In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Modernity as Apocalypse: Sacred Nihilism and the Counterfeits of Logos by Thaddeus J. KozinskiMehmet CiftciModernity as Apocalypse: Sacred Nihilism and the Counterfeits of Logos by Thaddeus J. Kozinski (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico, 2019), 231 pp.Whether the names Adrian Vermeule, Fr. Edmund Waldstein, and Sohrab Ahmari provoke anxiety or glee in readers' minds will depend on where they stand on integralism, the brand of Catholic traditionalism that all (...) three have sought to promote through various websites and publications. Presenting themselves as the authentic interpreters of magisterial teachings on church–state relations, the integralists have challenged the long-standing attempt (especially in North America) to combine the Catholic faith with a commitment to political liberalism, natural rights, religious liberty, and state neutrality toward religion. For the integralists, attempting such a combination succeeds only in distorting the Catholic faith and causes us to forget what the Church taught before the Second Vatican Council, which still obliges the assent of Catholics, they claim, and is desperately needed to stand against the onward march of secularism. [End Page 966]Although Thaddeus Kozinski, former professor at Wyoming Catholic College, may not be one of the more well-known integralists, his latest book presents an interesting iteration of Catholic traditionalism that displays both what is valuable and what is most worrying about contemporary traditionalism. Kozinski's previous book was a closely argued critique of John Rawls and Jacques Maritain using the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre. It built up a cumulative case for the impossibility of resolving the political problem of religious pluralism without moving beyond philosophy by making a decision to reject or accept the political importance of the Catholic Church and its teachings.1 Although the author's preference for some sort of confessional state was already clear in that book, he preferred not to defend it, but rather to argue that it is impossible to be agnostic or neutral toward the ideal of church–state union. Now he goes on the offensive, presenting in the twenty brief chapters of Modernity as Apocalypse his "sundry attempts over the past decade to grapple with the question of modernity" (14). More precisely, he is grappling with the questions of what defines modernity, how we arrived at where we are, and what Christians should do while living in it, particularly in the fields of education and politics.The two chapters that form the first part (entitled "Modernity") use Charles Taylor's A Secular Age to argue that modernity's increasingly pluralistic and secular culture creates "an entirely new incapacity to experience the reality of a particular worldview in a naïve way, that is, without the consciousness of there being other viable options" (37). Yet the problem also reveals a blessing. "Encountering reality through the lens of other perennial traditions can serve to expose that false dichotomy in our minds that leads us to interpret other views as nothing more than full-fledged errors and our own personal lenses as nothing less than the whole truth" (21). Anyone who has read what passes for commentary on websites such as Church Militant or Rorate Caeli will find that statement surprising and refreshing.The second part ("Logos") contains four chapters that lucidly discuss contemporary disagreements in ethics between Kantians and virtue-ethicists, between new natural lawyers and MacIntyreans. Chapter 4 makes an effective and moving argument to read Plato "as a precursor to Faith, and a guide along the way home" (50). There are some brief but suggestive remarks drawing on Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate in [End Page 967] chapter 6 to argue that an ethics of gift can enable us to express the moral teachings of the New Testament in terms that are potentially convincing to a broader audience. "Metanoia" is the title of the third part, dedicated to education. Chapters 7–8 and 10 give not very original and yet timely arguments for the importance of the liberal arts, the need for Catholic universities to be institutions that can foster, rather than deform, the practice of philosophy, and the need for pedagogy to be rooted in the transmission of a community's tradition.2However, one cannot help but be startled when... (shrink)

This new and up-to-date edition of a book that has been central to political philosophy, history, and revolutionary thought for two hundred years offers readers a dire warning of the consequences that follow the mismanagement of change. Written for a generation presented with challenges of terrible proportions--the Industrial, American, and French Revolutions, to name the most obvious--Burke's Reflections of the Revolution in France displays an acute awareness of how high political stakes can be, as well as a keen ability to (...) set contemporary problems within a wider context of political theory. (shrink)

