This is a review of the 2015 Princeton edition of The Praise of Folly.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE INSCRUTABILITY O:F MORAL EVIL IN KANT ((W:HENCE COMETH EVIL?" Late in his career, Immanuel Kant would turn his attention to this perennial question with an elaborate account of " radical evil " in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. His discussion produced consternation among his admirers, such as Goethe, and continues to produce puzzlement among his commentators. Among the chief difficulties facing the modern-day interpreter has been (...) the welter of complex terminology tossed up by Kant's attempts to tame his topic. The Kant specialist can justifiably suppose that if only he or she could un-scramble the terminology, grasp the intended interconnections among the terms, and set the discussion within the context of the entire critical philosophy, the result would be a reasonably clear view of Kant's theory of the nature and source of moral evil. There is of course some justification to this vaguely masochistic approach to the matter, yet such an approach, I fear, leads inevitably to frustration. This is because, despite all the appearances to the contrary, Kant never really explains moral evil in the discussion of radical evil in Religion. To be sure, he offers a definition of what moral evil is, by the terms of his philosophy. Nevertheless, he never really accounts for evil, nor does he offer anything remotely approaching an answer to my opening question. The deepest part of Kant's analysis is not a response to that question, but a link between moral evil and human freedom, and this link is utterly inexplicable, for the same reason that freedom itself is, for Kant, ultimately inexplicable. Thus, by this reading of the theory of radical evil, we are not finally led to comprehend Kant's view of evil. Instead, we are 246 THE INSCRUTABILITY OF MORAL EVIL IN KANT 247 reminded of the contingent nature of the exercise of freedom, the unfathomable quality of the process of character-building, and, finally, the sheer inscrutability of moral evil itself. Kant is theorizing about human nature in a way that gradually discloses the futility of domesticating this topic conceptually or rationally. This point is worth stressing, partly because of certain stereotypes that persist regarding the things Kant's philosophy supposedly renders in rational form. And, obviously, the point can be stressed in the present context by pursuing further the notion that moral evil is, for Kant, inscrutable. The inscrutability of moral evil does not pop into view all at once, for Kant's discussion in Religion is set in the context of a complex account of the structure of the will, the nature of the incentives capable of determining the will, and the issue of freedom. Consequently, in what follows I shall attempt to trace the Kantian line of thought lying behind his agnosticism regarding the source of moral evil. -IFor Kant, moral evil resides in a maxim.1 A maxim is for him a special kind of principle, one which guides or informs actionin effect, a "practical principle." The very idea of a maxim is a key element in Kant's efforts to determine how reason can be practical. Discourse about maxims is Kant's way of accounting for those practical principles by which we actually do act, instead of only those principles by which we ought ideally to act.2 In effect, a maxim is the guiding principle that I could state to myself were I to reflect upon the overall policy determining a given act (" I should enrich myself by whatever 1 Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, ed. W. Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), p. 6*7. English translation, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), p. 17. Hereafter referred to as Religion, followed by page numbers in both Weischedel and Greene/Hudson, with all translations taken from the latter. 2 Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. trans. Lewis White Beeck, (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950), pp. 17 n.l, 38 n.9. Q48 GORDON E. MICHALSON means possible," " I should at all times tell the truth "). This distinction between guiding principles by which we actually do... (shrink)

(2003). Intellectuals for our times. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 6, The Public Role of Intellectuals, pp. 33-50. doi: 10.1080/1369823042000241258.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1896 Edition.

"A major transformation in thought took place during the Southern Sung (1127-1279). A new version of Confucian teaching, Tao-hsueh Confucianism (what modern scholars sometimes refer to as Neo-Confucianism), became state orthodoxy, a privileged status which it retained until the twentieth century." "Existing studies of the new Confucianism generally depict a single line of development to and from Chu Hsi (1130-1200), the greatest theoretician of the tradition. In this study of unprecedented scope, however, Hoyt Cleveland Tillman offers an integrated intellectual (...) history of the development of Tao-hsueh Confucianism which for the first time places Chu Hsi within the context of his contemporaries. Tillman's methodological strategy allows a rich, complex picture of the Tao-hsueh movement to emerge - one that is sure to transform the field of Sung Confucianism." "To reconstruct the evolution of the Tao-hsueh group, Tillman studies a number of Confucians from four distinct periods, reflecting the basic diversity that existed among them. His discussion is deeply grounded in political and philosophical history and in research on the social networks that joined the members of the Tao-hsueh group. Within this framework, he provides a vivid account of the changing scope of the movement, tracing its development into a "fellowship" and at times a political faction and demonstrating its movement from diversity to gradually increasing exclusiveness, particularly under the influence of Chu Hsi. Close attention is given to confrontational writings and debates within the group, which covered such issues as humaneness, the function of the mind, uses of the Book of Changes, social welfare programs, teaching methods, expediency, and the grounds for knowledge and authority." "A superbly erudite work, Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi's Ascendancy is an invaluable contribution to the study of the history of Confucian thought in China."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

本书探讨朱熹的思维世界,它不但是思想史的研究,并注意的社会背景,因此也可以说是思想史与社会史交互为用的研究。.

