The purpose of this article is to argue for a position holding that epigenetic responsibility primarily should be a political and not an individual responsibility. Epigenetic is a rapidly growing research field studying regulations of gene expression that do not change the DNA sequence. Knowledge about these mechanisms is still uncertain in many respects, but main presumptions are that they are triggered by environmental factors and life style and, to a certain extent, heritable to subsequent generations, thereby reminding of aspects (...) of Lamarckism. Epigenetic research advances give rise to intriguing challenges for responsibility relations between the society and the individual. Responsibility is commonly understood in a backwards-looking manner, identifying causally responsible actors to blame for a bad outcome. If only a backwards-looking responsibility model is applied, epigenetics might give rise to arduous responsibility ascriptions to individuals for their health and the health of their future descendants. This would put heavy responsibility burdens on actors constrained by unequal social and economic structures. In contrast, a forward-looking responsibility notion takes account of structural conditions and pay attention to who is best placed to do something about conditions contributing to bad outcomes. A forward-looking responsibility notion would partly free disadvantaged individuals from responsibility, and identify actors with power and capacity to do something about structural factors constraining genuine choice. (shrink)

Conceptions of evil have changed dramatically over time, and though humans continue to commit acts of cruelty against one another, today we possess a clearer, more moral way of analyzing them. In _Narrating Evil_, María Pía Lara explores what has changed in our understanding of evil, why the transformation matters, and how we can learn from this specific historical development. Drawing on Immanuel Kant's and Hannah Arendt's ideas about reflective judgment, Lara argues that narrative plays a key role in helping (...) societies acknowledge their pasts. Particular stories haunt our consciousness and lead to a kind of examination and dialogue that shape notions of morality. A powerful description of a crime can act as a filter, helping us to draw conclusions about what constitutes a moral wrong, and public debates over these narratives allow us to construct a more accurate picture of historical truth, leading to a better understanding of why such actions are possible. In building her argument, Lara considers Greek tragedies, Shakespeare's depictions of evil, Joseph Conrad's literary metaphors, and movies that portray human cruelty. Turning to such philosophers and writers as Jürgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin, Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, and Ariel Dorfman, Lara defines a reflexive relationship between an event, the narrative of the event, and the public reception of the narrative, and she proves that the stories of perpetrators and sufferers are always intertwined. The process of disclosure, debate, and the public fashioning of collective judgment are vital methods through which we make sense not only of new forms of cruelty but of past crimes as well. _Narrating Evil_ describes the steps of this process and why they are a crucial part of our attempt to build a different, more just world. (shrink)

A Philosophy to Live By highlights Murdoch's distinctive conception of philosophy as a spiritual or existential practice and enlists the resources of her thought to explore a wide range of thinkers and debates at the intersections of moral philosophy, religion, art, and politics.

Not limited to merely mathematics, probability has a rich and controversial philosophical aspect. _A Philosophical Introduction to Probability_ showcases lesser-known philosophical notions of probability and explores the debate over their interpretations. Galavotti traces the history of probability and its mathematical properties and then discusses various philosophical positions on probability, from the Pierre Simon de Laplace's “classical” interpretation of probability to the logical interpretation proposed by John Maynard Keynes. This book is a valuable resource for students in philosophy and mathematics and (...) all readers interested in notions of probability. (shrink)

Of all the thinkers of the century of genius that inaugurated modern philosophy, none lived an intellectual life more rich and varied than Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Maria Rosa Antognazza's pioneering biography provides a unified portrait of this unique thinker and the world from which he came. At the centre of the huge range of Leibniz's apparently miscellaneous endeavours, Antognazza reveals a single master project lending unity to his extraordinarily multifaceted life's work. Throughout the vicissitudes of his long life, Leibniz (...) tenaciously pursued the dream of a systematic reform and advancement of all the sciences. As well as tracing the threads of continuity that bound these theoretical and practical activities to this all-embracing plan, this illuminating study also traces these threads back into the intellectual traditions of the Holy Roman Empire in which Leibniz lived and throughout the broader intellectual networks that linked him to patrons in countries as distant as Russia and to correspondents as far afield as China. (shrink)

