This paper examines the concept of sovereign agency in Nygren’s agapic theology. I argue that Nygren’s theology is structured by a voluntarist-inspired idealization of sovereignty that in effect precludes a viable agapic theory of alterity. ‘Otherness’ plays no essential role in Nygren’s subject-centred ethic. George Grant’s profound meditations on ‘otherness’ in Technology and Justice and other late works will provide the critical perspective for my reading of Nygren and agapist theology in general.

Friedrich Nietzsche's work has had a significant impact on the intellectual life of non-Western cultures and elicited responses from important thinkers outside of the Anglo-American philosophical traditions as well. Bringing together thirteen internationally renowned scholars, this is the first collection of essays to address the connection between Nietzsche's ideas and philosphies in India, China, and Japan. The contributors are Roger T. Ames, Johann Figl, Chen Guying, Michel Hulin, Arifuku Kogaku, David A. Kelly, Glen T. Martin, Sonoda Muneto, Graham (...) Parkes, okochi Ryogi, Eberhard Scheiffele, Mervyn Sprung, and Joan Stambaugh. "Exemplary. Its comparative approach is incisive yet accessible. I consider it a 'must read'"—Kathleen Marie Higgins, _Philosophy East and West_ "An excellent introduction to the broad ranging reception of Nietzsche among Asian thinkers."—James R. Watson, _Canadian Philosophical Review_ "The essays in this welcome collection are invariably thought-provoking and genuinely cross-disciplinary."—Kenneth Surin, _Religious Studies Review_ "A worthy and undogmatic introduction to several fascinating questions concerning the relations between Nietzschean thought and certain traditions of thought in India, China, and Japan."—Don Miller, _Asian Studies Review_. (shrink)

Earthbodies describes how our bodies are open circuits to a sensual magic and planetary care that when closed off leads to disastrous detours, such as illness, ...

We humans tend to believe that things are only real in as much as we perceive them, an idea reinforced by modern philosophy, which privileges us as special, radically different in kind from all other objects. But as Graham Harman, one of the theory's leading exponents, shows, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) rejects the idea of human specialness: the world, he states, is clearly not the world as manifest to humans. "To think a reality beyond our thinking is not nonsense, but (...) obligatory." At OOO's heart is the idea that objects--whether real, fictional, natural, artificial, human, or non-human--are mutually autonomous. This core idea has significance for nearly every field of inquiry which is concerned in some way with the systematic interaction of objects, and the degree to which individual objects resist full participation in such systems. In this brilliant new introduction, Graham Harman lays out OOO's history, ideas, and impact, taking in art and literature, politics and natural science along the way. From Sherlock Holmes, unicorns, and videogames to Dadaism, Voltaire, and string theory, this book will change the way you understand everything. (shrink)

Glen Stassen has approached his life and work "as if Jesus mattered," and this new collection of essays in his honor demonstrates that the contributors share that commitment, each in her or his own way. Ethics as if Jesus Mattered will introduce Stassen's work to a new generation, advance dialogue and debate in Christian ethics, and inspire more faithful discipleship just as it honors one whom the contributors consider a mentor.

Eighteen Christian theologians and ethicists offer a rich engagement with the theological ethics of Glen Stassen (1936-2014).

Graham Priest presents a ground-breaking account of the semantics of intentional language--verbs such as "believes," "fears," "seeks," or "imagines." Towards Non-Being proceeds in terms of objects that may be either existent or non-existent, at worlds that may be either possible or impossible. The book will be of central interest to anyone who is concerned with intentionality in the philosophy of mind or philosophy of language, the metaphysics of existence and identity, the philosophy of fiction, the philosophy of mathematics, or (...) cognitive representation in AI. (shrink)

This chapter states the contrast between presumptivism about testimonial warrant (often called anti-reductionism) and strict reductionism (associated with Hume) about testimonial warrant. Presumptivism sees an analogy with modest foundationalism about perceptual warrant. Strict reductionism denies this analogy. Two theoretical frameworks for these positions are introduced to better formulate the most popular version of persumptivism, a competence reliabilist account. Seven arguments against presumptivism are then stated and critiqued: (1) The argument from reliability; (2) The argument from reasons; (3) the argument from (...) positive reasons; (4) the argument from negative reasons; (5) the argument from agency; (6) the argument from psychological force; and (7) the argument from gullibility. If presumptivm is false, it is not for any of these arguments. (shrink)

This wide-ranging collection of original essays explores how individual and societal beliefs, values, and actions are transformed by science, technology, and engineering. Practical and theoretical insights from a global cohort of philosophers, policymakers, STS scholars, and engineers illuminate the perils and promise of technoscientific change.

