the genome as synthetic, we inserted "watermarks" at intergenic sites known to tolerate transposon insertions. Overlapping "cassettes" of 5 to 7 kilobases (kb), assembled from chemically synthesized oligonucleotides, were joined by in vitro recombination to produce (...) intermediate assemblies of approximately 24 kb, 72 kb ("1/8 genome"), and 144 kb ("1/4 genome"), which were all cloned as bacterial artificial chromosomes in Escherichia coli. Most of these intermediate clones were sequenced, and clones of all four 1/4 genomes with the correct sequence were identified. The complete synthetic genome was assembled by transformation-associated recombination cloning in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, then isolated and sequenced. A clone with the correct sequence was identified. The methods described here will be generally useful for constructing large DNA molecules from chemically synthesized pieces and also from combinations of natural and synthetic DNA segments. 10.1126/science.1151721. (shrink)

Some sacrifices—like giving a kidney or heroically dashing into a burning building—are supererogatory: they are good deeds beyond the call of duty. But if such deeds are really so good, philosophers ask, why shouldn’t morality just require them? The standard answer is that morality recognizes a special role for the pursuit of self-interest, so that everyone may treat themselves as if they were uniquely important. This idea, however, cannot be reconciled with the compelling picture of morality as impartial—the view that (...) we are each anyone’s equal. I propose an alternative Self-Other Symmetric account of our moral freedom: the limits on what morality may demand of us are set by the duties we owe to ourselves. I begin with a defense of the Self-Other Symmetry: the idea that we owe the same duties to ourselves—and have the same rights against ourselves—as any relevantly similar other. Because we are consenting parties to our own actions, I argue, our rights against ourselves do not function like the rights of unwilling others. Instead, they play a permissive function, allowing us to block the demand to give up what is ours. I conclude by uniting, aggravating, and trying to solve some paradoxes of supererogatory permissions, guided by the idea that morality cannot be reduced to a ranking of options from best-to-worst. Rights against oneself are an irreducible second dimension, one that we need if we are to unify rights and supererogation into an impartial moral vision. (shrink)

Disagreement over what exists is so fundamental that it tends to hinder or even to block dialogue among disputants. The various controversies between believers and atheists, or realists and nominalists, are only two kinds of examples. Interested in contributing to the intelligibility of the debate on ontology, in 1939 Willard van Orman Quine began a series of works which introduces the notion of ontological commitment and proposes an allegedly objective criterion to identify the exact conditions under which a theoretical (...) discourse signals an assumption of existence. I intend to present the concept of ontological commitment and the Quinean criterion, to expose and evaluate some of the many criticisms to which the criterion has subject and to situate it in the context of Quine’s philosophy. As a product of such analyses, I hope to contribute to the discussion on the application and relevance of the notion of ontological commitment. (shrink)

This paper defends Priorianism, a theory in the philosophy of time which combines three theses: first, that there is a metaphysical distinction between the present time and non-present times; second, that there are temporary propositions, that is, propositions that change in truth-value simpliciter over time; and third, that there is change over time only if there are temporary propositions. Priorianism is accepted by many Presentists, Growing Block Theorists, and Moving Spotlight Theorists. However, it is difficult to defend the view (...) without appealing to premises that those who reject the view find controversial. My aim in this paper is to defend Priorianism in a way that largely avoids appealing to such premises. I do three things: first (Section 1), I describe the component theses of Priorianism and the relations between them. Next (Section 2), I show how Priorians can respond to the argument that the B-theory implies that there are temporary propositions, and therefore satisfies the Priorian condition for there being change over time. Finally (Section 3), I defend the Priorian thesis that there is change over time only if there are temporary propositions against an alternative principle of change defended by Ross Cameron (The Moving Spotlight, 2015). (shrink)

This paper aims to show that widespread, serious errors in the self-assessment of affect are a genuine possibility-one worth taking very seriously. For we are subject to a variety of errors concerning the character of our present and past affective states, or "affective ignorance." For example, some affects, particularly moods, can greatly affect the quality of our experience even when we are unable to discern them. I note several implications of these arguments. First, we may be less competent pursuers of (...) happiness than is commonly believed, raising difficult questions for political thought. Second, some of the errors discussed ramify for our understanding of consciousness, including Ned Block's controversial distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Third, empirical results based on self-reports about affect may be systematically misleading in certain ways. (shrink)