Maung argues that an externalist understanding of mental disorder exposes how, if society was more just for the most deprived, patterns of access to assisted dying might be different. I counter that reducing inequality lacks relevance to the immediate permissibility of assisted dying for mental disorder, owing to the need for solutions for those in distress. I suggest that the question of assistance in death for mental disorders is one of pragmatic politics, not for obfuscatory philosophy.

In this essay, I shall scold a Jinn, recommend a position in Islamic theology to my Muslim neighbors, explore a famous dilemma recounted in Genesis, and participate in a debate occasioned by an interpretive puzzle in Kierkegaard studies. I investigate two opposed ways of understanding the phrase, ‘the teleological suspension of the ethical’, offer some critical remarks on the interpretation of that phrase in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, and defend a range of considerations that speak in favor of one of (...) the options over the other. Finally, I show how one may invoke my preferred interpretation to confront the puzzle common to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theology presented by the story of Abraham and the binding of Isaac and also how a related strategy can be invoked to address the story of Iblis and the puzzle peculiar to Islamic theology to which it gives rise. (shrink)

Women's participation in traditional religions is often explained in terms of their victimization and/or their opportunities for empowerment. This paper seeks to use Mormon women as a framework in order to explore some of the consequences of this phenomenon and to advocate for the creation of multiple, complex spaces where traditional religious women may be understood beyond the paradigm of victim/empowerment. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise known as the LDS or Mormons, maintains a cosmology that is (...) based upon highly differentiated gendered practices. A belief in a female deity, Mother in Heaven, and a related belief that all pious Mormon men and women have the ability to become gods and goddesses in a post-mortal existence are central to the Mormon gendered cosmology. Despite these beliefs, Mormon women generally resist feminism because they perceive feminism to be at odds with motherhood and family. Ironically, their belief in a female divine and their potential divinity strengthens their commitment to interdependence through maternal practices and kinship. (shrink)

Recently, many scientists have become concerned about an excessive number of failures to reproduce statistically significant effects. The situation has become dire enough that the situation has been named the ‘reproducibility crisis’. After reviewing the relevant literature to confirm the observation that scientists do indeed view replication as currently problematic, I explain in philosophical terms why the replication of empirical phenomena, such as statistically significant effects, is important for scientific progress. Following that explanation, I examine various diagnoses of the reproducibility (...) crisis, and argue that for the majority of scientists the crisis is due, at least in part, to a form of publication bias. This conclusion sets the stage for an assessment of the view that evidential relations in science are inherently value-laden, a view championed by Heather Douglas and Kevin Elliott. I argue, in response to Douglas and Elliott, and as motivated by the meta-scientific resistance scientists harbour to a publication bias, that if we advocate the value-ladenness of science the result would be a deepening of the reproducibility crisis. (shrink)

Wattpad is a popular online writing website in which individuals write, upload, and comment on original stories. In 2020, the platform had more than a hundred million registered users. In this article, we use a mixture of close and distant reading methods to study how lay authors wrote about the COVID-19 global pandemic during its first year. We examine some of the formal and generic norms these authors used to narrativize this event; how such norms evolved over time as the (...) pandemic dragged on; and how these online COVID stories differ from more established online genres, such as mystery and romance. Overall, this article explores how a large reading and writing public, leveraging the novel affordances of user generated content, came to respond to a massive social crisis in real time, before they knew how it would end. This exploration allows us to accomplish two things. First, we are able to situate real-time pandemic stories against the retrospective narratives that we expect from literary fiction. How does writing crisis in real time and in a collaborative mode produce its own unique plot and narrative structures, and how do stories written in the immediate wake of the pandemic anticipate later mainstream cultural productions (fiction, film, television)? Second, we gain a broader understanding of how new genres of writing emerge within a cultural ecosystem increasingly defined by generic predictability and the recycling of familiar cultural intellectual property (IP), such as The Avengers and Harry Potter. COVID-19 dramatically disrupted global economic, political, and health systems. How did it also disrupt cultural systems? (shrink)

I believe the material should be utilized as supplemental data for exploring Ch'en Liang's intellectual development.Ch'en's thought evolved through a tao-hsueh ...

