Lomax pays particular attention to the problematic concept of nobility, which concerned Nietzsche during his later years. This study provides a close textual analysis and a thoughtful reconceptualization ofBeyond Good and Evil.

Carl Schmitt was the most famous and controversial defender of political theology in the twentieth century. But in his best-known work, _The Concept of the Political_, issued in 1927, 1932, and 1933, political considerations led him to conceal the dependence of his political theory on his faith in divine revelation. In 1932 Leo Strauss published a critical review of _Concept _that initiated an extremely subtle exchange between Schmitt and Strauss regarding Schmitt’s critique of liberalism. Although Schmitt never answered Strauss publicly, (...) in the third edition of his book he changed a number of passages in response to Strauss’s criticisms. Now, in this elegant translation by J. Harvey Lomax, Heinrich Meier shows us what the remarkable dialogue between Schmitt and Strauss reveals about the development of these two seminal thinkers. Meier contends that their exchange only ostensibly revolves around liberalism. At its heart, their “hidden dialogue” explores the fundamental conflict between political theology and political philosophy, between revelation and reason­and ultimately, the vital question of how human beings ought to live their lives. “Heinrich Meier’s treatment of Schmitt’s writings is morally analytical without moralizing, a remarkable feat in view of Schmitt’s past. He wishes to understand what Schmitt was after rather than to dismiss him out of hand or bowdlerize his thoughts for contemporary political purposes.”—Mark Lilla, _New York__ Review of Books _. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt was the most famous and controversial defender of political theology in the twentieth century. But in his best-known work, _The Concept of the Political_, issued in 1927, 1932, and 1933, political considerations led him to conceal the dependence of his political theory on his faith in divine revelation. In 1932 Leo Strauss published a critical review of _Concept _that initiated an extremely subtle exchange between Schmitt and Strauss regarding Schmitt’s critique of liberalism. Although Schmitt never answered Strauss publicly, (...) in the third edition of his book he changed a number of passages in response to Strauss’s criticisms. Now, in this elegant translation by J. Harvey Lomax, Heinrich Meier shows us what the remarkable dialogue between Schmitt and Strauss reveals about the development of these two seminal thinkers. Meier contends that their exchange only ostensibly revolves around liberalism. At its heart, their “hidden dialogue” explores the fundamental conflict between political theology and political philosophy, between revelation and reason­and ultimately, the vital question of how human beings ought to live their lives. “Heinrich Meier’s treatment of Schmitt’s writings is morally analytical without moralizing, a remarkable feat in view of Schmitt’s past. He wishes to understand what Schmitt was after rather than to dismiss him out of hand or bowdlerize his thoughts for contemporary political purposes.”—Mark Lilla, _New York__ Review of Books _. (shrink)

This long overdue English translation of Karl Löwith's magisterial study is a major event in Nietzsche scholarship in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Its initial publication was extraordinary in itself—a dissident interpretation, written by a Jew, appearing in National Socialist Germany in 1935. Since then, Löwith's book has continued to gain recognition as one of the key texts in the German Nietzsche reception, as well as a remarkable effort to reclaim the philosopher's work from political misappropriation. For Löwith, the centerpiece of (...) Nietzsche's thought is the doctrine of eternal recurrence, a notion which Löwith, unlike Heidegger, deems incompatible with the will to power. His careful examination of Nietzsche's cosmological theory of the infinite repetition of a finite number of states of the world suggests the paradoxical consequences this theory implies for human freedom. How is it possible to will the eternal recurrence of each moment of one's life, if both this decision and the states of affairs governed by it appear to be predestined? Löwith's book, one of the most important, if seldom acknowledged, sources for recent Anglophone Nietzsche studies, remains a central text for all concerned with understanding the philosopher's work. (shrink)