At the center of medical morality is the healing relationship. It is defined by three phenomena: the fact of illness, the act of profession, and the act of medicine. The first puts the patient in a vulnerable and dependent position; it results in an unequal relationship. The second implies a promise to help. The third involves those actions that will lead to a medically competent healing decision. But it must also be good for the patient in the fullest possible sense. (...) The physician cannot fully heal without giving the patient an understanding of alternatives such that he or she can freely arrive—together with the physician—at a decision in keeping with his or her personal morality and values. In today's pluralistic society, universal agreement on moral issues between physicians and patients is no longer possible. Nevertheless, a reconstruction of professional ethics based on a new appreciation of what makes for a true healing relationship between patient and physician is both possible and necessary. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:President’s Council on BioethicsEdmund D. Pellegrino (bio) and F. Daniel Davis (bio)Approximately two weeks before what was to have been its final meeting, the White House dissolved the President’s Council on Bioethics by terminating the appointments of its 18 members. The letters of dismissal, dated 10 June 2009, informed the members that their service on the Council would end with the close of business the next day.The Council’s term (...) was set to expire on 30 September 2009. After President Obama’s election in November and during the transition, we were advised to proceed on the assumption that the Council would be permitted to cease on that date. Reasons for the abrupt move to disband the Council are unknown. We have accepted the fact that we Council members served at the pleasure of the President and that he simply exercised his rightful prerogative. No explanation is therefore required.Some observers have speculated that the action was retaliatory. They related to the fact that several members of the Council disagreed with the President’s stem cell policy in a signed statement published in the Hastings Center’s Bioethics Forum. Others have speculated that the move was pre-emptive. At its final meeting, scheduled for 25–26 June, the Council was set to sign-off on two of its final publications. One was a comprehensive report on the ethics of organ transplantation, and the other a white paper entitled Health Care and the Common Good. The aim was immediately to release the latter as a contribution to the intensifying debate about health care reform. Health Care and the Common Good could well have aided rather than impeded the President’s drive to better control health care costs and achieve universal coverage. The Council report attempted to ground both goals in the ethical framework of, as the title indicates, the common good of all Americans.In his letter terminating the members’ appointments, Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel Don Gips said that the President “recognizes the values of having a commission of experts in bioethical issues to provide objective and non-ideological bioethics advice to his administration.” Gips went on to say that the President is “currently rethinking the purposes and goals of such a bioethics commission, and is carefully considering a revitalized mission and mandate.” And, [End Page 309] responding to media enquiries, White House press officer Reid Cherlin explained that the President’s Council was terminated because it was a “philosophically leaning advisory group” and, according to a New York Times account by Nicholas Wade, “because it favored discussion over developing a shared consensus.” As for the ultimate outcome of the President’s “rethinking,” Cherlin indicated that President Obama will appoint a new commission with the mandate of offering “practical policy options” in bioethics.In the light of our experiences with the Council, we leave it with hopes that certain questions of national importance will be addressed. In light of the nature of federal advisory commissions, what is or are the proper roles of a national bioethics commission? If the aim is to provide advice and counsel to the President or, perhaps to the U. S. Congress, is that advice best rendered as a group consensus or as an in-depth exploration of the inevitably conflicting ethical perspectives on a given issue? How should such a commission be constituted—with what sorts of individuals? And what is the nature of the expertise that they individually and collectively bring to the commission’s functions? If the commission is to promote public debate and discussion, how exactly should it go about that task? And how is the efficacy of a commission to be assessed? Such questions inevitably lead us deep into contested territory, as the experience of this Council has shown: into the intersections of politics, religion, and science and into the relations between practice and theory—between policy and what some seem to deride as “philosophy.” Indeed, policy without an underlying philosophy is an edifice without a foundation; philosophy without policy is a foundation without an edifice.At the last meeting of the Council in March 2009, we launched a discussion of these questions with the... (shrink)

This response to Kevin WildesÕs article in the previous issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal addresses several major points of disagreement between Pellegrino and Wildes regarding the nature and scope of a philosophy of medicine, in particular how it is derived and by what method of philosophical enquiry it is best pursued.

John Wyclif has too frequently been described as "Morning Star of the Reformation" and only recently begun to be studied as a fourteenth-century English philosopher and theologian. This work draws on recent scholarship situating Wyclif in his fourteenth-century milieu to present a survey of his thought and writings as a coherent theological position arising from Oxford's "Golden Age" of theology. Lahey argues that many of Wyclif's best known critiques of the fourteenth-century Church arise from his philosophical commitment to an Augustinian (...) realism evocative of the thought of Robert Grosseteste and Anselm of Canterbury. This realism is comprehensible in terms of Wyclif's sustained focus on semantics and the properties of terms and propositions, a "linguistic turn" characterizing post-Ockham philosophical theology. Arising from this propositional realism is a strong emphasis on the place of Scripture in both formal and applied theology, which was the starting point for many of Wyclif's quarrels with the ecclesiastical status quo in late fourteenth-century England. This survey takes into account both Wyclif's earlier, philosophical works and his later works, including sermons and Scripture commentary. Wyclif's belief that Scripture is the eternal and perfect divine word, the paradigm of human discourse and the definitive embodiment of truth in creation is central to an understanding of the ties he believes relate theoretical and practical philosophy to theology. This connection links Wyclif's interest in the propositional structure of reality to his realism, his hermeneutic program, and to his agenda for reform of the Church. Lahey's survey also highlights Wyclif's rejection of Bradwardine's determinism in favor of a model of human freedom in light of God's perfect foreknowledge, and also explores the relation of Wyclif's spatiotemporal atomism to his rejection of transubstantiation. This is the first book-length, comprehensive survey of Wyclif's thought, and will be of interest to students of later medieval theology, philosophy, history, and literature. (shrink)