A biography of the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher whose revolutionary methods of reasoning greatly influenced future scientific thinking.

Since Alasdair MacIntyre’s landmark book After Virtue, there has been renewed interest in the role of the virtues in the moral life and attention paid to reappropriating the Aristotelian notion of "practice." Recent reappropriations of the virtues and virtue theory in medical ethics have contributed to conceiving more adequately the nature of good medicine. I wish to explore some of these insights and the special relevance the notion of practice has in an account of good medicine. Yet, I also want (...) to suggest that much remains to be done. This renewed attention to the virtues needs to be supplemented by a similar reappropriation and transposition of the notion of nature in order to navigate successfully the Dardanelles of an ahistorical essentialism and the Bosphorus of a historical relativism. (shrink)

This paper addresses the gap between familiar popular narratives describing Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as the trope of the killer robot, and the realistic near-future implications of machine intelligence and automation for technology policy and society. The authors conducted a series of interviews with technologists, science fiction writers, and other experts, as well as a workshop, to identify a set of key themes relevant to the near future of AI. In parallel, they led the analysis of almost 100 recent works (...) of science fiction stories with AI themes to develop a preliminary taxonomy of AI in science fiction. These activities informed the commissioning of six original works of science fiction and non-fiction response essays on the themes of “intelligence” and “justice” that were published as part of the Slate Future Tense Fiction series in 2019 and 2020. Our findings indicate that artificial intelligence remains deeply ambiguous both in the policy and cultural contexts: we struggle to define the boundaries and the agency of machine intelligence, and consequently find it difficult to govern or interact with such systems. However, our findings also suggest more productive avenues of inquiry and framing that could foster both better policy and better narratives around AI. (shrink)

: What philosophical and historical insights might be gained by juxtaposing and linking two distinct areas of Zhu Xi's comments, those on guishen (conventionally glossed as ghosts or spirits) and those on the transmission and succession of the Way (daotong)? There is considerable evidence that he regarded canonical rites for ancestors and teachers as insufficiently satisfying, and thus he sought enhanced communion with the dead. His statements about spirits and especially his prayers to Confucius' spirit served to enhance his confidence (...) that he had gained the transmission of Confucius' dao and that nothing being passed down to him had been lost. In the rituals and prayers to Confucius, Zhu Xi also projected himself as mediator between his students and Confucius' spirit. After hearing such prayers and participating in the ritual sacrifices, Zhu's students would become more convinced of his special status in the transmission of the Way. This inquiry into these spiritual and philosophical issues ultimately demonstrates the compelling importance of Zhu's practical concerns. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Benjamin I. Schwartz (1916-1999)Hoyt Cleveland TillmanBenjamin Sadie Schwartz was born on December 12, 1916,1 to Hyman and Jennie Weinberg Schwartz. In the wake of the Depression, this struggling family moved from the immigrant section of East Boston (near what became Logan Airport) to Orchestra, a working-class section of the city. Ben's intelligence and dedication to learning earned him the opportunity to study at Boston Latin, the city's premier (...) high school for talented youths, and he won a scholarship to attend Harvard College in 1934. Because the collegiate life of Harvard's house system was inaccessible to him, Ben commuted daily from home and ate his sack lunches with the other "townies" on the steps outside the buildings in Harvard Yard. The nationalizing experiences of being Jewish and poor surely enhanced his sensitivity to tensions within cultures and sharpened the critical edge of his reflections on elites and their ideologies. Moreover, his own experiences enabled an empathy with economically and culturally disadvantaged students, for he generously extended himself especially to such students during his long teaching career at Harvard, from 1950 through 1987. Indeed, his office door was always open to students, and no one needed an appointment to come to discuss ideas with him. Furthermore, his critical concerns about contemporary trends in society and polity continued to be central to his life as an engaged intellectual even after he had retired from formal teaching duties.After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1938 with a major in Romance Languages and Literatures, he went on to earn a master's degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1940. Unable to find a regular teaching position, he worked as a substitute teacher. Blessed with an enduring and profound spirituality, he considered becoming a rabbi. World War II intervened to change his life. Serving as a cryptanalyst from 1942 to 1946 in the Signal Corps, he decoded Japanese military cables; and he worked in 1946-1947 as a censor of the Japanese press during the beginning phase of the American Occupation. He rose to the rank of captain. With the educational benefits extended to veterans, he returned to Harvard, where he initially sought to focus on Buddhism, but his professors discouraged him on the grounds that the field required too many Asian languages for someone to begin in his thirties. He was admonished to focus on modern China, for that field required only that he supplement the Japanese language, which he had gained during his military service, with a reading knowledge of Chinese. He threw himself enthusiastically into reading both modern Chinese and what he referred to as "outbidding classical Chinese" because he loved to read texts to explore cultures and encounter peoples. Within less than three years, he not only earned a master's [End Page 183] in East Asian Studies and a Ph.D. in History and Far Eastern Languages but also became, in 1950, a Harvard instructor in history and government. Rising quickly through the ranks, he was promoted to assistant professor in 1951, associate professor in 1956, and professor in 1960. Moreover, he became widely regarded as "the scholar's scholar" at Harvard's East Asian Research Center.His first book, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Harvard University Press, 1951), was a revised version of his doctoral dissertation. Modern China scholars have in later years hailed this pioneering work for going against the tide of American political assumptions about Soviet Russian control of the communist movement in China. He demonstrated that Mao had defied Soviet orders and deviated from Soviet plans in struggling to gain power in China; furthermore, Ben also suggested that communism was devolving through expansion. Establishing an intellectual orientation that informed his later work, Ben was also using texts from a movement to explore the conscious life of leading figures and their personalities in the context of concrete historical circumstances and contingencies in order to determine how ideas related to actions. Providing translated texts for others to join the exploration of the interaction between ideology and behavior, he was one of three compilers of A Documentary History of Chinese Communism (Harvard, 1952). He... (shrink)