Epistemic defeat is standardly understood in either evidentialist or responsibilist terms. The seminal treatment of defeat is an evidentialist one, due to John Pollock, who famously distinguishes between undercutting and rebutting defeaters. More recently, an orthogonal distinction due to Jennifer Lackey has become widely endorsed, between so-called doxastic (or psychological) and normative defeaters. We think that neither doxastic nor normative defeaters, as Lackey understands them, exist. Both of Lackey’s categories of defeat derive from implausible assumptions about epistemic responsibility. Although Pollock’s (...) evidentialist view is superior, the evidentialism per se can be purged from it, leaving a general structure of defeat that can be incorporated in a reliabilist theory that is neither evidentialist nor responsibilist in any way. (shrink)

Assesses Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to ethics as calling for a poetic interplay between perception and imagination, and between silence and solidarity, that reveals our place in the world, and our obligations to ourselves and others. Before his death in 1961, Merleau-Ponty worried about what he saw as humanity’s increasingly self-enclosed and manipulative way of experiencing self, others, and the world—the consequences of which remain apparent in our destructive inability to connect with others within and across cultures. In Merleau-Ponty and the Face (...) of the World, Glen A. Mazis provides an overall consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy that brings out what he sees as a corrective prescription for ethical reorientation that is fundamental to Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Mazis begins by analyzing the key role that silence plays for Merleau-Ponty as a positive, powerful presence rather than a lack or emptiness, and then builds on this to explore the ethical significance of the face-to-face encounter in his thought as one of solidarity rather than obligation. In the last part of the book, Mazis traces the development of what he calls “physiognomic imagination” in Merleau-Ponty’s work. This understanding of imagination is not fancy or make-believe, but rather brings out the depths of perceptual meaning and leads to an appreciation of poetic language as the key to revitalizing both ethics and ontology. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s published works, lecture notes, unpublished writings, and the work of many phenomenologists and Merleau-Ponty scholars, Mazis also offers incisive readings of Merleau-Ponty’s work as it relates to that of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Gaston Bachelard, and Emmanuel Levinas. (shrink)

This two-part volume collects the complete fragments and most important testimonies for the leading presocratic philosophers. The Greek and Latin texts are translated on facing pages and accompanied by a brief commentary for each philosopher.

OOO and art: a first summary -- Formalism and its flaws -- Theatrical, not literal -- The canvas is the message -- After high modernism -- Dada, surrealism, and literalism -- Weird formalism.

The case of very young children is a test case for the plausibility of reductionism about testimonial warrant. Reductionism requires reductive reasons, reductively justified and actively deployed for testimonial justification. Though nascent language-users enjoy warranted testimony based beliefs, they do not meet these three reductionist demands. This paper clearly formulates reductionism and the infant/child objection. Two rejoinders are discussed: an influential conceptual argument from Jennifer Lackey’s paper “Testimony and the Infant/Child Objection” and the growing empirical evidence from developmental psychology on (...) selective trust in children. Neither Lackey’s argument nor the empirical evidence vindicate reductionism. (shrink)

The problem of higher-order misrepresentation poses a dilemma for the higher-order theory of consciousness. The two ways of conceiving of the theory each run into a different difficulty raised by the problem of misrepresentation. If the theory is conceived relationally, i.e., conceived so as the higher-order state causes or makes a first-order state conscious, then the theory faces a problem raised by Block concerning the implausibility of non-existent conscious states. If conceived non-relationally, i.e., conceived in such a way as it (...) is the higher-order state itself which is the conscious state, then consideration of Neander’s original misrepresentation problem, that this seems to make the first-order state a spinning wheel in the explanation of consciousness, raises the conceptual problem that this version of the higher-order theory seems not to offer a philosophical theory of consciousness that is distinct from the first-order theory. (shrink)

Leo Strauss’s political philosophy spurs recognition that (i) an adequate political philosophy of technology must be able to integrate domestic and geopolitical ideals that are often expressed separately; (ii) technologies alter the formation of publics around issues, which depend less on the traditional overlap between people and place, so the political concept of sovereignty must be reconsidered; and (iii) both the polis and its technologies lift individuals beyond themselves, so a political philosophy of technology must include an aspirational element: the (...) technologies we make, use, and maintain are expressions of our interests, values, and concerns. (shrink)

Brings into conversation research in two separate disciplines, offering readers a comprehensive guide to current forgiveness research. Its 42 chapters are divided into five sections: I. Religious Traditions; II. Historic Treatments; III. The Nature of Forgiveness; IV. Normative Issues; V. Empirical Findings.

