This qualitative study examines the moral courage of leaders working for democracy and human rights in Burma. As Burma transitions to democracy moralcourage will be essential for leaders of civil society organizations as they face corruption, cronyism, and resistance to change. From interview data with nineteen leaders in Burma and Thailand, and a review of the literature we developed a conceptual model of moral courage that suggests that the relationship between moral motivation and the demonstration of moral courage was mediated (...) by political, social, and individual level factors including the activists’ knowledge and experiences. In addition to applications for leadership in civil society organizations in emerging democracies, results suggest individuals in private, public, or non-governmental organizations, when confronted with coercion, corruption, exploitation, or denial of due process can act with moral courage by engaging their moral principles, commitment, compassion, and sense of urgency while recognizing risks and potential hardship. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Political Identity of the Philosopher:Resistance, Relative Power, and the Endurance of PotentialSamuel McCormickThe troublemaker is precisely the one who tries to force sovereign power to translate itself into actuality.—Giorgio AgambenBeyond the Straussian Practice of "Philosophic Politics"In the second half of the 1920s, Bertolt Brecht began a series of short stories about a "thinking man" named Mr. Keuner. Among the first stories he published was "Measures Against Power" ("Maßnahmen (...) gegen die Gewalt"), the opening passage of which provides the subject of this essay:As Mr. Keuner, the thinking man [Denkende], was speaking out against power in front of a large audience in a hall, he noticed the people in front of him shrinking back and leaving. He looked around and saw standing behind him—Power [Gewalt]."What were you saying," Power asked him."I was speaking out in favor of Power," replied Mr. Keuner. [End Page 72]After Mr. Keuner had left the hall, his students inquired about his backbone [Rückgrat]. Mr. Keuner replied: "I don't have a backbone to be broken. I'm the one who has to live longer than Power [Gerade ich muß länger leben als die Gewalt]."(2001, 3)How are we to understand the political activity of this "thinking man"? Clearly, Mr. Keuner is no Cynic. Unlike Diogenes, who famously ordered Alexander the Great to step out of the way and then openly rebuked his authority as king, Mr. Keuner refuses to play the part of the parrhesiastes.1 His political activity more closely resembles that of a Stoic philosopher. Consider, for instance, the way his reply to Power echoes that of Seneca the Younger: "It seems to me erroneous to believe that those who have loyally dedicated themselves to philosophy are stubborn and rebellious, scorners of magistrates or kings or of those who control the administration of public affairs. For, on the contrary, no class of man is so popular with the philosopher as the ruler is" (Ep. 73.1–2 [1920, 105]).Given this attitude toward the powers that be, we might also figure Mr. Keuner's conduct in terms of the Straussian practice of "philosophic politics." For Leo Strauss, one of the most striking, and sometimes strident, twentieth-century scholars to consider the political identity of the philosopher, philosophic politics consists in "satisfying the city that the philosophers are not atheists, that they do not desecrate everything sacred to the city, that they reverence what the city reverences, that they are not subversives, in short, that they are not irresponsible adventurers but good citizens and even the best of citizens." This is the defense of philosophy that is required "always and everywhere," Strauss concludes, regardless of what the dominant political order might be (1991, 205–6).Although he is certainly willing to appease Power, Mr. Keuner differs from Strauss's philosophic politician in three fundamental ways, each of which suggests that a closer examination of his speech and action is in order. First, the Straussian practice of philosophic politics does not consist in advocating for political or social change but in defending the discipline of philosophy. For Strauss, "there is no necessary connection between the philosopher's indispensible philosophic politics and the efforts which he might or might not make to contribute toward the establishment of the best regime" (1991, 205). For Mr. Keuner, however, the discipline of philosophy—and with it his identity as a "thinking man"—is neither in need of defense nor distinct from his political activity but, instead, available for use as a persuasive resource in his interaction with Power. How he [End Page 73] avails himself of the tropes and topoi of philosophical inquiry can only be determined by examining his conduct closely.Second, the proper site of philosophic politics is not the political activity of "thinking" men and women but their philosophical tracts and treatises. Thus, in searching for the "philosophic politics" of Mr. Keuner, Strauss would have us focus not on his interaction with Power but on the writings for which he has come to be known as a "thinking man." As I argue in a recent edition of this journal (2005, 302–3), this... (shrink)

