The publication of Robert Sugden's The Community of Advantage in 2018 might very well turn out to be a landmark event in welfare economics. In the book, Sugden presents a highly original view on wh...

Many contemporary Anglo-American philosophers describe themselves as naturalists. But what do they mean by that term? Popular naturalist slogans like, "there is no first philosophy" or "philosophy is continuous with the natural sciences" are far from illuminating. "Understanding Naturalism" provides a clear and readable survey of the main strands in recent naturalist thought. The origin and development of naturalist ideas in epistemology, metaphysics and semantics is explained through the works of Quine, Goldman, Kuhn, Chalmers, Papineau, Millikan and others. The most (...) common objections to the naturalist project - that it involves a change of subject and fails to engage with "real" philosophical problems, that it is self-refuting, and that naturalism cannot deal with normative notions like truth, justification and meaning - are all discussed. "Understanding Naturalism" distinguishes two strands of naturalist thinking - the constructive and the deflationary - and explains how this distinction can invigorate naturalism and the future of philosophical research. (shrink)

Perhaps the time has finally arrived for a fuller appreciation of Ernst Bloch, the eminent Marxist philosopher of the “not-yet.” At the very least, Wayne Hudson's book will make Bloch's ideas better-known in America, and known in a manner that Bloch himself would have approved. Hudson's incisive and cogent study gives readers an inkling of the diverse and provocative Blochian theories that are there for us to “inherit,” if we can learn to sift the gems of light from the poetical (...) and somewhat esoteric philosopher's pen. Given Bloch's voluminous output and the incredible demands he places on his readers, Hudson's work illuminates a way into and beyond Bloch's ideas. (shrink)

These essays in aesthetics by the philosopher Ernst Bloch belong to the tradition of cultural criticism represented by Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. Bloch's fascination with art as a reflection of both social realities and human dreams is evident in them. Whether he is discussing architecture or detective novels, the theme that drives the work is always the same - the striving for "something better," for a "homeland" that is more socially aware, more humane, more just.The book opens (...) with an illuminating discussion between Bloch and Adorno on the meaning of utopia; then follow 12 essays written between 1930 and 1973, on topics as diverse as aesthetic theory, genres such as music, painting, theater, film, opera, poetry, and the novel, and perhaps most important, popular culture in the form of fairy tales, detective stories, and dime novels.Ernst Bloch was a profoundly original and unorthodox philosopher, social theorist, and cultural critic. The MIT Press has previously published his Natural Law and Human Dignity and his magnum opus, The Principle of Hope. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Fantasy Matters Too MuchJack Zipes (bio)In September 1997 a fairy-tale princess and a holy saint, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa, died within a few days of each other. Millions of people openly and dramatically expressed their grief and mourning. Their pictures along with many different images of Diana and Mother Teresa were beamed all over the world through television and the Internet. The mass media carried all sorts (...) of stories and acclaimed the two of them as the fairy-tale princess and the saint, so that little was left to the imagination. Fantastic spectacle was all that mattered.We speculate with the fantastic. Fantasy is a celebrity and money-making machine. As a module in our brains, it has the capacity to transform plain junk into gold that glitters. Fantasy mobilizes and instrumentalizes the fantastic to form and celebrate spectacles that exist and have always existed—illusions of social relations of exploitation based on power. Spectacles violate and drain our imaginations by glorifying social relations of power that are made spectacular and involve the magic of fetishism. Generally, the results bring about delusion and acclamation of particular sets of social relations that are commodified, sold, and consumed. We acclaim commodities that we don’t know, products that are not of our own making and that we consume mentally and physically. We reproduce images consciously and unconsciously that are not of our own making. The media and the corporate world occupy our psyches and manipulate our fantasies even when we [End Page 77] dream. Our relations are mediated through fantastic spectacle and through fetish abetted by the latest technology that connects us to each other while also disconnecting us from our minds and feelings. Simultaneously, we seek to project our desires in the form of fantasies onto reality and endeavor to occupy a space in which our most profound wishes and desires can be realized. We seek cognition and recognition. In each instance—in the tension between corporate determination of the fantastic and individual projection of desire—we seem to anchor our understanding of reality in artworks dependent on the fantastic, such as the Bible and fairy tales. Hence, Mother Teresa the saint. Diana the fairy-tale princess.It is through fantasy that we have always sought to make sense of the world, not through reason. Reason matters, but fantasy matters more. Perhaps it has mattered too much, and our reliance on fantasy may wear thin and betray us even while it nourishes us and gives us hope that the world can be a better place. We have imagined gods, the kingdom of a single god, the miraculous feats of divine and semidivine characters, and the commandments that have been established to lead us to the good life, if not paradise. It is through the fictive projections of our imaginations based on personal experience that we have sought to grasp, explain, alter, and comment on reality. This is again why such staples as the Bible and the Grimms fairy tales have become canonical texts: unlike reality, they allegedly open the mysteries of life and reveal ways in which we can maintain ourselves and our integrity in a conflict-ridden world. They compensate for the constant violation of nature and life itself and for the everyday violation of our lives engendered through spectacle. They contest reality and also become conflated with reality.But our fantasy and the fantasies that we conceive have become desperate because they are outstripped by real existing conditions that instrumentalize them at every waking second of our day, and even when we slumber. It is a commonplace today that fiction, especially science fiction and what we label fantasy in the world of art, cannot keep pace with the devastating and disturbing fantastic of real occurrences, or what I call the incredible credibility of the real. When the normal is so fantastically abnormal, what role can fantastic artworks play in our lives? Is the violence that we encounter in our everyday lives so much more fantastic than in literature, film, and the arts that we seek to consume the fantastic like harmless junk food as quick fixes and consolation? Can our joys really and realistically... (shrink)