Le texte de Hailey est une présentation didactique des 10 principes de justice handie du collectif Sins Invalid. Ceux-ci ont été rédigés en 2015, dans un contexte nord-américain où les milieux de justice sociale peinaient à considérer les effets combinés du racisme et du validisme systémique.

This edited volume presents critical scholarship analysing governance practices in diverse jurisdictions in Europe and North America, at multiple scales, and in relation to several different arenas of policy and practice. The contributors address shortcomings in the mainstream literature on governance within the discipline of political science. The volume as a whole is marked by geographical and topical diversity. However, what the individual chapters have in common is that each considers whether and how gender, racialized identity, and/or other axes of (...) marginalization are visible within the conceptualizations and/or practices of governance under discussion. Drawing together insights and conceptual tools from both feminist and post-structuralist frameworks in analysing governance practices, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and graduates who engage with feminist and/or post-structural analysis of policy and governance. It will also be of use to critical policy scholars in anthropology, geography, sociology, and women's studies. (shrink)

ExcerptThe humanities are currently under pressure from vocational studies and electronic technologies. The more education is mechanized and corporatized, the less room there is often thought to be for the Bildung that the modern humanities aimed to impart. At the same time, radical critiques of the neoliberal university have appeared, implicating it in colonial practices, racism, and the promotion of casteism, hierarchy, and inequality. Currently there are major schisms between defenders of the traditional humanities and advocates of technologically based higher (...) education, advocates of radically politicized higher education, and advocates of entirely vocational training, which dispenses with the humanities altogether. (shrink)

A short philosophical narrative about an angel wrestling with the decision to rebel against God and leave his post in the Garden of Eden.

Our paper contributes to emerging management research on the effects of societal inequality. It aims to study the relationship between societal-level inequality and perceived unequal HR practices within organizations based on relationships which we term “relation-based inequality” (RBI). We further examine the moderating effect of country corruption on the RBI-employee commitment link. Thus, whereas previous research has looked at single countries, there is still much to know about societal effects of inequality and corruption on employee perceptions and attitudes at work (...) across countries. By surveying 691employees from five countries and using country-level indicators we take a first step in this direction, and establish that inequality (income, health and education) is linked to higher levels of relation-based HR practices. We also show that the effect of RBI is different for continuance, affective and normative commitment, and contingent on country corruption levels. (shrink)

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion.

A Dialogue between Kukai and John Scotus EriugenaThe Japanese philosopher and calligrapher Kukai (774–835), founder of esoteric Shingon Buddhism, talks to John Scotus Eriugena (800–877), an Irish philosopher and the author of The Division of Nature, who held that nature includes the things that are and the things that are not.

There have been and continue to be disagreements about how to consider the traditional square of opposition and the traditional inferences of obversion, conversion, contraposition and inversion from the perspective of contemporary quantificational logic. Philosophers have made many different attempts to save traditional inferences that are invalid when they involve empty classes. I survey some of these attempts and argue that the only satisfactory way of saving all the traditional inferences is to make the existential assumption that both the subject (...) and predicate classes and their complement classes are non-empty for all the propositions we admit. I briefly indicate the room for continued controversy over how properly to interpret Aristotle?s statements regarding these inferences, but find some plausibility in the views of Manley Thompson and A.N.Prior that Aristotle had in mind a particular arrangement of existential import unfamiliar to most contemporary logicians. (shrink)