The protests on June 16, 1976 of black schoolchildren in Soweto against the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in their schools precipitated one of the most profound challenges to the South African apartheid state. These events were experienced in a context of violent social and political conflict. They were almost immediately drawn into a discourse that discredited and silenced them, manipulating meaning for ideological and political reasons with little regard for how language and its absence-silences-further violated those (...) who had experienced the events. Violence, in its physical and discursive shape, forged individual memories that remain torn with pain, anger, distrust, and open questions; collective memories that left few spaces for ambiguity; and official or public histories tarnished by their political agendas or the very structures-and sources-that produced them. Based on oral histories and historical documents, this article discusses the collusion of violence and silence and its consequences. It argues that-while the collusion between violence and silence might appear to disrupt or, worse, destroy the ability of individuals to think historically-the individual historical actor can and does have the will to contest and engage with collective memory and official history. (shrink)

My discussion is presented in three steps: The present position of the Catholic Church; why it is a relatively recent tradition; and the roots of the tradition.

Birth regulation is a tired and worn-out conversation, so I will not approach the matter in that way. I think it much more exciting, and it raises all the same problems, to approach the issues of reproductive services through reproductive technologies that are now available. Since this is based on my recent experience with the American Fertility Society, now the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, I will take this tack. This presentation is a vehicle for getting some questions on the (...) table; hopefully, there will be enlightenment in the discussion and debates that follow. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"A Unity of Order":Aquinas on the End of PoliticsWilliam McCormick S.J.Nonspecialists are often surprised to learn that Aquinas's thought on Church and state is a matter of obscurity. After all, Aquinas is the most famous medieval thinker in the West, and the question of Church and state is one of the best-known medieval political questions. And yet his thought on that polemical topic remains obscure. As John Watt (...) puts it: "There are too many ambiguities in his doctrine and too many unanswerable questions about what he did or did not hold."1Why is his view not better understood? Part of its obscurity is the relative infrequency with which he writes on politics.2 Another is the relative lack of interest in medieval political thought among political scientists and historians of political thought, an obscurity dating back to the Renaissance.3 Those who do study Aquinas's thought, moreover, have been mired in a controversy over two key texts: one from book II of his Scriptum or commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences (d. 44, q. 2, a. 3, exp. text.), and the other in book II of De regno (On kingship), chapter 3 (no. 110). For brevity, I will use S for the Scriptum passage and R for the De regno passage.4 These two [End Page 1019] appear to contradict each other, and with respect to fundamental political questions. The debate over these two texts points to what most contributes to the obscurity of Aquinas's teaching on Church and state: confusion about his vision of politics in human life. As I will show in this paper, Aquinas transcends modern categories of the "secular" and "belief" in his treatment of politics. Aquinas valorizes the integrity of political activity: that autonomy is not just a concession to the modern condition. It is in fact when Aquinas is most theological that he is most open to that integrity. The integrity of the political speaks to the intrinsic goodness of that order: it mirrors God's unity in its complex and ordered diversity.In this paper I examine R and S to show their concordance. I argue that they are complementary in what they prescribe for relations between Church and state, and indeed grounded in the same account of the origins of political authority. Through this investigation we will uncover key principles of Aquinas's political thinking that show him to have a capacious vision of politics where humans achieve the actualization of their full beings as human.A key notion will be unitas ordinis, or unity of order: the form of human cooperation in political life. As we will see, that form strikes a middle path between the simple unity of the individual person and the orderless collectivity of a crowd. For Aquinas, that order is itself a common good of politics, and an intrinsic one at that, before any "extrinsic" common good achieved by the people through that order. Part of why this seemingly secular consideration is good is its theological importance: it mirrors God.Further, if Aquinas does not elaborate on political arrangements as much as one would like, nevertheless he offers sure guidance for the principles which ought to guide the prudent development of those arrangements in a particular time and place. Ultimately Aquinas shows that medieval political thought is in key respects not as alien and hostile to us as we might imagine, but in its own way equally concerned about the integrity of the political life.5The Teaching of SAquinas's teaching on Church and state in S is widely accepted as his mature "two powers" teaching. Aquinas's most famous work, the Summa theologiae [ST], would eventually replace Lombard's Sentences, but in Thomas's own thirteenth century it was that compendium of quotations and arguments [End Page 1020] from Christian sources compiled by the twelfth-century theologian-bishop Lombard that was the standard theology textbook in the Latin West—the Ur-text for theological teaching and scholarship.6The Sentences is perhaps the most important Western book no one has heard of. It was so influential not only because it collected a rich trove of... (shrink)

This rich volume is sure to attract scholarly attention in a variety of fields. There is nothing else like it in print.

