Holmes Rolston challenges the sociobiological orthodoxy that would naturalize science, ethics, and religion. The book argues that genetic processes are not blind, selfish, and contingent, and that nature is therefore not value-free. The author examines the emergence of complex biodiversity through evolutionary history. Especially remarkable in this narrative is the genesis of human beings with their capacities for science, ethics, and religion. A major conceptual task of the book is to relate cultural genesis to natural genesis. There is also a (...) general account of how values are created and transmitted in both natural and human cultural history. The book is thoroughly up-to-date on current biological thought and is written by one of the most well-respected figures in the philosophy of biology and religion. (shrink)

Harry Stack Sullivan has been described as 'the most original figure in American psychiatry'. Challenging Freud's psychosexual theory, Sullivan founded the interpersonal theory of psychiatry, which emphasized the role of interpersonal relations, society and culture as the primary determinants of personality development and psychopathology. This concise and coherent account of Sullivan's work and life invites the modern audience to rediscover the provocative, groundbreaking ideas embodied in Sullivan's interpersonal theory and psychotherapy.

Morality is a normative system of guidance that figures into practical reason by telling people what to do in various situations. The problem, however, is that morality has inherent gaps that often render it inefficacious. First, it may be indeterminate due to the high level of generality in which its principles are formulated. Second, moral terms such as ‘good’ and ‘right’ may be so vague that they fail to specify the requisite behavior. And third, its subjective aspect, which is a (...) product of personal experience, generates moral disagreement and thereby creates coordination problems that frustrate society’s collective moral aims. The objective of this article is to advance the thesis that morality must sometimes depend on law as a supplementary source of practical reason, a dependence which can be explained in terms of three essential features of law: its institutional character, its claim to authority, and its status as a second-order exclusionary reason for action. It shall then be explained how these three features enable law to make difficult decisions on behalf of individuals, define objective standards of conduct, and solve coordination problems, respectively, and in doing so, manage to fill in the gaps of morality mentioned above. Hence, it will be argued that law is also a normative system that helps people achieve their moral aims, notwithstanding the fact that it guides human behavior through a different logic and mode of operation from those of morality. (shrink)

_The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy Methodologies_ offers rich, productive discussion of methodological best practices in Chinese philosophy. The participants to this exchange are largely representative of the diverse methodologies currently undertaken in Chinese philosophy, and their contributions illuminate key dimensions of the nature of comparative work and its possibilities. The volume serves as a valuable introduction to the methodological perspectives of established figures in the field, rehearsing influential views and offering diverse insights. The return to shared themes serves (...) well to connect the essays and draw the reader into a rich conversation over how to approach comparative philosophy. Its diversity of methodological views is complemented by variety in the methods of discussing and understanding those methodological views. (shrink)

The contributors to The Moral of the Story, all preeminent political theorists, are unified by their concern with the instructive power of great literature. This thought-provoking combination of essays explores the polyvalent moral and political impact of classic world literatures on public ethics through the study of some of its major figures-including Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Robert Penn Warren, and Dostoevsky. Positing the uniqueness of literature's ability to promote dialogue on salient moral and intellectual virtues, (...) editor Henry T. Edmonson III has culled together a wide-ranging exploration of such fundamental concerns as the abuse of authority, the nature of good leadership, the significance of "middle class virtues" and the needs of adolescents. This collection reinvigorates the study of classic literature as an endeavor that is not only personally intellectually satisfying, but also an inimitable and unique way to enrich public discourse. (shrink)

Collating, for the first time, the key writings of Leonard Harris, this volume introduces readers to a leading figure in African-American and liberatory thought. -/- Harris' writings on honor, insurrectionist ethics, tradition, and his work on Alain Locke have established him as a leading figure in critical philosophy. His timely and urgent responses to structural racism and structural violence mark him out as a bold cultural commentator and a deft theoretician. -/- The wealth and depth of Harris' writings (...) are brought to the fore in this collection and the incisive introduction by Lee McBride serves to orient, contextualize, and frame an oeuvre that spans four decades. In his prolegomenon, Harris eschews the classical meaning of “philosophy,” supplanting it with an idiosyncratic conception of philosophy--philosophia nata ex conatu--that features an avowedly value-laden dimension. As well as serving as an introduction to Harris' philosophy, A Philosophy of Struggle provides new insights into how we ought conceptualize philosophy, race, tradition, and insurrection in the 21st century. (shrink)