This paper argues that evidential decision theory is incompatible with options having objective values. If options have objective values, then it should always be rationally permissible for an agent to choose an option if they are certain that the option uniquely maximizes objective value. But, as we show, if options have objective values and evidential decision theory is true, then it is not always rationally permissible for an agent to choose an option if they are certain that the option uniquely (...) maximizes objective value. (shrink)

Economists have always recognised that human endeavours are constrained by our limited and uncertain knowledge, but only recently has an accepted theory of uncertainty and information evolved. This theory has turned out to have surprisingly practical applications: for example in analysing stock market returns, in evaluating accident prevention measures, and in assessing patent and copyright laws. This book presents these intellectual advances in readable form for the first time. It unifies many important but partial results into a satisfying single picture, (...) making it clear how the economics of uncertainty and information generalises and extends standard economic analysis. Part One of the volume covers the economics of uncertainty: how each person adapts to a given fixed state of knowledge by making an optimal choice among the immediate 'terminal' actions available. These choices in turn determine the overall market equilibrium reflecting the social distribution of risk bearing. In Part Two, covering the economics of information, the state of knowledge is no longer held fixed. Instead, individuals can to a greater or lesser extent overcome their ignorance by 'informational' actions. The text also addresses at appropriate points many specific topics such as insurance, the Capital Asset Pricing model, auctions, deterrence of entry, and research and invention. (shrink)