Human brain organoids (HBOs) are novel entities that may exhibit unique forms of cognitive potential. What moral status, if any, do they have? Several authors propose that consciousness may hold the answer to this question. Others identify various _kinds of_ consciousness as crucially important for moral consideration, while leaving open the challenge of determining whether HBOs have them. This paper aims to make progress on these questions in two ways. First, it proposes a framework for thinking about the moral status (...) of entities other than paradigmatic persons. This framework identifies four qualities that ground moral status: evaluative stance, self-directedness, agency, and other-directedness. Second, we speculate on ways in which these qualities are relevant to dimensions of conscious experience that have been, or could be, identified in nonhuman animals. We further explore how these approaches could be adapted for use in HBOs, and argue that such studies, or something similar to them, will have to be performed if we wish to have empirical indications that HBOs have consciousness of a morally significant kind. We end by proposing that in our current scientific and epistemic situation, it is too soon to attribute any moral status to HBOs, but that this might change in the future. (shrink)

Philosophical clarity is not simply a matter of style; it affects the quality of the thinking and writing and so the level of intellectual rigor. Achieving maximum clarity requires both intellectual and perceptual skills. The intellectual grasp of what philosophical clarity involves motivates writing with greater clarity. The perceptual skill of seeing exactly what we have written enables such improvement to occur. This paper explains a technique used in graduate-level courses to move both sets of skills, which in turn typically (...) changes the students’ approach to writing and moves their written presentation skills quite dramatically. (shrink)

Dispositionalist accounts of colour concepts are now largely discarded. But a number of recent and influential objections to this type of theory can be readily answered providing the dispositionalist account contains the key elements it should---which actual versions in the literature do not. I explicate some of the conceptual components needed in such an account once we correctly understand the anthropocentricity of the colour concepts involved. When these components are incorporated into dispositionalism, including one crucial distinction in particular, some powerful (...) seeming objections against this revised dispositionalism fail. In addition, dispositionalism has extra advantages over the far more popular physicalist theories, and I therefore contend that we should explore vigorously this kind of enriched dispositionalist account. (shrink)

It is proposed in this paper that enzymes, by virtue of a number of correctly positioned sites of interaction with substrates, can force the compression of hydrogen bonds, increasing the probability of proton transfer by quantum mechanical tunneling. By such a catalytic mechanism a rate enhancement of many orders of magnitude may be obtained with a very low energy input requirement. The mechanism would, however, require a highly structured catalyst.Pertinent aspects of hydrogen bond theory and of tunneling theory are briefly (...) reviewed. (shrink)

An analysis of the relationship between organized religion and secular states in modern Africa.

This chapter contains sections titled: What Is in the Head What Ain't in the Head A Change of Mind The Ideal and the Real Facts and Values Is Putnam Postmodern Despite Himself?

Dispositionalist accounts of colour concepts are now largely discarded. But a number of recent and influential objections to this type of theory can be readily answered providing the dispositionalist account contains the key elements it should---which actual versions in the literature do not. I explicate some of the conceptual components needed in such an account once we correctly understand the anthropocentricity of the colour concepts involved. When these components are incorporated into dispositionalism, including one crucial distinction in particular, some powerful (...) seeming objections against this revised dispositionalism fail. In addition, dispositionalism has extra advantages over the far more popular physicalist theories, and I therefore contend that we should explore vigorously this kind of enriched dispositionalist account. (shrink)

This book discusses Ramon Llull (ca. 1232-1316), the Christian missionary, philosopher and mystic, his relations with Jewish contemporaries, and how he ...

America’s unfinished revolution The_revolutionary spirit that runs through American history and whose_founding_father and greatest advocate was Thomas Paine is fiercely traced in Thomas Paine and the Promise of America ._Showing how Paine turned Americans into radicals—and how we have remained radicals at heart ever since—Harvey J. Kaye presents the nation’s democratic story with wit, subtlety, and, above all, passion. Paine was one of the most remarkable political writers of the modern world and the greatest radical of a radical age._Through (...) writings like Common Sense —and words such as “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth,” “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” and “These are the times that try men’s souls”—he not only turned America’s colonial rebellion into a revolutionary war but, as Kaye demonstrates, articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise. Beginning with Paine’s life and ideas and following their vigorous influence through to our own day, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America reveals how, while the powers that be repeatedly sought to suppress, defame, and most recently co-opt Paine’s memory, generations of radical and liberal Americans turned to Paine for inspiration as they endeavored to expand American freedom, equality, and democracy. (shrink)

J Harvey; Stereotypes and Group-claims: epistemological and moral issues, and their implications for multi-culturalism in education, Journal of Philosophy of Ed.

