George Du Maurier’s best-selling novel, Trilby (1894), is as important because of its defiance of social and cultural norms as it is for its apparent compliance with them. Trilby is a fiction that, like its eponymous heroine, attempts to negotiate the perilously fine line between the highbrow and the lowbrow, or to put it another way, between fine art and political commentary on one side, and pornography and sensationalism on the other. This article examines the way that Du Maurier engages (...) his readership in this textual tease – his seduction of the reader – by suggesting the possibility of a peep show where everything that Victorian respectability abhors may be on display, and then his narratological dressing of the text, to ensure that where there is sexual non-conformity there is also moralism, and where there is social confrontation there is also historical distance. Understanding the textual appeal of Trilby as a character, the artist’s model who enchanted the fin-de-siècle reading public, is essential to appreciating how the discourses of pornography and fine art interact and have consequently evolved. This article therefore examines why Trilby succeeded with the Victorians where other, similarly sexually active heroines – such as Thomas Hardy’s Sue Bridehead – failed. Trilby the novel and Trilby the woman are both broken down by their author into manageable parts, a pornographic fetishistic technique that simultaneously eroticises, and makes more palatable, the textual and the physical bodies. (shrink)

Purpose This paper aims to formalize long-term trajectories of human civilization as a scientific and ethical field of study. The long-term trajectory of human civilization can be defined as the path that human civilization takes during the entire future time period in which human civilization could continue to exist. -/- Design/methodology/approach This paper focuses on four types of trajectories: status quo trajectories, in which human civilization persists in a state broadly similar to its current state into the distant future; catastrophe (...) trajectories, in which one or more events cause significant harm to human civilization; technological transformation trajectories, in which radical technological breakthroughs put human civilization on a fundamentally different course; and astronomical trajectories, in which human civilization expands beyond its home planet and into the accessible portions of the cosmos. -/- Findings Status quo trajectories appear unlikely to persist into the distant future, especially in light of long-term astronomical processes. Several catastrophe, technological transformation and astronomical trajectories appear possible. -/- Originality/value Some current actions may be able to affect the long-term trajectory. Whether these actions should be pursued depends on a mix of empirical and ethical factors. For some ethical frameworks, these actions may be especially important to pursue. (shrink)

Forgiveness theorists focus a good deal on explicating the content of what they take to be a shared folk concept of forgiveness. Our empirical research, however, suggests that there is a range of concepts of forgiveness present in the population, and therefore that we should be folk conceptual pluralists about forgiveness. We suggest two possible responses on the part of forgiveness theorists: (1) to deny folk conceptual pluralism by arguing that forgiveness is a functional concept and (2) to accept folk (...) conceptual pluralism and focus on a revisionary conceptual ethics project. (shrink)

Anyone who aims to translate Hegel into readable English should bear in mind what he said in an early essay, viz. that before the living spirit which dwells in a philosophy can reveal itself it must be brought to birth by a kindred spirit. His approach to Hegel will therefore be sympathetic and in order to grasp the full import of what he is saying will try to think along with him, will try to become, as G.R.G. Mure said, an (...) actor in the dialectic. Then Hegel will be no more difficult to read in English than in German. The difficulties associated with his style and terminology are, in my opinion, exaggerated. Professor James Doull rightly says that just because Hegel’s terminology is thoroughly systematic, it is intelligible directly in a given passage to one who is at home in it. Differences in vocabulary and syntax are no barrier to the adequate expression of philosophic truth. In this connection it would be interesting and perhaps amusing if we could have Hegel’s comments on the biassed views of his Dutch disciple G.J.P.J. Bolland who founded a Hegelian school in Leiden at the beginning of this century. In a collection of his sayings occurs the following: “Honour to whom honour is due. Great is the spirit of Hegel - but in-the first decade of the twentieth century pure reason speaks the language of Holland and Bolland.” In a correspondence with Francis Sedlak in 1911 he stated that “even the language of Hegel is inferior to Dutch” and referred to English as a “semi-barbarous language in which the finest things cannot be said.”. (shrink)