The process of dehumanization, or thinking of others as less than human, is a phenomenon with significant societal implications. According to Haslam's model, two concepts of humanness derive from comparing humans with either animals or machines: individuals may be dehumanized by likening them to either animals or machines, or humanized by emphasizing differences from animals or machines. Recent work in cognitive neuroscience emphasizes understanding cognitive processes in terms of interactions between distributed cortical networks. It has been found that reasoning about (...) internal mental states is associated with activation of the default mode network and deactivation of the task positive network ; whereas reasoning about mechanical processes produces the opposite pattern. We conducted two neuroimaging studies. The first examined the neural bases of dehumanization and its relation to these two brain networks, using images and voice-over social narratives which either implicitly contrasted or implicitly likened humans to either animals or machines. The second study addressed a discrepancy between findings from the first study and prior work on the neural correlates of dehumanization: using a design similar to prior work we examined neural responses to pictures of humans, animals and machines, presented without any social context. In both studies, human and humanizing conditions were associated with relatively high activity in the DMN and relatively low activity in the TPN. However, the non-human and dehumanizing conditions deviated in different ways: they demonstrated more marked changes either in the DMN or in the TPN. Notably, differences between the animal dehumanizing and humanizing conditions were most evident in regions associated with mechanistic reasoning, not in the mentalizing network. Conjunction analysis of contrasts from both paradigms revealed that only one region was consistently more active when participants saw human, a medial parietal region regarded as the central hub of the DMN. These findings provide a neural basis for Haslam's distinction between two types of dehumanization, and suggest that the DMN and TPN play opposing roles in creating a sense of moral concern. (shrink)

Ten years ago there was little talk about adding “professionalism” to the medical curriculum. Educators seemed to believe that professionalism was like the studs of a building—the occupants assume them to be present, supporting and defining the space in which they live or work, but no one talks much about them. Similarly, educators assumed that professional values would just “happen,” as trainees spent years working with mentors and role models, as had presumably been the case in the past. To continue (...) the metaphor, when educators did discuss ethics and values, they tended to focus more on external building codes than on the nature of construction materials. Building codes are designed to ensure the public's safety by establishing procedures and standards. Likewise, the “new” bioethics of autonomy and informed consent that entered the medical curriculum in the 1970s and 1980s was oriented primarily toward protecting human rights by codification. In fact, educators explicitly warned students against acting on their personal or professional values in a misguided way—that is, in the absence of adequate ethical constraints, a type of behavior that came to be labeled, pejoratively, as paternalism. (shrink)

entry for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://www.iep.utm.edu/s/smith.htm.

The existence and unity of a discipline called economics reside in the eye and mind of the beholder. The perception of economics's unity and disciplinarity itself arises in some, but not all, of the different schools of thought that we would loosely categorize as economic. Indeed, as we hope to show, the presumption of unity and disciplinarity—the idea that there is a center or “core” of propositions, procedures, and conclusions or a shared historical “object” of theory and practice—is suggested in (...) the concepts and methods of some schools of economic thought, but is opposed by others. Further, we argue that the portrayal of economics as a discipline with distinct boundaries is often a discursive strategy by one school or another to hegemonize the field of economic discourse. In this way, the issue of the existence of an economics discipline and its principles of unity or dispersion is in part a political question. Its effects are felt in the hiring and firing of economics professors and practitioners, the determination of what comprises an economics curriculum, the determination of what is a legitimate economic argument and what is not, the dispensation of public and private grant monies, and the differential entry into or exclusion from ideological, political, and economic centers of power and decision making.Our view is that no discipline of economics exists. Or, rather, no unified discipline exists. The “discipline” of economics is actually an agonistic and shifting field of fundamentally different and often conflicting discourses. The dispersion and divisions that exist between the schools of thought we discuss here as “economic” may have some regularities. But we do not see closer contiguity of these economic schools when placed on a horizontal scale than, to take just one example, among all of the many different "disciplinary" forms of Marxian thought. That is, in our view, Marxian economic thought shares more concepts, approaches, and methods—may have more discursive regularity—with Marxian literary theory than do Marxian economic thought and neoclassical economic theory. Jack Amariglio is associate professor of economics at Merrimack College and the editor of Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture, and Society. He is working on a book entitled Modernism and Postmodernism in Economics with Arjo Klamer. Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff are professors of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Their recent coauthored books are Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy and Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical. (shrink)