Bradford Skow’s Objective Becoming (2015) is a strikingly original and philosophically rich contribution to contemporary philosophy of time. The book rewards very careful study, and is surely a ‘must-read’ for anyone with an interest in current debates concerning time and change. Perhaps the most immediately compelling aspect of the book is its leading question: if I [Skow] didn’t already accept the ‘block universe theory’ (BU),1 which theory of time would I defend? Skow’s surprising (and, from my perspective, welcome!) answer (...) is that he would defend some version of the Moving Spotlight Theory (MST). However, Skow’s reason for this answer is less familiar: it is that MST—unlike BU and its popular rival Presentism—‘contains robust passage’. Skow goes on to (quite convincingly, in my view) defend two versions of MST against a number of common objections: ‘MST-Supertense’ and ‘MST-Time’. In the first part of this paper (§1), I investigate the question of what it is for a theory to contain robust passage in Skow’s sense. In particular, I argue that given Skow’s arguments in favour of robust passage, he should probably not count MST-Time as a theory that contains robust passage. I also argue that there are better reasons to reject BU than those Skow describes. In the second part of the paper (§2), I focus on Skow’s MST-Supertense. I argue that there are reasons for MSTers to reject MST-Supertense in favour of a more ‘traditional’ version of MST (the view I call ‘Classic MST’). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Popular Culture in the Houses of Poe and CortázarDaniel Bautista (bio)"[…]at the age of nine I read Edgar Allan Poe for the first time. That book I stole to read because my mother didn't want me to read it, she thought I was too young and she was right. The book scared me and I was ill for three months, because I believed in it."…—Julio Cortázar1In interviews and essays, (...) Julio Cortázar, the famous Argentine author, often expressed a lifelong fascination with Edgar Allan Poe (Berg 227–32). Moreover, as a young man Cortázar spent two years translating the American author's prose into Spanish, making irresistible the search for traces of Poe in his own work. His description of Poe as a youthful and guilty pleasure reflects a common reaction to the American author that has led some critics to rue Poe's influence. Jonathan Elmer points out that "Poe's connection with juvenile tastes, and hence with a time when reading and acquiring 'culture' were actually enjoyable […] has been insistently and disapprovingly stressed by the Anglo-American literary-historical tradition" (3). Although Poe himself often liked to "advertise [his work] as ethereal and otherworldly, or avowedly timeless," critics who found elements of the vulgarly popular in his writing regarded the author as a true "stumbling block" in the American literary landscape (Rosenheim and Rachman xii; Eliot 205). In a similar vein, Elmer observes,It has puzzled many critics, sometimes to the point of vituperation, that Poe stands simultaneously as the germinal figure of a central modernist trajectory (leading via Baudelaire to French Symbolism and thence to the high modernism of Eliot and others) and as the much-acknowledged pioneer of several durable mass-cultural genres: detective fiction and science fiction, as well as certain modes of sensational or gothic horror, which are today, to use one of Poe's coinages, "omniprevalent."(2)In the past, such critics tended to dismiss Poe to the fringes of the American canon for what they saw as his highbrow pretensions and lowbrow taste. More recently, critics like Elmer and others have argued that Poe's ability to straddle the high/low cultural divide is precisely what makes him such a perennially fascinating writer and one of the most revealing about American culture in general.Considering Poe's high standing in Latin America, one might assume that the question of his low or popular status was not as much of a stumbling block there.2 Cortázar himself blamed American discomfort with Poe on his use of "baroque" language, an issue that Cortázar's own background as a native Spanish speaker allowed him to ignore: [End Page 1] "since I'm neither English nor American, I see it with another perspective. I know there are aspects which have aged a lot, that are exaggerated, but that hasn't the slightest importance next to his genius" (Weiss 73). The idea that an author's "genius" could rise above the demands of his countrymen was important to Cortázar. Questions about his own cultural status also significantly affected the reception of Cortázar's work, though in many ways he suffered from just the opposite charges made against Poe. The style and themes of his work, and the political context in Argentina during the early part of his career (characterized most conspicuously by the rise of Perónism), led some in the literary establishment of his own country to accuse Cortázar of being too European or elitist.3 Looking at Poe and Cortázar together, this essay compares how both authors negotiated such cultural issues in their writing and the way that Cortázar reworks some of Poe's particular strategies in a modern Argentine setting. Focusing on two of these authors' most well-known stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (published in 1839) and "Casa tomada" ("House Taken Over") (published in 1946), I argue that they both reflect some of the ways that Poe and Cortázar grappled with the rise and attraction of a popular culture that threatened to reconfigure their particular literary landscapes.In Keywords, Raymond Williams traces the... (shrink)