J Harvey; Stereotypes and Group-claims: epistemological and moral issues, and their implications for multi-culturalism in education, Journal of Philosophy of Ed.

I examine some common trends in ‘conflict management skills’, particularly those focused on practical results, and argue that they involve some moral problems, like the reliance on offensive stereotypes, the censorship of moral language, the promotion of distorted relationships, and sometimes the suppression of basic rights and obligations that constitute non–consequentialist moral constraints on human interactions (including dispute resolution). Since these approaches now appear in educational institutions, they are sending dangerous messages to those least able to critically assess them, messages (...) that denigrate the language, reflection, and interactions on which the moral life depends, thus undermining the possibility of moral education in the most fundamental sense of the phrase. (shrink)

I examine some common trends in ‘conflict management skills’, particularly those focused on practical results, and argue that they involve some moral problems, like the reliance on offensive stereotypes, the censorship of moral language, the promotion of distorted relationships, and sometimes the suppression of basic rights and obligations that constitute non–consequentialist moral constraints on human interactions (including dispute resolution). Since these approaches now appear in educational institutions, they are sending dangerous messages to those least able to critically assess them, messages (...) that denigrate the language, reflection, and interactions on which the moral life depends, thus undermining the possibility of moral education in the most fundamental sense of the phrase. (shrink)

The phrase “Cosmic Purpose” and others akin to it are familiar enough, particularly in the literature of edification. It is the aim of this article to examine the idea the words convey rather more closely than we do in our common use of them; to deflate the expression, so to speak, of those gaseous suggestions of “uplift” which too often hang about it. The question involved is, of course, in what sense, if in any, purpose may be attributed to the (...) Cosmos, to the universe in its totality. And we have to ask, in case the term so used should turn out to be really misused, Is it a sheer error that dissolves away under criticism, or is there some valid core of meaning which may be restated in other terms? If these are well-worn questions, yet the problem is too fundamental for them ever to be altogether trite. (shrink)

Contemplating the catastrophic course of the Nazi Revolution we may well find it all too easy to see nothing in the spectacle but the nether darkness made visible; and if we are advised that it is not merely permissible but highly advisable to learn from the enemy, we may be tempted to think that whatever the Nazi war-machine has to teach the strategist and the technician, the political history of Germany in the last decade, and in particular the political ideology (...) that has imposed itself upon the German mind with such apparent thoroughness, can yield only the negative lesson of a warning, by displaying upon the world-wide stage the doomful consequences of wrong principles ruthlessly pushed to their extreme. But it is certainly an error to deny that nothing of more positive value has emerged out of the revolutionary cauldron: and indeed it would be more than strange, where such whole-hearted energies of mind are being enlisted in the evil cause of Nazism, if none of its votaries had ever stumbled for a time into wisdom. (shrink)

Thought-provoking explorations of the relationship between psychoanalysis and Judaism.

Following an earlier paper in the journal in which Evans argued that it was commercial exploitation, not mere payment, that was morally objectionable about certain sorts of organ donation, this paper looks at the moral issues when commercial exploitation is eliminated from systems of paid organ donation. It argues that there are no conclusive moral arguments against such schemes for non-exploitative paid kidney donation.

Philosophical clarity is not simply a matter of style; it affects the quality of the thinking and writing and so the level of intellectual rigor. Achieving maximum clarity requires both intellectual and perceptual skills. The intellectual grasp of what philosophical clarity involves motivates writing with greater clarity. The perceptual skill of seeing exactly what we have written enables such improvement to occur. This paper explains a technique used in graduate-level courses to move both sets of skills, which in turn typically (...) changes the students’ approach to writing and moves their written presentation skills quite dramatically. (shrink)