This collection of ten original essays was first published in 1977. It engages the 'crisis in sociology' at the most fundamental level of thought and experience. Existential sociology is defined as the study and understanding of all forms of human existence. Without seeking to erect a pristine philosophical sanctuary of its own, Existential Sociology examines and criticizes the underlying philosophical assumptions of previous theories of social science, while elaborating its own approach to human understanding. The contributors are concerned with constructing (...) practical as well as theoretical truths about social life - how we feel, think and act. In contrast to most other sociologies, the emphasis is on the independence and dominance of human feelings over the evaluative and cognitive features of social actions. Students and teachers of sociology and people in related fields interested in the connection between social science and their own subjects will find Existential Sociology useful and absorbing. (shrink)

This essay, and the special issue it introduces, sets out to reignite ethical interrogations of the theory and practice of Human Resource Management (HRM). To cultivate greater levels of boundary-spanning debate about the ethics of HRM, we develop a framework of four tenors for scholarly work: the ethical-declarative, the ethical-subjunctive, the ethical-ethnographic, the ethical-systemic. Each of these tenors denotes particular grounds for ethical critique and encourages scholars to consider the subjects and objects of their enquiry, the disciplinary scope of their (...) work and the limits to subsequent claims about ethics and HRM. We provisionally locate each of the papers comprising the special issue with regard to one, or more, of these tenors. (shrink)

In his 2011 book Justice for Hedgehogs, Ronald Dworkin makes a case for the view that genuine values cannot conflict and, moreover, that they are necessarily mutually supportive. I argue that by prioritizing coherence over the conceptual authenticity of values, Dworkin’s ‘interpretivist’ view risks neglecting what we care about in these values. I first determine Dworkin’s position on the monism/pluralism debate and identify the scope of his argument, arguing that despite his self-declared monism, he is in fact a pluralist, but (...) unusual in denying conflict between plural values. I then set out the structure of his interpretive theory of value relations and present a case of value conflict which I think interpretivism cannot deal with. Following this I argue that there are structural reasons why cases like this are liable to occur and suggest that interpretivism will frequently fail to properly reflect people’s moral commitments because reinterpretation of values has the side effect of excluding important moral commitments from our conceptions of values. While, as Dworkin argues, there are no brute moral facts concerning values, moral psychology constrains the range of acceptable conceptions of values. Given the shortcomings of interpretivism I conclude that we should acknowledge that values may conflict. (shrink)

Deleuze suggests that his work grounds a new conception of the Other–the Other as expression of a possible world, as a structure that precedes any subsequent dialectical mediation, including the master-slave dialectic of social relations. I will argue, however, that the ethico-political injunction that Deleuze derives from his analysis of the 'other-structure' confronts a different problem. It commits Deleuze to either tacitly prescribing a romantic morality of difference that valorizes expressive encounters without 'relations of explication' and any kind of pre-understanding (...) (embodied or otherwise), or his continual flirtations with a mystical 'going beyond' the other-structure must be more than mere flirtations. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that many of the core phenomenological insights, including the emphasis on direct perception, are a necessary but not sufficient condition for an adequate account of inter-subjectivity today. I take it that an adequate account of inter-subjectivity must involve substantial interaction with empirical studies, notwithstanding the putative methodological differences between phenomenological description and scientific explanation. As such, I will need to explicate what kind of phenomenology survives, and indeed, thrives, in a milieu that necessitates engagement with (...) the relevant sciences, albeit not necessarily deference to them. -/- There will be two central aims to this paper: 1. to defend the centrality and vitality of phenomenological treatments of inter-subjectivity via a consideration of some remarks in Sartre - which I do think possess a non-trivial unity amongst the various interlocutors - and the manner in which they in fact serve to provide the basis for a better explanation of an array of empirical data than existing inferentialist or mindreading accounts of social cognition (notably Theory Theory, Simulation Theory, and hybrid versions); 2. to offer the methodological resources for renewing phenomenology in a manner that acknowledges ostensibly non-phenomenological moments in theory production - which involve explanation, inference to the best explanation, etc. - but does not abandon phenomenology for all that, allowing it to be simply absorbed into empirical explanation or other forms of philosophical analysis without remainder. (shrink)