The first edition of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline appeared in 1817, followed by a second, much enlarged edition in 1827, and a third, somewhat less expanded edition in 1830. For this review it will first be necessary to recount the complex publishing history of these editions, a history which is perhaps not familiar to all readers of The Owl. After Hegel’s death his students prepared two editions of his Werke. The second of these editions was the (...) basis of the Sämtliche Werke: Jubiläumsausgabe, which appeared in 1927-40 under the editorship of Hermann Glockner. The 1817 Encyclopedia was first reprinted as volume 6 of the Jubiläumsausgabe. The first of the above books here under review contains the first published translation into English of the entire 1817 Encyclopedia, as well as the first published English translation of Hegel’s 1828 review, “Solger’s Posthumous Writings and Correspondence,” both of which are preceded in this book by a reprint of A. V. Miller’s 1977 translation of the famous Preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807. Since 1968, under the general editorship of Otto Pöggeler and Friedhelm Nicolin, individual volumes of the excellent Gesammelte Werke have been published by Felix Meiner Verlag. Their edition of the 1817 Encyclopedia, edited by Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Hans-Christian Lucas, is still under preparation, but their first German re-edition of the 1827 Encyclopedia, also edited by Bonsiepen and Lucas, appeared as volume 19 in 1989. No translation into English of this second edition has ever appeared. (shrink)

The rejection of a “characterless” moral self is central to some of Bernard Williams’ most important contributions to philosophy. By the time of Truth and Truthfulness, he works instead with a model of the self constituted and stabilized out of more primitive materials through deliberation and in concert with others that takes inspiration from Diderot. Although this view of the self raises some difficult questions, it serves as a useful starting point for thinking about the process of developing an authentic (...) moral point of view in the context of contemporary living. In what follows, I begin to fill out and extend this picture of the self and its related notion of authenticity by exploring some of the “technologies of the self” at play in Rachel Cusk’s recent work (primarily, the Outline trilogy, Coventry, Second Place, and “The Stuntman”) that ask us to rethink the possibility and importance of stability; seek a way of constituting oneself and one’s values outside the confining structures of traditional narrative (focusing instead on a framework that might be provided by the visual arts); and give a different role to the sort of internalized other Williams sees as being at work in the mechanisms of shame. (shrink)

Original and penetrating, this book investigates of the notion of inference from signs, which played a central role in ancient philosophical and scientific method. It examines an important chapter in ancient epistemology: the debates about the nature of evidence and of the inferences based on it--or signs and sign-inferences as they were called in antiquity. As the first comprehensive treatment of this topic, it fills an important gap in the histories of science and philosophy.

Annalisa Coliva (Int J Study Skept 10(3–4):346–366, 2020) asks, “Are there mathematical hinges?” I argue here, against Coliva’s own conclusion, that there are. I further claim that this affirmative answer allows a case to be made for taking the concept of a hinge to be a useful and general-purpose tool for studying mathematical practice in its real complexity. Seeing how Wittgenstein can, and why he would, countenance mathematical hinges additionally gives us a deeper understanding of some of his latest thoughts (...) on mathematics. For example, a view of how mathematical hinges relate to Wittgenstein’s well-known river-bed analogy enables us to see how his way of thinking about mathematics can account nicely for a “dynamics of change” within mathematical research—something his philosophy of mathematics has been accused of missing (e.g., by Robert Ackermann (Wittgenstein’s city, The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1988) and Mark Wilson (Wandering significance: an essay on conceptual behavior, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006). Finally, the perspective on mathematical hinges ultimately arrived at will be seen to provide us with illuminating examples of how our conceptual choices and theories can be ungrounded but nevertheless the right ones (in a sense to be explained). (shrink)