John Wyclif has too frequently been described as "Morning Star of the Reformation" and only recently begun to be studied as a fourteenth-century English philosopher and theologian. This work draws on recent scholarship situating Wyclif in his fourteenth-century milieu to present a survey of his thought and writings as a coherent theological position arising from Oxford's "Golden Age" of theology. Lahey argues that many of Wyclif's best known critiques of the fourteenth-century Church arise from his philosophical commitment to an Augustinian (...) realism evocative of the thought of Robert Grosseteste and Anselm of Canterbury. This realism is comprehensible in terms of Wyclif's sustained focus on semantics and the properties of terms and propositions, a "linguistic turn" characterizing post-Ockham philosophical theology. Arising from this propositional realism is a strong emphasis on the place of Scripture in both formal and applied theology, which was the starting point for many of Wyclif's quarrels with the ecclesiastical status quo in late fourteenth-century England. This survey takes into account both Wyclif's earlier, philosophical works and his later works, including sermons and Scripture commentary. Wyclif's belief that Scripture is the eternal and perfect divine word, the paradigm of human discourse and the definitive embodiment of truth in creation is central to an understanding of the ties he believes relate theoretical and practical philosophy to theology. This connection links Wyclif's interest in the propositional structure of reality to his realism, his hermeneutic program, and to his agenda for reform of the Church. Lahey's survey also highlights Wyclif's rejection of Bradwardine's determinism in favor of a model of human freedom in light of God's perfect foreknowledge, and also explores the relation of Wyclif's spatiotemporal atomism to his rejection of transubstantiation. This is the first book-length, comprehensive survey of Wyclif's thought, and will be of interest to students of later medieval theology, philosophy, history, and literature. (shrink)

In 1991, Diane Wood Middlebrook, a professor of English at Stanford University, published a biography of the poet Anne Sexton in which, among other things, she used as source material some 300 tapes of Sexton's psychotherapeutic sessions with her psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Orne. After some years of reluctance and with the concurrence of Sexton's daughter and literary executor, Linda Gray Sexton, Orne released the tapes to Professor Middlebrook. Middlebrook's picture of Sexton drew heavily on the tapes, supplemented by scrapbooks, letters, (...) photos, clippings, unpublished poems, and hospital records. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to correct Hume's gloss of the Crito both for the historical purpose of enhancing our understanding of the dialogue and for the philosophical aim of illuminating the grounds of morality and moral community. My thesis is that both Hume and Plato are sensitive to the human condition, which is manifestly a condition of inter- dependence, which means that rational, free, informed acceptance of a government depends on some government's prior parentalism.

As Montaigne put it, on the highest throne in the world man sits on his arse. Usually this epigram makes people laugh because it seems to reclaim the world from artificial pride and snobbery and to bring things back to egalitarian values. But if we push the observation even further and say men sit not only on their arse, but over a warm and fuming pile of their own excrement—the joke is no longer funny. The tragedy of man's dualism, his (...) ludicrous situation, becomes too real. The anus and its incomprehensible, repulsive product represents not only physical determinism and boundness, but the fate as well of all that is physical: decay and death. [Becker, 1973, p. 31]. (shrink)

Concerning the thing of which I am most in earnest] I certainly have composed no work in regard to it, nor shall I ever do so in the future, for there is no way of putting it in words like other studies. (Plato, Seventh Letter 341c.

The variety of general issues and particular controversies in biomedical ethics can be understood as reflecting a deeper unity than normally supposed. The principle of plenitude and the paradigm of the "chain of Being" form the tie among the phenomena. They are defined, and their presence is tracked especially through some of the ideas and language in the debate about the ethics of abortion. Keywords: plenitude, great chain of Being, abortion, explanation CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

tracked the influence of the major Western historical paradigm of the great chain of being through various positions taken about abortion. This essay shows the paradigm's influence on our language – especially in animating the use of "god" and phrases like "playing god". This is important given the prevalence of religious values in bioethics debates and the pervasiveness of the language. I hunt unsuccessfully for a meaning that could serve as a moral principle, and I show how these phrases are (...) rooted in the paradigm. I conclude that all that such language can do is offer the pretense that there is a specific absolute ground for forbidding something which could otherwise be morally acceptable. But such language is nearly senseless, and worse still, it is immoral in that it cuts off reflection and debate. Keywords: play[ing] god, great chain of being, principle of plenitude CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This eloquent 1757 treatise examines how interactions with the physical world affect formulation of ideals related to beauty and art. Tremendously influential on the development of aesthetic theory, this formative dissertation was among the first explorations of the concept of the sublime and remains a thought-provoking study for modern readers.