Virtue ethicists sometimes say that a right action is what a virtuous person would do, characteristically, in the circumstances. But some have objected recently that right action cannot be defined as what a virtuous person would do in the circumstances because there are circumstances in which a right action is possible but in which no virtuous person would be found. This objection moves from the premise that a given person ought to do an action that no virtuous person would do, (...) to the conclusion that the action is a right action. I demon‐strate that virtue ethicists distinguish “ought” from “right” and reject the assumption that “ought” implies “right.” I then show how their rejection of that assumption blocks this “right but not virtuous” objection. I conclude by showing how the thesis that “ought” does not imply “right” can clarify a further dispute in virtue ethics regarding whether “ought” implies “can.”. (shrink)

Virtue ethicists sometimes say that a right action is what a virtuous person would do, characteristically, in the circumstances. But some have objected recently that right action cannot be defined as what a virtuous person would do in the circumstances because there are circumstances in which a right action is possible but in which no virtuous person would be found. This objection moves from the premise that a given person ought to do an action that no virtuous person would do, (...) to the conclusion that the action is a right action. I demon‐strate that virtue ethicists distinguish “ought” from “right” and reject the assumption that “ought” implies “right.” I then show how their rejection of that assumption blocks this “right but not virtuous” objection. I conclude by showing how the thesis that “ought” does not imply “right” can clarify a further dispute in virtue ethics regarding whether “ought” implies “can.”. (shrink)

Endurantism is commonly characterized as a sweeping thesis, according to which enduring objects persist by sweeping or moving through time. I argue that the endurantist should resist this characterization as it makes her view incompatible with eternalism, the moving spotlight theory, and the growing block theory. Moreover, even the presentist endurantist should resist this characterization as it undermines the modal analogy. As a result, those who argue against endurantism should avoid characterizing endurantism in this way. Through this discussion we (...) can better understand the endurantist picture and appreciate why caution is needed when characterizing the nature of enduring objects. (shrink)

There is a puzzle about Hume's is-ought gap involving an epistemic `ought'. From the premise `Snow is white,' we can infer `Sophia's belief that snow is white is correct.' `Snow is white' is paradigmatically non-normative, and that Sophia's belief is correct, a claim about what belief she ought to have, seems to be normative. The argument seems valid, so the is-ought gap is supposed to block this kind of inference. The puzzle is over whether we should give up on (...) the is-ought game or find another way to resolve the conflict. In the first chapter, I provide a formulation of the is-ought gap in a general semantic framework that avoids some other known problems. I turn in chapter 2 to discussing the puzzle about correct belief. I cast doubt on a solution proposed by Allan Gibbard by showing that it can admit of no epistemology of the normative. In chapter 3, I defend a solution to the puzzle while more directly tackling the question of the nature of oughts for belief. I offer a new explanation of why we ought to believe the truth. At the heart of the account is the idea that it's a conceptual truth beliefs ought to be true, which I provide a new argument for. I then claim that being an agent requires being subject to this norm of belief. This results in a non-moral, distinctly doxastic, account of why we ought to believe the truth. My conclusion is that asking why we ought to believe the truth is like asking why a bachelor must be unmarried: the answer is contained in the ideas that make up the question. In the final chapter, I respond to Gibbard's claim that an analogous story cannot work for `ought' claims for degreed belief. I pose a worry for Gibbard's proposed alternative explanation, and I undermine Gibbard's motivation for pursuing such an account in the first place. By taking belief to have an aim in a normative sense, I sketch how we can make sense of epistemic rationality in terms of that aim. (shrink)

Jaegwon Kim argues that if mental properties are irreducible with respect to physical properties then mental properties are epiphenomenal. I believe this conditional is false and argue that mental properties, along with their physical counterparts, may overdetermine their effects. Kim contends, however, that embracing overdetermination in the mental case, due to supervenience, renders the attribution of overdetermination vacuous. This way of blocking the overdetermination option, however, makes the attribution of mental epiphenomenalism equally vacuous. Furthermore, according to Kim’s own logic, physical (...) properties, and not mental properties, may be in danger of losing their causal relevance. (shrink)