In this chapter, I revisit the question of the philosophical significance of the Great War upon the trajectory of philosophy in the twentieth century. While accounts of this are very rare in philosophy, and this is itself symptomatic, those that are given are also strangely implausible. They usually assert one of two things: that the War had little or no philosophical significance because most of the major developments had already begun, or—at the opposite extreme—they maintain that nothing was ever the (...) same in philosophy (as elsewhere). On the latter view, the creation of the so-called analytic-continental ‘divide’ is but one notable philosophical consequence of the Great War. I want here to steer a middle-way between these positions, both having a grain of truth but over-playing their respective hands. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to investigate appropriate methods for educating students into citizenship within a pluralistic state and to explain why civic education is itself important. In this discussion, I will offer suggestions as to how students might be best prepared for their future political roles as participants in a democracy, and how we, as theorists, ought to structure institutions and curricula in order to ensure that students are adequately trained for political decision making. The paper is divided (...) into six sections. In the first two sections, I argue that community is a learned understanding and that such education,even when it supports liberal commitments,cannot be neutral. I use the social contract tradition as an entrance into the perpetual nature of conflict within a pluralist society. In the third and fourth sections, I develop a pedagogy geared towards educating students into what I call cognitive conflict, and argue that the arts, widely understood, should be privileged over other disciplines. In the fifth section, I examine two difficulties inherent inmy pedagogy — first that it seems to demandthat all perspectives be taught, and second that it seems to promote anxiety among students. In the final section, I ask that political theory reexamine the role of harmony in justice. I conclude that a managed conflictis a more acceptable organizational description of liberal political structures. (shrink)

In this study, we present data on graduate students' actual experiences in dealing with impaired peers and faculty predictions of how students would deal with such situations. A total of 29 faculty and 73 graduate students responded to a survey of 40 randomly selected clinical psychology training programs. Student respondents were almost universally (95%) aware of peers whom they regarded as impaired in their professional functioning, and half (49%) the sample reported being aware of a peer's ethical impropriety. Faculty overestimated (...) the number of students who said they "did nothing" when confronted with the resulting ethical dilemma and underestimated the degree of conflict and turmoil (i.e., anger, frustration, dismay) that students reported experiencing. Faculty also estimated that students would be more concerned with peer loyalty issues, whereas students indicated that they were strongly motivated by ethical considerations. Ethics curricula ought more thoroughly to address affective concerns through experiential learning vehicles such as faculty modeling, simulation exercises, and small-group discussion. (shrink)

I am skeptical of our ability to predict, or even forecast, the future—of human rights or any other important social practice. Nonetheless, an understanding of the paths that have brought us to where we are today can facilitate thinking about the future. Thus, I approach the topic by examining the reshaping of international ideas and practices of state sovereignty and human rights since the end of World War II. I argue that in the initial decades after the war, international society (...) constructed an absolutist conception of exclusive territorial jurisdiction that was fundamentally antagonistic to international human rights. At the same time, though, human rights were for the first time included among the fundamental norms of international society. And over the past two decades, dominant understandings of sovereignty have become less absolutist and more human rights–friendly, a trend that I suggest is likely to continue to develop, modestly, in the coming years. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the purpose of public philosophy, challenging the claim that its goal is to create better citizens. I define public philosophy narrowly as the act of professional philosophers engaging with nonprofessionals, in a non-academic setting, with the specific aim of exploring issues philosophically. The paper is divided into three sections. The first contrasts professional and public philosophy with special attention to the assessment mechanism in each. The second examines the relationship between public philosophy and citizenship, calling (...) into question the effect public philosophy has on political reasoning. The third focuses on the practice of public philosophy, describing actual events to investigate the nature and limits of their outcomes. I conclude that public philosophy aims at future philosophical inquiry but is best considered a form of entertainment. (shrink)