Called by many France's foremost philosopher, Gilles Deleuze is one of the leading thinkers in the Western World. His acclaimed works and celebrated collaborations with Félix Guattari have established him as a seminal figure in the fields of literary criticism and philosophy. The long-awaited publication of _What is Philosophy?_ in English marks the culmination of Deleuze's career. Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between philosophy, science, and the arts, seeing as means of confronting chaos, and challenge the common view that philosophy (...) is an extension of logic. The authors also discuss the similarities and distinctions between creative and philosophical writing. Fresh anecdotes from the history of philosophy illuminate the book, along with engaging discussions of composers, painters, writers, and architects. A milestone in Deleuze's collaboration with Guattari, _What is Philosophy?_ brings a new perspective to Deleuze's studies of cinema, painting, and music, while setting a brilliant capstone upon his work. (shrink)

Au début du xiii e siècle fut composée à Paris une adaptation sous forme de figurae du De missarum mysteriis du cardinal Lothaire, devenu le pape Innocent III. Entre le xiii e et le xv e siècle, onze manuscrits ont conservé cette œuvre originale qui présente quarante-deux schémas classant les caractéristiques de la messe selon l’esprit de système propre au Moyen Âge. Elle fut en outre accompagnée par la suite d’un texte heuristique permettant d’expliquer les ambiguïtés de certaines figures. L’article (...) analyse et édite l’œuvre graphique ainsi que son texte explicatif. (shrink)

Ventricular Fibrillation is responsible for a majority of sudden cardiac death, but little is known about how ventricular tachycardia (VT) degenerates into ventricular fibrillation. Several clinical studies focused only on preventing VT with a class III antiarrhythmic drug resulted in many deaths. Our simulations investigate the interactions between an antiarrhythmic drug likely to suppress a VT and a Figure 8 reentry. A parameter AAR is introduced to increase the action potential duration and therefore simulate various Class III drugs. Simulations (...) are ran under several conditions (phases of the reentry, values of AAR, durations). They show that a VT can be suppressed whatever the phase of the reentry but it strongly depends on the duration of the effect. It confirms that a drug which can suppress a reentry can also worsen it. It also shows a great variety of activation patterns and thus the complexity of antiarrhythmic drugs effects. Simulations also demonstrate that suppressing VT is an increasing function of AAR. (shrink)