This article addresses the question under what conditions it is still possible to think in today’s era of the Anthropocene, in which the human has become the key factor in the evolution of the biosphere, considering the fact, structurally neglected by philosophy, that thinking is thoroughly conditioned by a technical milieu of retentional dispositives. The Anthropocene results from modern technology’s domination of the earth through industrialization that is currently unfolding as a process of generalized, digital automation, which tends to eliminate (...) reflection and to block any genuine questioning of its own development, producing a state of generalized entropy at all levels—ecological, psychic, social, economic, and, in particular, the noetic or thinking. The radical undermining of the very possibility of thinking and questioning, thought by Martin Heidegger in terms of Enframing, should be understood as a pharmacological situation that calls for a therapeutic reversal of the toxicity of current digital technologies into a remedial instrument for realizing a negentropic turn beyond the Anthropocene and toward the Neganthropocene. This requires that thinking starts to understand itself as caring, i.e., as a taking care of itself by taking care of the technical pharmaka that thoroughly constitute and condition it and that can render human life as noetic life both deeply unlivable and profoundly worthwhile. (shrink)

Traditional human–computer interaction (HCI) allowed researchers and practitioners to share and rely on the ‘five E’s’ of usability, the principle that interactive systems should be designed to be effective, efficient, engaging, error tolerant, and easy to learn. A recent trend in HCI, however, is that academic researchers as well as practitioners are becoming increasingly interested in user experiences, i.e., understanding and designing for relationships between users and artifacts that are for instance affective, engaging, fun, playable, sociable, creative, involving, meaningful, exciting, (...) ambiguous, and curious. In this paper, it is argued that built into this shift in perspective there is a concurrent shift in accountability that is drawing attention to a number of ethical, moral, social, cultural, and political issues that have been traditionally de-emphasized in a field of research guided by usability concerns. Not surprisingly, this shift in accountability has also received scarce attention in HCI. To be able to find any answers to the question of what makes a good user experience, the field of HCI needs to develop a philosophy of technology. One building block for such a philosophy of technology in HCI is presented. Albert Borgmann argues that we need to be cautious and rethink the relationship as well as the often-assumed correspondence between what we consider useful and what we think of as good in technology. This junction—that some technologies may be both useful and good, while some technologies that are useful for some purposes might also be harmful, less good, in a broader context—is at the heart of Borgmann’s understanding of technology. Borgmann’s notion of the device paradigm is a valuable contribution to HCI as it points out that we are increasingly experiencing the world with, through, and by information technologies and that most of these technologies tend to be designed to provide commodities that effortlessly grant our wishes without demanding anything in return, such as patience, skills, or effort. This paper argues that Borgmann’s work is relevant and makes a valuable contribution to HCI in at least two ways: first, as a different way of seeing that raises important social, cultural, ethical, and moral issues from which contemporary HCI cannot escape; and second, as providing guidance as to how specific values might be incorporated into the design of interactive systems that foster engagement with reality. (shrink)

In Barnett and Block (J Bus Ethics 88(4):711–716, 2009a), the present authors claim that borrowing short and lending long is fraudulent, and thus ought to be prohibited on legal grounds. Bagus and Howden (J Bus Ethics 90(3):399, 2009) take issue with our ethical analysis. The present paper is our response to these authors; it is an attempt to defend Barnett and Block (J Bus Ethics 88(4):711–716, 2009a) against the very interesting and important, although we believe, erroneous, criticisms of (...) Bagus and Howden (J Bus Ethics 90(3):399, 2009). (shrink)

We stipulate, arguendo, that fractional-reserve-demand deposit banking is per se fraudulent. We ask whether or not time deposit banking can also be illicit, and answer in the positive, if there is a mismatch between the time dimensions of deposits and loans. To wit, if an intermediary borrows short and lends long.