Despite its consistently mild tone, Simon Glendinning’s The Idea of Continental Philosophy is a provocative and uncompromising work. It is to be admired for this. Without “chickening out” (94), Glendinning purports to show that there can be no coherent philosophical understanding of continental philosophy as comprising any sort of distinct or unified tradition. Furthermore, he argues that the vast majority of us working in this so-called tradition actually know this at some level but shy away from this uncomfortable conclusion. This (...) second claim might seem to be readily falsifiable, but Glendinning’s suggestion that we can’t face up to this absence of a unified tradition guards against this. In fact, many of his central arguments rely upon a highly perceptive deconstructive and psychoanalytic understanding of the ‘divide’ between analytic and continental philosophy, which is not surprising given his previous important work on Derrida in Arguing With Derrida (Blackwell 2001) and On Being With Others (Routledge 1998). In what follows, however, I’ll raise some questions about the largely unilateral direction in which his account of the motives for the divide is pursued: analytic philosophy is envisaged as pathologically projecting the internal and unavoidable threat of philosophical failure upon an external ‘continental’ other, much as the foreign policy of successive US administrations has projected an internal threat upon others through rhetoric like the ‘axis of evil’ and ‘rogue states’. I will also contend that Glendinning’s claims regarding the lack of thematic and methodological continuity at work in continental philosophy are overstated. Without denying that there is less of a normative consensus undergirding this polyvocal tradition than is evinced in the analytic tradition, in the second half of the paper I will argue for a ‘quasi-unity’ that revolves around the co-imbrication of methodological considerations and what I characterise as continental philosophy’s ‘temporal turn’. (shrink)

Does Henry Thoreau have a positive politics? Depending on how one conceives of politics, answers will vary. Hannah Arendt famously portrayed Thoreau’s commitment to the sanctity of individual conscience as distinctly unpolitical. More recent commentators grant that Thoreau has a politics, but they characterize it as profoundly negative in character. This essay argues that Thoreau indeed sponsors a positive politics—a politics of performing conscience. The performance of conscience before an audience transforms the invocation of conscience from a personally political act (...) into a publicly political one. The aim of the performance is to provoke one’s neighbors into a process of individual self-reform that will make them capable of properly vigilant democratic citizenship and conscientious political agitation. I establish this claim through a sustained reading of a relatively neglected text that deserves wider attention in political theory: Thoreau’s 1859 lecture defending insurrectionary activities by radical abolitionist John Brown. (shrink)

The phrase sacra mensae appears in only a select number of instances from the first century a.d. onwards. This paper seeks to demonstrate that references to sacra mensae are not coincidental, and that they were employed deliberately by authors such as Valerius Maximus and, after him, Quintilian, Tacitus and Seneca, based on an assumed shared understanding of their significance on the part of Roman audiences. Although it appears across a variety of literary works and in a range of contexts, the (...) phrase does not seem to have been used in reference to a specific rite or rites performed at the table. Instead, sacra mensae appears to have been used primarily in a metaphorical sense, designed to epitomize the customs and respect attached to dining in Roman culture. Religion certainly played an important part in creating the aura surrounding the table, which was subject to various rituals and superstitions that were discussed by ancient authors. However, beyond the sphere of religion there was the equally important social emphasis on dining, which enforced notions of conviviality and personal obligation between hosts and guests. Disregard of such traditions came to be identified as a hallmark of tyranny, which provided the writers of the Principate with an opportunity to use the sacra mensae as a powerful literary device against those who failed to respect established customs of hospitality. (shrink)