ABSTRACT:I here advance a critical research agenda for the political perspective of corporate social responsibility (Political CSR). I argue that whilst the ‘Political’ CSR literature is notable for both its conceptual novelty and practical importance, its development has been hamstrung by four ambiguities, conflations and/or oversights. More positively, I argue that ‘Political’ CSR should be conceived as one potentialformof globalization, and not as aconsequenceof ‘globalization’; that contemporary Western MNCs should be presumed to engage in CSR for instrumental reasons; that ‘Political’ (...) CSR should be associated with a corresponding ‘political’ model of corporate governance; and that both a ‘Rawlsian’ and ‘Habermasian’ perspective of Political CSR are different from ‘Political’ CSR. In concluding, I use these four critiques to identify a number of areas within which increasingly robust and sophisticated positive and normative theories of Political CSR are required. (shrink)

In this new book Glen Newey offers a balanced guide to this key text that explores both its historical and philosophical aspects.

Prometheanism -- Brassier at Goldsmiths -- Brassier's nihilism -- The path ahead -- Vitalist idealism -- Grant at Goldsmiths -- Philosophies of nature after Schelling -- A new sense of idealism -- Object-oriented ontology (OOO) -- OOO at Goldsmiths -- The withdrawn -- Objects and their qualities -- Vicarious causation -- The crucial place of aesthetics -- Speculative materialism -- Meillassoux at Goldsmiths -- After finitude -- Glimpses of the divine inexistence -- The two axes of speculative realism.

Central to the argument of the book are Charles Taylor's perspectives on authenticity and expressivism, which the author reads as a radical reworking of our understanding of being in the world and a starting point for rethinking the way individuals and communities ought to be dealing politically with ecological crises. Glen Lehman uses Taylor's work on liberalism, interpretivism and socialism to construct a bridge between democratic, ethical and ecological perspectives. The bridge developed involves a fusion between liberal and interpretivist (...) ideas, establishing a common ground through which different values are addressed. Such a fusion of perspectives acts in a spirit that moderates the dominant anthropocentric attitude toward the natural environment"--From publisher's website. (shrink)

Industrial emissions of greenhouse gases are significant contributors to climate change, which poses a grave threat to social and economic systems. Our understanding of what might drive firms to reduce their emissions of these gases, however, is incomplete, and it is not clear that the knowledge gained from other environmental issues will readily apply to these emissions. We argue and find that indicators of environmental injustice previously shown to relate to toxic pollutants, for example, are poor predictors of greenhouse gas (...) emissions. Instead, we show that the degree of belief in and concern about climate change in a local community is a significant predictor of the facility’s rate of emission improvements. Furthermore, we find that beliefs at both the facility and headquarter communities influence emission reduction, and that those effects are substitutes for each other. (shrink)

Social knowledge, for the most part, is knowledge through testimony. This essay is an overview of the epistemology of testimony. The essay separates knowledge from justification, characterizes testimony as a source of belief, explains why testimony is a source of knowledge, canvasses arguments for anti-reductionism and for reductionism in the reductionism vs. anti-reductionism debate, addresses counterexamples to knowledge transmission, defends a safe basis account of testimonial knowledge, and turns to social norms as a partial explanation for the reliability of testimony.

ENGLISH POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY HOBBES I. ON MAN § In the year there was published in England a very remarkable book, one of England's Bibles, an original and ...

This biography illuminates the life and thought of Baroness Mary Warnock, whose active years spanned the second half of the twentieth century, a period during which opportunities for middle-class women rapidly and vastly improved.