Nietzsche values intellectual honesty, but is dubious about what he calls the will to truth. This is puzzling since intellectual honesty is a component of the will to truth. In this paper, I show that this puzzle tells us something important about how Nietzsche conceives of our pursuit of truth. For Nietzsche, those who pursue truth occupy unstable ground, since being honest about the ultimate reasons for that pursuit would mean that truth could no longer satisfy the important human needs (...) it satisfies at present. We can pursue truth, or be honest about what in us is served by such a pursuit, but not both. Nietzsche aims to show that understanding and owning up to this instability is the sort of affirmation of human life to which we ought to aspire, and is the price we pay for being free from otherworldly morality. (shrink)

Nietzsche is famously a critic of Mitleid, compassion or pity. He claims that because it must condemn all suffering, a morality of compassion is unable to recognize the ennobling aspects of suffering, and so is unable to recognize what is good and noble about those aspects of the human condition susceptible to suffering. Compassion thus robs our finitude of significance. Alongside his criticisms of compassion, however, at numerous places we see Nietzsche distinguishing between conceptions of compassion made different by the (...) different forms of life in which they are implicated. “Compassion,” for Nietzsche, is too broad a term, capturing a range of moral phenomena and their attendant eliciting conditions, deep... (shrink)

Nietzsche criticizes the shared suffering of compassion as a basis for ethics, yet his challenge to overcome compassion seeks not to extinguish all fellow feeling but instead urges us to transform the way we relate to others, to learn to share not suffering but joy. For Schopenhauer, we act morally when we respond to another’s suffering, while we are mistrustful of the joys of others. Nietzsche turns to the type of relationality exempli!ied by friendship, understood as shared joy, in order (...) to help him to articulate his ethical ideal for human beings. (shrink)

The slogans of social movements are often put forward as simple truths, so that advocacy has consisted in changing social conditions such that these new truth claims are accepted as true: that women’s rights are human rights, that Black lives matter. Social movements critical of the political ascendance of Donald Trump, however, have been concerned not merely with this or that truth claim, but with the status—epistemological, social, and political—of truth itself. Those examining this post-truth moment have often turned to (...) Friedrich Nietzsche, who for many is synonymous with the kind of postmodern conception of truth at the center of post-truth politics. However, while it is true that Nietzsche offers valuable... (shrink)

A critic of metaphysically robust accounts of the human self, Nietzsche means not to do away with the self entirely, but to reimagine it. He pursues an account according to which the unity of the self is born out of a coherent organization of drives and yet is not something other than that organization. Readers of Nietzsche have pointed to a so-called “lack of fit” between this theoretical account of the self, according to which the self is nothing apart from (...) the organization of drives, and Nietzsche’s practical account of human agency, which often seems to require that the self be something more than mere drives. I suggest Nietzsche’s interest in Greek agonistic norms of contest sheds light on this apparent incongruity. Agonistic relationships, insofar as they cultivate contest among diverse forces, are for Nietzsche one appropriate model for the subjectivity of beings whose psychology is similarly characterized by contest among diverse forces—that is, beings like us. (shrink)

Representing a variety of interpretive strategies, and looking closely at a wide range of Nietzsche’s works, the papers in this issue are nevertheless united by a common concern to make clear whether and how our understanding of Nietzsche is improved by paying closer attention to his treatment of virtue. For Nietzsche’s overlapping projects of interrogating inherited values and of envisioning forms of human life outside of the present moral economy of guilt and retribution both grow out of concerns central to (...) virtue ethics. That is, Nietzsche is asking whether morality in its present state is good for human beings, where what counts as good has to do with the kind of creatures we are, and so what it takes for us to flourish. (shrink)

Conventional quantum mechanics with a complex Hilbert space and the Born Rule is derived from five axioms describing experimentally observable properties of probability distributions for the outcome of measurements. Axioms I, II, III are common to quantum mechanics and hidden variable theories. Axiom IV recognizes a phenomenon, first noted by von Neumann (in Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1955) and independently by Turing (Teuscher and Hofstadter, Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker, Springer, Berlin, (...) 2004), in which the increase in entropy resulting from a measurement is reduced by a suitable intermediate measurement. This is shown to be impossible for local hidden variable theories. Axiom IV, together with the first three, almost suffice to deduce the conventional rules but allow some exotic, alternatives such as real or quaternionic quantum mechanics. Axiom V recognizes a property of the distribution of outcomes of random measurements on qubits which holds only in the complex Hilbert space model. It is then shown that the five axioms also imply the conventional rules for any finite dimension. (shrink)

It is shown that completely entangled two-particle quantum states are simultaneous eigenstates of a large set of commuting, nonlocal observables, a characterization that generalizes to multiparticle systems. This leads to a nonstatistical proof of the Bell-EPR no-hidden-variable theorem for two-particle systems and to a family of multiparticle generalizations of the three-particle system of Greenberger, Horne, and Zeilinger.