The Latin word "Docilitas" in the title of this book means the willingness and capacity we have of being able to learn something we did not know. It has not the same connotation as "learning," which is what happens to us when we are taught something. Docility also means our recognition that we do not know many things, that we need the help of others, wiser than we are, to learn most of what we know, though we can discover a (...) few things by or own experience. This book contains some sixteen chapters, each of which was given to an audience in some college or university setting. They consider what it is to teach, what to read, reading places, libraries, and class rooms. They look upon the duties of a teacher or professor as mostly a delight, because the truth should delight us. In Another Sort of Learning, the subject of what a student "owes" his teacher came up. Here, we look at the other side of the question, what does a teacher or professor "do"? But a professor cannot teach unless there is someone willing to be taught, someone willing to recognize that he needs guidance and help. Yet, the end of teaching is not just the "transfer" of what is in the mind of the professor to the mind of the student. It is when both, student and teacher, behold, reflect on, and see the same truth of things that are. This common "seeing" is the read adventure in which student and teacher share something neither "owns." Knowledge and truth are free, but each requires our different insights and approaches so that we can finally realize what "teaching" and "being taught" mean to us. (shrink)

This review considers Semantic Syntax and Slavic Transformational Syntax particularly in the light of their contributions to the theory of grammar. Semantic Syntax is shown to have a polemical bias against the Aspects model and toward generative semantics. Its editor's position in the constellation of semantic logicians is defined; pro-Chomskian objections to the logical-cognitive semantic theory are advanced. Slavic Transformational Syntax is comprised of essays with a wide range of theoretical stances; the insights of the radical case grammar of (...) class='Hi'>James Miller are compared with those of Semantic Syntax. Remarks on deixis by Richard Brecht are discussed in relationship to semantic-logic approaches. Certain similarities of Jakobsonian functionalism and generative semantics are discussed. (shrink)

In 1973, Rittel and Webber coined the term ‘wicked problems’, which they viewed as pervasive in the context of social and policy planning.1 Wicked problems have 10 defining characteristics: they are not amenable to definitive formulation; it is not obvious when they have been solved; solutions are not true or false, but good or bad; there is no immediate, or ultimate, test of a solution; every implemented solution is consequential, it leaves traces that cannot be undone; there are no criteria (...) to prove that all potential solutions have been identified and considered; every wicked problem is essentially unique; every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem; a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways and the choice of explanation determines what will count as a solution and the actors are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate.1 One needs only a passing familiarity with the history of HIV prevention research, and with the intellectual traditions of research ethics, to appreciate that the perils and opportunities arising from proposals to conduct research with people who inject drugs in some of the most precarious social and political circumstances around the world and the challenges associated with implementing the findings satisfy Rittel's and Webber's criteria for ‘wicked problems’. HIV prevention research has contributed important new knowledge about the feasibility, efficacy or relative efficacy of various prevention strategies in a variety of contexts around the world. But the pathways and timelines for how this knowledge has contributed to improvements in public health practice and/or the establishment of policies that ensure unfettered access to appropriate healthcare services for PWID are less clear and decidedly non-linear. One account of the transition from trial to policy …. (shrink)

In 1973, Rittel and Webber coined the term ‘wicked problems’, which they viewed as pervasive in the context of social and policy planning. 1 Wicked problems have 10 defining characteristics: they are not amenable to definitive formulation; it is not obvious when they have been solved; solutions are not true or false, but good or bad; there is no immediate, or ultimate, test of a solution; every implemented solution is consequential, it leaves traces that cannot be undone; there are no (...) criteria to prove that all potential solutions have been identified and considered; every wicked problem is essentially unique; every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem; a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways and the choice of explanation determines what will count as a solution and the actors are liable... (shrink)

In The Life of the Mind, Georgetown University's James V. Schall takes up the task of reminding us that, as human beings, we naturally take a special delight and pleasure in simply knowing. Because we have not only bodies but also minds, we are built to know what is. In this volume, Schall, author of On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, among many other volumes of philosophical and political reflection, discusses the various ways of approaching the delight of thinking (...) and the way that this delight begins in seeing and hearing and even in making and walking. We must be attentive to and cultivate the needs of the mind, argues Schall, for it is through our intellect that all that is not ourselves is finally returned to us, allowing us to live in the light of truth. (shrink)

This is an excellent collection of critical essays on Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice. David Miller provides a comprehensive and lucid introduction to Walzer’s views on justice, and Walzer offers a brief—perhaps too brief—response to his critics. Contributors are drawn from philosophy, political science, and sociology, and include Judith Andre, Richard Arneson, Brian Barry, Joseph Carens, Jon Elster, Amy Gutmann, David Miller, Susan Moller Okin, Michael Rustin, Adam Swift, and Jeremy Waldron.