‘Without exaggeration and oversimplification little progress is made in most fields of humanistic investigation.’ With this disarming quotation from A. D. Nock, Albert Henrichs begins his book-length interpretation of P. Colon, inv. 3328. In the same spirit of humanistic progress, I would like to reconsider some aspects of the text and to offer a different assessment of its place in the history of religion and literature.The fragments are from three pages of a hitherto unknown Greek novel, Lollianos'Phoinikika. Frags A and (...) B luckily include book-ends, from whose subscriptions we know the author and title of the work. Frag. C is just scraps which yield no continuous sense. Frag. A brokenly and confusedly mentions youths, women dancing, being thrown off the roof, sobriety, kissing, and then, in a slightly more intelligible scene, the male narrator's loss of virginity with a woman named Persis, her gift to him of a gold necklace which he refuses, the assistance of one Glauketes in taking the necklace elsewhere, and finally what seems to be a confrontation between Persis' mother and the two lovers. This last is similar to Achilles Tatius ii 23–5. Achilles Tatius also offers the closest parallel to frag. B, a ghastly description of human sacrifice and cannibalism. This scene is the focus of most of Henrichs' interpretation and I will limit myself to it in the present article.The central question raised by this new novel fragment is how to assess the relative importance of religious and literary parallels. Is thePhoinikikato be regarded as a document in religious or in literary history, or perhaps somewhere on the borderland of both? There has been a lively discussion in the last half century of the thesis that the ancient novels were written and read as religious documents, deriving their basic structure and many details from the myths and cults of particular religions. Henrichs devotes most of his book to arguing that the sacrifice scene in Lollianos is inspired by an actual rite, probably of a Dionysian character, and that thePhoinikikaserves to illuminate a little-known corner of religious history. His views are based on an extensive collection of liturgical, mythical and ethnological parallels concerning oath rituals, the sacrifice of children, cannibalism, and face-painting. Of all the parallels cited, the two which are closest in every way to Lollianos are Achilles Tatius iii 15 and Cassius Dio lxxi 4. On the strength of these Henrichs asserts that Lollianos' description of a ritual murder represents, more or less directly, the cultic practice of the Egyptian Boukoloi. Without postulating a religious message for thePhoinikikaas a whole, Henrichs does claim that this scene yields valuable information about the structure of ancient mystery rituals and that these new fragments support the methodological correctness of Kerenyi's and Merkelbach's approach to the ancient novels. (shrink)

This paper first explains why the charge of self-refutation against extreme relativism is so important and then defends extreme relativism against two of the most recent and most sophisticated accusations of self-refutation. It is shown that these accusations seem plausible only because they illicitly employ principles appropriate only to absolute truth; hence these accusations are unsound. One central topic of discussion in the paper is the relation between "a believes that p" and "p is true for a".

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work is commonly associated with the philosophical movement called existentialism and its intention to begin with an analysis of the concrete experiences, perceptions, and difficulties, of human existence. However, he never propounded quite the same extreme accounts of radical freedom, being-towards-death, anguished responsibility, and conflicting relations with others, for which existentialism became both famous and notorious in the 1940s and 1950s. Perhaps because of this, he did not initially receive the same amount of attention as his French contemporaries (...) and friends, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. These days though, his phenomenological analyses are arguably being given more attention than either, in both France and in the Anglo-American context, because they retain an ongoing relevance in fields as diverse as cognitive science, medical ethics, ecology, sociology and psychology. Although it is difficult to summarize Merleau-Ponty’s work into neat propositions, we can say that he sought to develop a radical re-description of embodied experience (with a primacy given to studies of perception), and argued that these phenomena could not be suitably understood b y the philosophical tradition because of its tendency to drift between two flawed and equally unsatisfactory alternatives: empiricism and, what he called, intellectualism. This article will seek to explain his understanding of perception, bodily movement, habit, ambiguity, and relations with others, as they were expressed in his key early work, Phenomenology of Perception, before exploring the enigmatic ontology of the chiasm and the flesh that is so evocatively described in his unfinished book, The Visible and the Invisible. (shrink)