Nietzsche, Foucault, and Rorty are each ethical thinkers in that widest sense that concerns questions of who we ought to be, and each seeks to answer those questions through accounts of self-creation that are distinguished by the style and scope of embeddedness in some community they rely on. Nietzsche’s is a middle-ground position between Rorty and Foucault since he offers an affirmation of community, on grounds that Rorty might accept, without acquiescence to the status quo, a concern for Foucault. Nietzsche (...) aims to place himself in a community, but one in part defined by its vigilance in identifying its blind spots, in knowing that it does not always know itself. In particular, I would like to say that Rorty misses the force of Nietzsche’s views on self-creation and the affirmation of community because Rorty mischaracterizes Nietzsche’s perspectivism by construing it along narrative rather than affective or physiological lines. (shrink)

If we think of political progress as indexed to some permanent standard, and then agree that it is Nietzsche who dispels the authority of any such standard, then we may perhaps conclude that after Nietzsche, progress is ruled out. I want to show, however, that we find in Nietzsche comfort for a continued vision of human progress through engaged political action. I suggest that we look to Derrida and Rorty as offering a view of a post-Nietzschean democracy the engine of (...) which is an account of ameliorative progress that is at home in the Enlightenment tradition while avoiding its universalist pretensions. (shrink)

Throughout his writings, Nietzsche problematizes self-knowledge, trying to displace rather than satisfy our drive for it. Describing self-knowledge as an ideal only for a certain kind of human being, he writes that it is the community that says, “‘you shall be knowable, express your inner nature by clear and constant signs—otherwise you are dangerous [...]. We despise the secret and unrecognizable.—Consequently, you must consider yourself knowable, you may not be concealed from yourself, you may not believe that you change’”.1 And (...) he argues that what we call self-knowledge develops in the first instance not in order that we might know ourselves, but only in response to our need to... (shrink)

Current medical and legal literature generally favors a definition of death based on total cessation of brain functioning. It does not, however, supply the reasoning for this recommendation. None of the arguments for whole-brain death is convincing; there exists, however, a satisfactory rationale for identifying death with cortical death. Policymakers should refrain from endorsing any of these arguments, focussing instead on the pragmatic tasks involved in guiding medical care at the end of life.

This article is the first in-depth analysis of the direct intellectual engagement between one of America's most important Founding Fathers, John Adams, and the work of the leading modern feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft. It draws on the first complete transcription of Adams's marginalia in his copy of Wollstonecraft's French Revolution to argue that these two thinkers disagreed profoundly in their respective assessments of the watershed event of political modernity due to their divergent interpretations of the relationship between human nature, history, and (...) Revolutionary violence on the one hand, and the appropriate structure of political and social institutions on the other. (shrink)

Many modern conservatives and feminists trace the roots of their ideologies, respectively, to Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft, and a proper understanding of these two thinkers is therefore important as a framework for political debates today. According to Daniel O’Neill, Burke is misconstrued if viewed as mainly providing a warning about the dangers of attempting to turn utopian visions into political reality, while Wollstonecraft is far more than just a proponent of extending the public sphere rights of man to (...) include women. Rather, at the heart of their differences lies a dispute over democracy as a force tending toward savagery or toward civilization. Their debate over the meaning of the French Revolution is the place where these differences are elucidated, but the real key to understanding what this debate is about is its relation to the intellectual tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, whose language of politics provided the discursive framework within and against which Burke and Wollstonecraft developed their own unique ideas about what was involved in the civilizing process. (shrink)

Many modern conservatives and feminists trace the roots of their ideologies, respectively, to Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft, and a proper understanding of these two thinkers is therefore important as a framework for political debates today. According to Daniel O’Neill, Burke is misconstrued if viewed as mainly providing a warning about the dangers of attempting to turn utopian visions into political reality, while Wollstonecraft is far more than just a proponent of extending the public sphere rights of man to (...) include women. Rather, at the heart of their differences lies a dispute over democracy as a force tending toward savagery or toward civilization. Their debate over the meaning of the French Revolution is the place where these differences are elucidated, but the real key to understanding what this debate is about is its relation to the intellectual tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, whose language of politics provided the discursive framework within and against which Burke and Wollstonecraft developed their own unique ideas about what was involved in the civilizing process. (shrink)