A collection of Fr. James Schall's recent essays, Political Philosophy and Revelation offers a learned, erudite, and coherent statement on the relationship between reason and revelation in the modern world. It addresses political philosophy in the context of an awareness of other humane and practical sciences, including history, literature, economics, theology, ethics and metaphysics.

The Politics of Heaven and Hell makes an invaluable contribution to the understanding of classical, medieval, and modern political philosophy, while explaining the profound problem with modernity. Christianity 'freed men from the overwhelming burden of ever thinking that their salvation will ultimately come from the political order', writes Fr. James Schall, S.J. Modernity, on the other hand, is a perversion of Christianity, which tries to achieve man's salvation in this world. It does this by politicizing everything, which results in (...) the absolute state: 'The distance from the City of God to the Leviathan is not at all far once the City of God is relocated on earth.' The best defense against this tyranny is 'the adequate description of the highest things, of what is beyond politics'"--Inside jacket. (shrink)

This work presents an annotated text of the most comprehensive and detailed arguments in Erasmus's conflict with the Catholic, conservative, scholastic theologians, the _Declarationes_. It also shows the contrast between the scholastic/logical and the humanist/rhetorical approach to Scripture and to theological questions.

What is real and what is noble, as well as what is deranged and wrong, can often be stated briefly. Nietzsche was famous for his succinct aphorisms and epigrams. Aquinas in one of his responses could manage to state clearly what he held to be true. Ultimately, all of our thought needs to be so refined and concentrated that we can see the point. So these are "brief" essays and they are largely of a philosophical "hue." They touch on things (...) worth thinking about. Indeed, often they consider things we really need to think about if our lives are to make sense. The advantage of a collection of essays is that it is free to talk about many things. It can speak of them in a learned way or in an amused and humorous way. As Chesterton said, there is no necessary conflict between what is true and what is funny. Oftentimes, the greatest things we learn are through laughter, even laughter at ourselves and our own foibles and faults. So these essays are "brief." And they are largely of philosophical import. At first sight, taxing beer may seem to have no serious principle, except perhaps for the brewer and the consumer. But wherever there is reality, we can find something to learn. Each of these essays begins with the proposition "on"--this is a classical form of essay in the English language. Belloc, one the essay's greatest masters, wrote a book simply entitled "ON"--and several other books with that introductory "ON" to begin it. The word has the advantage of focusing our attention on some idea, place, book, person, or reality that we happen to come across and notice, then notice again, then wonder about. (shrink)

A collection of essays on political philosophy, ancient philosophy, and Catholic theology, including a handful of book reviews and a short "autobiographical memoir," by a Catholic priest who taught politics at Georgetown University for decades. The book was planned and prepared by the author prior to his death but published posthumously.

In Roman Catholic Political Philosophy author James V. Schall tries to demonstrate that Roman Catholicism and political philosophy—-revelation and reason—are not contradictory. It is his contention that political philosophy, the primary focus of the book, asks certain questions about human purpose and destiny that it cannot, by itself, answer. Revelation is the natural complement to these important questions about God, human being, and the world. Schall manages to avoid polemicism or triumphalism as he shows that revelation and political thought (...) contribute to a fuller understanding of each other. (shrink)

James V. Schall presents, in a convincing and articulate manner, the revelational contribution to political philosophy, particularly that which comes out of the Roman Catholic tradition.