Many technological advancements do not readily lend themselves to incorporation into a philosophy curriculum, but Wikipedia is an exception. Courses can be designed around implementing or improving Wikipedia pages, which will help students both learn technological skills and engage with the world beyond the classroom. In the fall of 2012 I led such a class, in which we created the Wikipedia page for (appropriately) Collective Intentionality. This essay recounts my experience leading this class, examines its pedagogical and philosophical import, and (...) provides a template for future classes. (shrink)

The norm of assertion, to be in force, is a social norm. What is the content of our social norm of assertion? Various linguistic arguments purport to show that to assert is to represent oneself as knowing. But to represent oneself as knowing does not entail that assertion is governed by a knowledge norm. At best these linguistic arguments provide indirect support for a knowledge norm. Furthermore, there are alternative, non-normative explanations for the linguistic data (as in recent work from (...) Van Elswyk). Direct arguments would rely on normative judgments about the permissibility or impermissibility of assertions with and without the speaker knowing the content asserted. John Turri's work experimental results purport to show that our norm of assertion is factive, and probably knowledge. But as a number of recent experimentalists (Kneer, Reuter and Broessel, Marsili and Wiegmann) have shown, Turri's results rely on the problemmatic use of 'should' as in 'Maria should assert that she owns a 1990 watch.' Correcting for this, these experimentalists provide strong evidence that our norm of assertion is not factive. The standard reply to evidence like this from the assertion of unlucky falsehoods is the excuse maneuver. But Marsili and Wiegmann, following Turri's protocol for testing for excuse validation, show that participants who judge that assertions unlucky falsehoods are permissible are not guilty of excuse validation. Given our current understanding of the experimental evidence, knowledge is not our norm of assertion. (shrink)

It is a very curious thing that proponents of Idealism have considered it to be a satisfactory counter to ‘scepticism’, ‘nihilism’, and the like. On the contrary, it seems to me that Idealism is a very close cousin to ‘brain-in-a-vat’ scepticism and other anti-naturalistic fantasies. Moreover, it seems to me that Idealism is inferior to Naturalism for much the same kinds of reasons that ‘brain-in-a-vat’ scepticism and other anti-naturalistic fantasies are inferior to Naturalism: a proper weighing of theoretical virtues discloses (...) that Naturalism is the most virtuous worldview. (shrink)

The virtues have long played a central role in Christian moral teaching. Not surprisingly, over the centuries theologians have produced a number of interesting versions of virtue ethics. In spite of the fact that they hearken back to and are profoundly shaped by a shared set of canonical texts, theological commitments, and ritual observances, many of these versions of virtue ethics differ quite markedly from one another. The perfectionism of Wesley’s A Plain Account of Christian Perfection is as different from (...) the agapism of Edwards’ The Nature of True Virtue as it is like it. And neither of them could easily be confused with the natural law theory that Thomas Aquinas develops in the Summa Theologica. Given the length, breadth, and sophistication of this tradition, Christian moral theology offers a wealth of resources for contemporary virtue ethicists, whether or not those ethicists are working within a Christian theological framework. This chapter will highlight four strands within recent theologically-informed work on virtue ethics, each of which is directly relevant to current controversies in both moral theology and moral philosophy. (shrink)

This paper considers what Günter Figal’s perspective on objectivity and more generally, his hermeneutic phenomenology, may contribute to the traditions of phenomenological psychological research, as well as non-phenomenological approaches to qualitative research. Across qualitative research approaches and methods developed outside of phenomenology over the past 30–40 years, there has been a trend away from notions of consciousness and subjectivity, as well as objectivity. Günter Figal’s hermeneutical phenomenology retrieves these key ideas and recasts them with greater clarity and precision. These ideas, (...) in conjunction with an understanding of the philosophical position of critical realism, suggest renewed possibilities and significant places for both objectivity and subjectivity within both phenomenological and non-phenomenological psychological qualitative research. (shrink)

Objects generate time; time does not generate or change objects. That is the central thesis of this book by the philosopher Graham Harman and the archaeologist Christopher Witmore, who defend radical positions in their respective fields. Against a current and pervasive conviction that reality consists of an unceasing flux-a view associated in philosophy with New Materialism-object-oriented ontology asserts that objects of all varieties are the bedrock of reality from which time emerges. And against the narrative convictions of time as (...) the course of historical events, the objects and encounters associated with archaeology push back against the very temporal delimitations which defined the field and its objects ever since its professionalization in the nineteenth century. In a study ranging from the ruins of ancient Corinth, Mycenae, and Troy to debates over time from Aristotle and al-Ash'ari through Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, the authors draw on alternative conceptions of time as retroactive, percolating, topological, cyclical, and generational, as consisting of countercurrents or of a surface tension between objects and their own qualities. Objects Untimely invites us to reconsider the modern notion of objects as inert matter serving as a receptacle for human categories"-. (shrink)