In this essay we shall examine the contemporary jurisprudential thinking and legal precedents surrounding the issue of the sanctionability of pornography. We shall catalogue them by their logical presumptions, such as whether they view pornography as speech or act, whether they view pornography as obscenity, political hate-speech or anomalous other, whether they would scrutinize legislation governing pornography by a balancing of the harm of repression against the harm of permission, and who exactly they view as the victims.We shall take a (...) special interest in the most recent, but unsuccessful, attempt by a subgroup of feminists to proscribe pornography by treating it as neither political speech nor sexual speech but speech which causes harm which is both political and sexual. They would like it to be considered as a special kind of odious propaganda undeserving of protection because it promulgates a mental state conducive to criminal activity, and hence is criminal in and of itself. However, the repression of propaganda, even odious propaganda, is not so easily accomplished in this country. (shrink)

Edmund Burke, long considered modern conservatism's founding father, is also widely believed to be an opponent of empire. However, Daniel O'Neill turns that latter belief on its head. This fresh and innovative book shows that Burke was a passionate supporter and staunch defender of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, whether in the New World, India, or Ireland. Moreover--and against a growing body of contemporary scholarship that rejects the very notion that Burke was an exemplar of conservatism--O'Neill demonstrates (...) that Burke's defense of empire was in fact ideologically consistent with his conservative opposition to the French Revolution. Burke's logic of empire relied on two opposing but complementary theoretical strategies: Ornamentalism, which stressed cultural similarities between "civilized" societies, as he understood them, and Orientalism, which stressed the putative cultural differences distinguishing "savage" societies from their "civilized" counterparts. This incisive book also shows that Burke's argument had lasting implications, as his development of these two justifications for empire prefigured later intellectual defenses of British imperialism"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

"A collection of essays that discuss the writings of Carole Pateman, with emphasis on her theories of democracy and feminism"--Provided by publisher.

Recent years have seen increased interest in Friedrich Nietzsche's middle period works, as scholars have turned to Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science in exploring Nietzsche's turn toward naturalism and the roots of his mature criticisms of morality. Entering that conversation, Matthew Meyer offers an ambitious challenge to how we read these texts. Often viewed as a series of disconnected intellectual experiments that evince Nietzsche's rapid, not always linear, development over the period of their publication, the middle (...) period works are, Meyer argues, instead best understood as a consciously constructed dialectical Bildungsroman or narrative of self-education. That is, without having every detail... (shrink)

_ Ideals and Ideologies: A Reader_, 9/e, is a comprehensive compilation of original readings representing all of the major 'isms'.It offers students a generous sampling of key thinkers in different ideological traditions and places them in their historical and political contexts. Used on its own or with _Political Ideologies and the Democratic Ideal_, the title accounts for the different ways people use ideology and conveys the ongoing importance of ideas in politics.

Human behavior and thought often exhibit a familiar pattern of within group similarity and between group difference. Many of these patterns are attributed to cultural differences. For much of the history of its investigation into behavior and thought, however, cognitive science has been disproportionately focused on uncovering and explaining the more universal features of human minds—or the universal features of minds in general. -/- This entry charts out the ways in which this has changed over recent decades. It sketches the (...) motivation behind the cultural turn in cognitive science, and situates some of its central findings with respect to the questions that animate it and the debates that it has inspired. Woven throughout the entry are examples of how the cognitive science of culture, and especially its elevated concern with different forms of diversity and variation, continues to influence and be influenced by philosophers. -/- One cluster of philosophical work falls within the traditional subject matter of philosophy of science, in this case of the cognitive and social sciences. Philosophers have analyzed and assessed the methods and evidence central to the scientific study of cognition and culture, and have offered conceptual scrutiny, clarification, and synthesis. Research in a second vein sees philosophers themselves contributing more directly to cognitive scientific projects, (co)constructing theories, helping build computational models, even gathering empirical data. A third kind of work is naturalistic philosophy or philosophy of nature, wherein philosophers seek to use results from the cognitive science of culture to inform or transform debates over long-standing philosophical questions, including questions about the nature of philosophy and philosophical methodology itself. (shrink)