When William James spoke about belief to the philosophy clubs of Yale and Brown in 1896, he forewarned his audience of the nature of his comments by describing them as a “sermon on justification by faith” (James 13), titling the talk “The Will to Believe.” Although there is disagreement about the substance of James’s remarks, it is fairly innocuous to assert that James thought they were appropriate because of the prevalence of the “logical spirit” of many (...) of those who practiced academic philosophy that led them to the conclusion that religious faith was untenable. Aware of his audience, James presents his view on the permissibility of religious faith on the terms and grounds familiar to professional philosophers. .. (shrink)

Face perception plays a central role in social communication and is, arguably, one of the most sophisticated visual perceptual skills in humans. The organization of neural systems for face perception has stimulated intense debate. This article presents an updated model of distributed human neural systems for face perception. It opens up with a discussion of the Core System for visual analysis of faces with an emphasis on the distinction between perception of invariant features for identity recognition and changeable features for (...) recognition of facial gestures such as expression and eye gaze. The study analyses the roles of systems for the representation of emotion, for person knowledge, and for action understanding in face recognition and perception of expression and gaze. It presents systems that are of particular relevance for social communication and that are illustrative of how distributed systems are engaged by face perception. It concludes with a discussion of modularity and distributed processing in neural representation. (shrink)

It is rare that I both disagree so thoroughly with the first few lines of a talk or article and still find it compelling and timely. Reverend Dr. Thandeka's "Whites Made in America: Advancing American Philosophers' Discourse on Race" is one such paper. She begins, "'Racism" and 'white privilege' have outlived their usefulness as concepts and judgements. Neither term explains what's going on in America today".Like many, Thandeka marks the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States as (...) a signal that something was missed in the months or years prior. With others, Thandeka asserts that Hillary Clinton's major misstep in the election was calling the Trump support base "deplorables" and in so... (shrink)

Inspired by selected passages from Wendell Berry’s story “A Place in Time,” the article discusses Étienne Gilson’s essay “The Future of Augustinian Metaphysics” with a special regard to the relation of habits to metaphysics. The basis of this relation is human being whose life, from the perspective of Augustinian metaphysics, is permanently unsettled. Man is the one mortal being whose perfection does not come with his being, but only with his own input into what it already is. Habits, then, prefect (...) an already constituted human being in what he or she is. Man is not born, however, with habits, but acquires them through acts of the virtues or vices. The article develops the Augustinian idea according to which the moral effort of man to pursue virtues and escape vices results not so much from his natural desire of ‘beatitude’, but rather from the fact of being led to God by God. (shrink)

No other volume has this scope. Students in bioethics, public and international health, and ethics will find this book particularly useful.

Far from being unwelcome or impossible in a mathematical setting, indeterminacy in various forms can be seen as playing an important role in driving mathematical research forward by providing “sources of newness” in the sense of Hutter and Farías :434–449, 2017). I argue here that mathematical coincidences, phenomena recently under discussion in the philosophy of mathematics, are usefully seen as inducers of indeterminacy and as put to work in guiding mathematical research. I suggest that to call a pair of mathematical (...) facts a coincidence is roughly to suggest that the investigation of connections between these facts isn’t worthwhile. To say of this pair, “That’s no coincidence!” is to suggest just the opposite. I further argue that this perspective on mathematical coincidence, which pays special attention to what mathematical coincidences do, may provide us with a better view of what mathematical coincidences are than extant accounts. I close by reflecting on how understanding mathematical coincidences as generating indeterminacy accords with a conception of mathematical research as ultimately aiming to reduce indeterminacy and complexity to triviality as proposed in Rota Indiscrete thoughts, Birkhäuser, 1997). (shrink)

In this book, distinguished theologian and political scientist James V. Schall explores Maritain's political philosophy, demonstrating that Maritain understood society, state, and government in the tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas, of natural law and human rights and duties. Schall pays particular attention to the ways in which evil appears in political forms, and how this evil can be dealt with morally.

Additional theorizing about mathematical practice is needed in order to ground appeals to truly useful notions of the virtues in mathematics. This paper aims to contribute to this theorizing, first, by characterizing mathematical practice as being epistemic and “objectual” in the sense of Knorr Cetina The practice turn in contemporary theory, Routledge, London, 2001). Then, it elaborates a MacIntyrean framework for extracting conceptions of the virtues related to mathematical practice so understood. Finally, it makes the case that Wittgenstein’s methodology for (...) examining mathematics and its practice is the most appropriate one to use for the actual investigation of mathematical practice within this MacIntyrean framework. At each stage of thinking through mathematical practice by these means, places where new virtue-theoretic questions are opened up for investigation are noted and briefly explored. (shrink)