The Anemodoulion, a Constantinopolitan tetrapylon decorated with numerous figural reliefs and crowned by a weathervane, has traditionally been seen as an entirely late antique construction. A re-evaluation of the medieval sources shows that, while the tetrapylon itself was constructed in late antiquity, its figural decoration and conversion into a weathervane likely date to the reign of Leo III (717–741). Viewed in connection with other monuments of Leo's reign, in particular the gate of the Kontoskalion Harbor, and historical accounts of the (...) end of the Arab siege of 717/18, the Anemodoulion may be interpreted as a triumphal monument celebrating the dispersal of the Arab fleet via a powerful storm. It thus provides new insight into the earliest efforts of the Isaurian emperors to rebuild Constantinople as a fitting capital for a medieval empire. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coeditors’ IntroductionRetro III: As We RestartAlyson Cole and Kyoo Leethe covid-19 pandemic drags on, and, as the world is now trying to recover from it by learning to at least live with it better, philoSOPHIA has arrived at the third and final issue of RETRO. The fact that this series ended up being framed by the turbulent temporality of the current pandemic is something that some future editors of (...) philoSOPHIA, too, might find worth remembering.For now, we return to the now-point, as expected. To that end, here we have assembled articles on historical, individual, and gendered stigmas and wounds and traumas, among others, focusing also on their relationships to existential time, namely, present moments that persist.We turn first to the pressing issue presented by “Shackling Pregnant Women: US Prisons, Anti-Blackness, and the Unfinished Project of American Abolition”: Brady Heiner offers a lucid “interpretation of the social meaning of shackling imprisoned pregnant women and its persistence despite widespread normative consensus in favor of its abolition,” a joltingly specific, haunting reminder of how deeply the legacy of slavery is embedded in the US criminal legal system and the ways in which American abolition remains an “unfinished project.”Finally, RETRO III marks an ending and a restart of another kind. As of this issue—or, rather, this volume—philoSOPHIA is transitioning from a biannual to an annual publication schedule. In recent years, the journal has transformed in various ways. In 2018, we adopted a new transContinental approach and, with it, a new subtitle. We have expanded to include different [End Page v] genres, media, and voices, always aiming to reflect on our current moment and rethink persistent feminist philosophical questions from divergent angles. Publishing one volume per year is, we are certain, the best way to sustain this breadth of inquiry and continue deepening our alliances with critical race, disability, literary, media, and queer studies, among other fields. As we restart, readers can expect us to keep pushing boundaries, as we always have, while maintaining the same high quality and standards. This is essentially a change in the journal’s format, not in its substance.Wound/stigma as process also emerged as a key notion in Retro III partly because of our preliminary editorial conversation with Annette-Carina van der Zaag about three years ago, who, in response to our call for proposals on “retro” themes, had proposed an idea of guest editing an issue. Although that plan unfortunately did not materialize as we dealt with various pandemic challenges still faced by so many of us on a daily basis, Annette did write a spirited article while encouraging some other colleagues to explore related ideas, for which we remain grateful. In this piece, “Touching Wounds: On the Fugitivity of Stigma,” which explores stigma’s queer-responsive “transformational energy,” van der Zaag articulates ways of “inhabiting” wounds on three registers—material, affective, and fugitive—as an open-ended, future-embracing pathway beyond identity-bound ontology. Ghalya Saadawi, in turn, in her engagingly autobiographical essay “Critical Incision: Hypochondria, Autotheory, and the Health-Illness Dialectic,” autotheoretically draws out “critical” energy from this critical “illness” of hers, hypochondria, to the effect of destabilizing the temporally linearized and medically coordinated discursive ideals of health and being/living well.Survival, at the end of the day, often requires some literal transcending. A case in point has been movingly portrayed and theorized by Na-Young Lee, a sociologist and justice activist who, in “Multiple Encounters and Reconstructed Identities,” revisits questions of historical trauma and collective stigma. Here, she introduces and reflects on her oral history interviews with Korean “Halmoni Activist-Survivors of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery as Postcolonial Subjects,” with whom she herself continues to fight in solidarity. Focusing on the stories of two foundational figures, “Yun Chung-ok, a leading scholar and activist who, having managed to escape the fate of many other peers, first spoke out about Japanese military sexual slavery, and Kim Bok-dong, a survivor and human rights activist,” Lee shows how “overcoming trauma and reaching out to others continues to drive the redress movement” and how “through mutually constructed identities, activist-survivors broke away from... (shrink)

The AGI alignment problem has a bimodal distribution of outcomes with most outcomes clustering around the poles of total success and existential, catastrophic failure. Consequently, attempts to solve AGI alignment should, all else equal, prefer false negatives (ignoring research programs that would have been successful) to false positives (pursuing research programs that will unexpectedly fail). Thus, we propose adopting a policy of responding to points of philosophical and practical uncertainty associated with the alignment problem by limiting and choosing necessary assumptions (...) to reduce the risk of false positives. Herein we explore in detail two relevant points of uncertainty that AGI alignment research hinges on---meta-ethical uncertainty and uncertainty about mental phenomena---and show how to reduce false positives in response to them. (shrink)

pt. I. En tout temps, l'art comme figure du bonheur -- pt. II. La réinitialisation artistique de la culture -- pt. III. La réinitialisation des perceptions bienheureuses du monde.