Time is a fundamental domain of experience. In this paper we ask whether aspects of language and culture affect how people think about this domain. Specifically, we consider whether English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently. We review all of the available evidence both for and against this hypothesis, and report new data that further support and refine it. The results demonstrate that English and Mandarin speakers do think about time differently. As predicted by patterns in language, Mandarin speakers (...) are more likely than English speakers to think about time vertically (with earlier time-points above and later time-points below). (shrink)

The chapters of Rousseau’s Social Contract devoted to republican Rome prescribe institutions that obstruct popular efforts at diminishing the excessive power and influence of wealthy citizens and political magistrates. I argue that Rousseau reconstructs ancient Rome’s constitution in direct opposition to the more populist and anti‐elitist model of the Roman Republic championed by Machiavelli in the Discourses: Rousseau eschews the establishment of magistracies, like the tribunes, reserved for common citizens exclusively, and endorses assemblies where the wealthy are empowered to outvote (...) the poor in lawmaking and elections. On the basis of sociologically anonymous principles like generality and popular sovereignty, and by confining elite accountability to general elections, Rousseau’s neo‐Roman institutional proposals aim to pacify the contestation of class hierarchies and inflate elite prerogative within republics – under the cover of more formal, seemingly more genuine, equality. (shrink)

In this paper we examine how English and Mandarin speakers think about time, and we test how the patterns of thinking in the two groups relate to patterns in linguistic and cultural experience. In Mandarin, vertical spatial metaphors are used more frequently to talk about time than they are in English; English relies primarily on horizontal terms. We present results from two tasks comparing English and Mandarin speakers’ temporal reasoning. The tasks measure how people spatialize time in three-dimensional space, including (...) the sagittal (front/back), transverse (left/right), and vertical (up/down) axes. Results of Experiment 1 show that people automatically create spatial representations in the course of temporal reasoning, and these implicit spatializations differ in accordance with patterns in language, even in a non-linguistic task. Both groups showed evidence of a left-to-right representation of time, in accordance with writing direction, but only Mandarin speakers showed a vertical top-to-bottom pattern for time (congruent with vertical spatiotemporal metaphors in Mandarin). Results of Experiment 2 confirm and extend these findings, showing that bilinguals’ representations of time depend on both long-term and proximal aspects of language experience. Participants who were more proficient in Mandarin were more likely to arrange time vertically (an effect of previous language experience). Further, bilinguals were more likely to arrange time vertically when they were tested in Mandarin than when they were tested in English (an effect of immediate linguistic context). (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to advance a new understanding of gender as a routine accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction. To do so entails a critical assessment of existing perspectives on sex and gender and the introduction of important distinctions among sex, sex category, and gender. We argue that recognition of the analytical independence of these concepts is essential for understanding the interactional work involved in being a gendered person in society. The thrust of our remarks is toward theoretical (...) reconceptualization, but we consider fruitful directions for empirical research that are indicated by our formulation. (shrink)

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

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

C. L. Hardin has argued that the colour opponency of the vision system leads to chromatic subjectivism: chromatic sensory states reduce to neurophysiological states. Much of the force of Hardin's argument derives from a critique of chromatic objectivism. On this view chromatic sensory states are held to reduce to an external property. While I agree with Hardin's critique of objectivism it is far from clear that the problems which beset objectivism do not apply to the subjectivist position as well. I (...) develop a critique of subjectivism that parallels Hardin's anti-objectivist argument. (shrink)

It is widely believed that Hume often wrote carelessly and contradicted himself, and that no unified, sound philosophy emerges from his writings. Don Garrett demonstrates that such criticisms of Hume are without basis. Offering fresh and trenchant solutions to longstanding problems in Hume studies, Garrett's penetrating analysis also makes clear the continuing relevance of Hume's philosophy.

