Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy is often a starting point for students of philosophy. It forms the basis for much of Continental thought, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. Descartes’ text invites readers on a philosophical journey and this brief overview by Kurt Brandhorst is designed to prepare and accompany them. Brandhorst guides first-time readers through Descartes' language and offers pathways to a clear understanding of his method, ideas, and conclusions, while at the same time stimulating serious meditation (...) on this deeply influential philosophical text. (shrink)

According to Xenophon, Socrates tried to persuade his associate Aristippus to moderate his excessive indulgence in wine, women, and food, arguing that only hard work can bring happiness. Aristippus wasn’t convinced. Instead, he and his followers espoused the most radical form of hedonism in ancient Western philosophy. Before the rise of the better known but comparatively ascetic Epicureans, the Cyrenaics pursued a way of life in which moments of pleasure, particularly bodily pleasure, held the highest value. In The Birth of (...) Hedonism, Kurt Lampe provides the most comprehensive account in any language of Cyrenaic ideas and behavior, revolutionizing the understanding of this neglected but important school of philosophy. -/- The Birth of Hedonism thoroughly and sympathetically reconstructs the doctrines and practices of the Cyrenaics, who were active between the fourth and third centuries BCE. The book examines not only Aristippus and the mainstream Cyrenaics, but also Hegesias, Anniceris, and Theodorus. Contrary to recent scholarship, the book shows that the Cyrenaics, despite giving primary value to discrete pleasurable experiences, accepted the dominant Greek philosophical belief that life-long happiness and the virtues that sustain it are the principal concerns of ethics. The book also offers the first in-depth effort to understand Theodorus’s atheism and Hegesias’s pessimism, both of which are extremely unusual in ancient Greek philosophy and which raise the interesting question of hedonism’s relationship to pessimism and atheism. Finally, the book explores the “new Cyrenaicism” of the nineteenth-century writer and classicist Walter Pater, who drew out the enduring philosophical interest of Cyrenaic hedonism more than any other modern thinker. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

La forme dans laqualle Leibniz a présenté sa Monadologie dans son petit essay du même nom et dans différentes lettres peut facilement donner l'impression que cette doctrine ne consiste qu'en une certaine collection des aperçus. Mais, en vérité, il s'agit d'un système construit de façon strictement logique, qui est basé sur dix axiomes. Cette construction procède en deux étapes : D'abord Leibniz commence avec des phénomènes donnés pour déduire d'eux les Monades ; ensuite il commence avec les Monades pour déduire (...) d'elles les phénomènes. Seulement en suivant Leibniz sur les deux chemins chaque élément de la Monadologie devient complètement comprehensible. Dans la première étape, il prouve que les Monades doivent exister et qu'elles sont l'origine des phénomènes physiques ; dans la deuxième étape il montre qu'elles produisent ces phénomènes par des perceptions et de l'appétit, qu'il y a une harmonie préétablie entre les perceptions des différentes Monades et que la continuité de l'espace et du temps est une condition necessaire de cene harmonie. (shrink)

Die Auseinandersetzung zwischen Theologie und Philosophie ist so alt wie das Christentum. Im Mittelalter wurde der Streit weitgehend zugunsten der Theologie entschieden. Die Philosophie, verstanden als Metaphysik, wurde ancilla theologiae, Magd der Theologie. Im Zeitalter der Aufklärung drehte sich jedoch der Spieß um, die Theologie wurde nun zur Magd der Philosophie. Später, unter dem wachsenden Einfluss der empirischen Wissenschaften und der Technik, verlor die Philosophie ihren metaphysischen Charakter und wurde weitgehend eine Theorie der Wissenschaften, die schließlich in einer Selbstkritik des (...) empirisch-wissenschaftlichen Denkens überhaupt gipfelte. Diese letzte Entwicklung wird in dem folgenden Artikel skizziert. Es wird gezeigt, wie gegenwärtig Theologen, die diese Entwicklung nicht erkannt haben und von einem heute überholten Wissenschaftsbegriff ausgehen, immer noch versuchen, ihn mit dem theologischen Denken zu versöhnen. So werden sie mehr und mehr gezwungen, das, was sie für einen »dogmatischen Ballast« halten, über Bord zu werfen mit der Folge, dass sie das Wesen der christlichen Offenbarung weitgehend verfremden.The struggle between theology and philosophy is as old as Christianity. In the middle age this struggle ended in favour of theology. Philosophy, understood as metaphysics, was called ancilla theologiae. However, in the age of enlightenment the tables were turned: Now, theology became the ancilla of philosophy. Later, under the growing influence of the empirical sciences and technology, philosophy lost its metaphysical character and widely became a theory of sciences which culminated in self-criticism of scientific thinking. Now, this last development will be sketched in the following article. It will be shown how at present theologians who ignore this development and proceed from an antiquated concept of science still try to reconcile it with theological thinking. Thereby, they are more and more compelled to throw off what is deemed to be »dogmatic ballast« with the consequence that they alienate the essence of christian revelation. (shrink)

This article was prepared for the International Demographic History Congress on ‘Malthus Yesterday and Today’ which took place in Paris, 27–29 May 1980.

Individuals’ implicit theories that people’s character is fixed versus malleable are associated with their holding beliefs that morality is primarily determined by fulfilling prescribed duties versus upholding basic rights of others, respectively. Three studies provide evidence that the ability to recognize that a situation can legitimately be considered from a moral point of view is interactively dependent upon the nature of perceivers’ implicit theories and the extent to which the issue involves a violation that emphasizes a failure to fulfill a (...) prescribed duty versus a failure to uphold a fundamental right of others. The studies experimentally manipulated the characteristics of a hypothetical business situation to involve either a duty-based violation or a rights-based violation or no behavioral violation. In addition, Study 1 experimentally manipulated subjects’ implicit theories, while Studies 2 and 3 measured subjects’ chronically held implicit theories. Collectively, the studies provide consistent evidence that entity theorists have greater moral awareness than incremental theorists when considering situations involving duty-based violations, while incremental theorists have greater moral awareness than entity theorists when considering situations involving rights-based violations, and moral awareness is not significantly different for perceivers who are neither strongly entity nor incremental theorists, when considering situations involving duty- versus rights-based violations. Study 3 also found evidence of a moderated-mediated association between violation type and moral intentions, through moral awareness as a mediator, moderated by perceivers’ implicit theories. (shrink)

Despite decades of research, we still lack a clear explanation for the emergence and persistence of inequality. Here we propose and evaluate a marginal utility of inequality hypothesis that nominates circumscription and environmental heterogeneity as independent, necessary conditions for the emergence of intragroup material inequality. After coupling the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample with newly generated data from remote sensing, we test predictions derived from this hypothesis using a multivariate generalized additive model that accounts for spatial and historical dependence as well as (...) subsistence mode. Our analyses show that the probability a society will be stratified increases significantly as a function of proxies of environmental heterogeneity and environmental circumscription. This supports the hypothesis that increasing environmental heterogeneity and circumscription drives the emergence and persistence of inequality among documented societies across the globe. We demonstrate how environmental heterogeneity and circumscription produce situations that limit individuals’ options so that some may find it in their best interest to give up some autonomy for material gain, while others may find it in their best interest to give up some material resources for another individual’s time or deference. These results support the marginal utility of inequality framework and enable future explorations of the ecological conditions that facilitate the emergence of intragroup inequality through time and across the globe. (shrink)