Richard III’s courtship of Lady Anne in William Shakespeare’s King Richard III is a blend of courtly speech and sexual extravaganza. His sexual energy and power of seduction were invented by Shakespeare to enhance the theatrical effect of this figure and, at the same time, to present Richard as a tragic character. Richard’s eroticism in Act 1 Scene 2 makes him a complicated individual. Playing a seducer is one of the guises he uses to achieve his political aims on (...) the one hand, and, on the other, the pose of a sexually attractive lover enables him to put his masculinity to the test. Throughout the scene Richard is haunted by his deformity that, together with his villainy, makes him a stranger to the world and an enemy to his family and the court. In order to overcome his self-image of a disproportional cripple he manifests his sexuality towards Anne to boost his self-esteem and to confirm that the lady will accept him despite his obvious physical shortcomings. This article uses Georges Bataille’s theory of eroticism and erotic desire to characterize Richard as a tragic individual and to explain the reasons behind his unexpected sexual behaviour in the seduction scene. (shrink)

Thomas More's History of Richard III is a metahistory, rich in factual and fictional details. I will discuss More's concept of historiography as a rhetorical art and how his presentation of history transformed details of what was imperfectly known about Richard III into a polemic about what should be believed as an irrefutable truth. More's conception of history is much more amorphous than modern theories. He incorporated classical myths, literature, history, and philosophy along with phantasies, dreams, and oral testimonies to (...) recreate his historical Richard III as a tragic figure. More saw patterns of immoral behavior deeply rooted in the histories of the Plantagenet kings from the twelfth century to 1485 as if the sins of the fathers are repeated by their children. More used his sources, the antiquarian John Rous, the historian Polydore Vergil, and the oral history of Archbishop/cardinal John Morton to prove that the immorality of the Plantagenets, embodied in Richard III, was a curse that will be purged from England by the ascendance of Henry VII. William Shakespeare copied and embellished More's tragic vision of Richard III. Their historical facts and fictions enhanced their moral signification of the rise and fall of Richard III in English history. (shrink)

The inclusion of Elizabeth Shore in Thomas More’s History of King Richard III offers important insights into the decisions made by More in shaping his text. This article explores the evidence available to More as he wrote, emphasizing the near-complete absence of Shore from earlier narratives. Shore’s activity in the 1470s and 1480s is examined, along with evidence for her survival and that of her husband, Thomas Lynom, into the 1510s when More was writing. Lynom’s connections are considered, providing an (...) understanding of intersections of his activities with the environment in which More was shaping the History. As a central figure in the events of 1483 who survived into the 1520s, Shore was a prompt to the creation of More’s account—she was not simply a product of More’s literary and philosophical imagination, but part of his effort to respond to the immediate legacies of conflict in politics and society. (shrink)

Lorsqu’il fait référence, dans les traités 31 (V,8) et 48 (III,3) à la beauté d’Hélène, Plotin reprend un topos de la littérature grecque antique. Après avoir rappelé les différentes interprétations de cette figure controversée, on examine ici la façon dont Plotin, tout en rejoignant certaines de ces interprétations, retravaille ce topos (dans le cadre de sa polémique contre les Gnostiques) pour lui donner un sens nouveau.

Lorsqu’il fait référence, dans les traités 31 (V,8) et 48 (III,3) à la beauté d’Hélène, Plotin reprend un topos de la littérature grecque antique. Après avoir rappelé les différentes interprétations de cette figure controversée, on examine ici la façon dont Plotin, tout en rejoignant certaines de ces interprétations, retravaille ce topos (dans le cadre de sa polémique contre les Gnostiques) pour lui donner un sens nouveau.

The paper discusses the question as to whether, and in which way, Nietzsche is present in Derrida’s readings of Heidegger in the Geschlecht texts, and in the newly edited Geschlecht III specifically. In order to unfold the background of this question, the first part turns to earlier texts from the 1960s and 1970s and shows that Nietzsche is a key figure in Derrida’s takes on Heidegger, especially as regards the issue of Heidegger’s “belonging” to metaphysics. The second part then (...) addresses the Geschlecht texts and makes the case that, despite their brevity and seeming marginality, the remarks on Nietzsche, most of all in Geschlecht III, are indeed illuminating, in mainly two regards: on the one hand, they shed some light on how Derrida reads and “dislocates” Heidegger in these texts overall, and on the other hand, they contribute to the question of a “continuity” in Derrida’s relations to Heidegger. (shrink)