C. L. Hardin has argued that the colour opponency of the vision system leads to chromatic subjectivism: chromatic sensory states reduce to neurophysiological states. Much of the force of Hardin's argument derives from a critique of chromatic objectivism. On this view chromatic sensory states are held to reduce to an external property. While I agree with Hardin's critique of objectivism it is far from clear that the problems which beset objectivism do not apply to the subjectivist position as well. I (...) develop a critique of subjectivism that parallels Hardin's antiobjectivist argument. (shrink)

This was the book which first garnered international celebrity and notoriety for its author, and which fire-started a debate about the supernatural claims of Christianity. Rejecting Christian doctrines and metaphysics in favour of the religious consciousness which characterises human identity, Cupitt 'takes leave' of God by abandoning objective theism. Whatever one thinks of the author's views, and of the non-realist beliefs he has been seen to champion, Taking Leave of God remains an essential work, and one of the most controversial (...) theological interventions of its age. (shrink)

In many ways, Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza appears to be a contradictory figure in the history of philosophy. From the beginning, he has been notorious as an "atheist" who seeks to substitute Nature for a personal deity; yet he was also, in Novalis's famous description, "the God-intoxicated man." He was an uncompromising necessitarian and causal determinist; yet his ethical ideal was to become a "free man." He maintained that the human mind and the human body are identical; yet he also (...) insisted that the human mind can achieve a kind of eternality that transcends the death of the body. He has been adopted by Marxists as a precursor of historical materialism, and by Hegelians as a precursor of absolute idealism. He was a psychological egoist, proclaiming that all individuals necessarily seek their own advantage and implying that other individuals were of value to him only insofar as they were useful to him; yet his writings aimed to promote human community based on love and friendship, he had many devoted friends, and even his critics were obliged to acknowledge that his personal conduct was above reproach. He held that the state has the right to do whatever it has the power to do, while at the same time he defended democracy and freedom of speech. He denied supernatural revelation and criticized popular religion as a grave danger to the peace and stability of the state; yet he devoted himself to the careful interpretation of scripture and argued for toleration and freedom of religion. Rarely employing figures of speech or rhetorical flourishes of any kind, his works are nevertheless among the most magisterial and uplifting of all philosophical writings, and they have inspired more poets and novelists than those of any other philosopher of the early modern period. (shrink)

Beginning with an overview of Hume's life and work, Don Garrett introduces in clear and accessible style the central aspects of Hume's thought. These include Hume's lifelong exploration of the human mind; his theories of inductive inference and causation; skepticism and personal identity; moral and political philosophy; aesthetics; and philosophy of religion. The final chapter considers the influence and legacy of Hume's thought today. Throughout, Garrett draws on and explains many of Hume's central works, including his Treatise of Human Nature (...) , Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding , and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion . Hume is essential reading not only for students of philosophy, but anyone in the humanities and social sciences and beyond seeking an introduction to Hume's thought. (shrink)

As part of an ethics course, health professions students were asked to identify ethical issues and to propose resolutions before and after a class discussion of a case involving confidentiality and substance abuse. Students listed an average of 2.4 issues before and 3.6 issues after the discussion. After discussion 50 per cent of students made explicit changes in their proposed resolution. Opinions varied widely on breaching confidentiality and the responsibility for protecting the patient's health. After the discussion almost 20 per (...) cent of the class felt it was acceptable to breach confidentiality as long as the patient was unaware. Many students identified more with the health care provider than with the patient. The presence of substance abuse altered many students' views on confidentiality. In this experience students were less rigorous in their application of principles, creating an excellent opportunity for teaching through exploration of the complexity of ethical decision-making in a specific case. (shrink)

The question of whether it is ever permissible to believe on insufficient evidence has once again become a live question. Greater attention is now being paid to practical dimensions of belief, namely issues related to epistemic virtue, doxastic responsibility, and voluntarism. In this book, McCormick argues that the standards used to evaluate beliefs are not isolated from other evaluative domains. The ultimate criteria for assessing beliefs are the same as those for assessing action because beliefs and actions are both (...) products of agency. Two important implications of this thesis, both of which deviate from the dominant view in contemporary philosophy, are 1) it can be permissible to believe for non-evidential reasons, and 2) we have a robust control over many of our beliefs, a control sufficient to ground attributions of responsibility for belief. (shrink)

In order to lie, you have to say something that you believe to be false. But lying is not simply saying what you believe to be false. Philosophers have made several suggestions for what the additional condition might be. For example, it has been suggested that the liar has to intend to deceive (Augustine 395, Bok 1978, Mahon 2006), that she has to believe that she will deceive (Chisholm and Feehan 1977), or that she has to warrant the truth of (...) what she says (Carson 2006). In this paper, I argue that none of the existing definitions of lying identify a necessary condition on lying. I claim that lying is saying what you believe to be false when you believe that the following norm of conversation is in effect: "Do not say what you believe to be false" (Grice 1989, 27). And I argue that this definition handles all of the counter-examples to the existing definitions. (shrink)