Certain emotional processes “bypass the will” and even awareness, whereas others arise due to the deliberative evaluation of objects, states, and events. It is important to differentiate between the automatic versus reflective origins of emotional processes, and sensory versus conceptual bases of diverse negative and positive emotions. A taxonomy of emotions based on different origins is presented. This taxonomy distinguishes between negative and positive automatic versus reflective emotions. The automatic emotions are connected with the (a) homeostatic and (b) hedonistic regulatory (...) mechanisms. The reflective emotions—uniquely human—are described in reference to deliberative processes and appraisals based on two types of conceptual and verbalized evaluative standards: (a) ideal self-standards and (b) general, axiological standards of good and evil. (shrink)

Postmodern political critiques speak of the death of ideology, the end of history, and the postsecular return of religious attitudes, yet radical conservative theorists such as Mark Lilla argue religion and politics are inextricably intertwined. Returning much-needed uncertainty to debates over the political while revitalizing the very terms in which they are defined, María Pía Lara explores the ambiguity of secularization and the theoretical potential of a structural break between politics and religion. For Lara, secularization means three things: the translation (...) of religious semantics into politics; a transformation of religious notions into political ideas; and the reoccupation of a space left void by changing political actors that gives rise to new conceptions of political interaction. Conceptual innovation redefines politics as a horizontal relationship between governments and the governed and better enables societies (and individual political actors) to articulate meaning through action--that is, through the emergence of new concepts. These actions, Lara proves, radically transform our understanding of politics and the role of political agents and are further enhanced by challenging the structural dependence of politics on religious phenomena. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam is one of the world’s leading philosophers. His highly original and often provocative ideas have set the agenda for a variety of debates in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. His now famous philosophical thought experiments, such as the ‘Twin earth’ and ‘the brains in the vat’ have become part of the established canon in philosophy and cognitive science. _Reading Putnam_ is an outstanding overview and assessment of Hilary Putnam’s work by a team of (...) international contributors, and includes replies by Putnam himself. Divided into clear sections, it contains chapters on key aspects of Putnam’s large body of writing, including: Scientific realism and the changes that Putnam’s thought has undergone on this topic analyticity and ontology, including the important interconnections between the views of Putnam and Quine Putnam’s arguments concerning externalist views of meaning and reference, questions of conceptual relativity, and his preoccupation with ethics through a denial of the fact–value dichotomy Putnam’s developing views on perception. Offering an excellent survey of Putnam’s work, _Reading Putnam_ is essential for those studying philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science, as well as for anyone interested in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Philosophy of Emotion in Buddhist Philosophy (and a Close Look at Remorse and Regret)Maria HeimIt is an honor to guest-edit a special issue for the Journal of Buddhist Philosophy for its inaugural issue, and even more to be invited to write a somewhat longer article than is typically the privilege of the guest editor. It was thought that something of a broader statement of the state of (...) the field in this emerging subfield of philosophy might itself be useful in situating current work and aspirations for future endeavors.That the study of emotions in Buddhist philosophy is still in its infancy is somewhat surprising given that Buddhist texts offer 2,500 years of exceedingly fine-grained analyses and reflections on experience.1 It could be that scholars have been thrown off by the word "emotion" itself, given that the English term does not map easily onto Buddhist categories. No single term in any Buddhist language does exactly what "emotion" does. Of course, "emotion" does not map precisely onto premodern Western categories of experience (affections, passions, sentiments, and so on) either, and has a notably shallow history even in European contexts, dating in something like its current usage only to the early nineteenth century (see Dixon 2003 for this history). And if "emotion" fits only awkwardly with Buddhist categories, it should occasion no surprise that many of the debates and dichotomies preoccupying Western philosophy on emotions—is emotion affective or cognitive? Physical or mental? Socially constructed or universal? Are emotions feelings? Evaluations? Motivations?—ill fit the debates and discussions that Buddhist texts offer about experience. The modern [End Page 2] Western categories and terms of the discussion may well inhibit Buddhist philosophical participation in these debates.I have found that this predicament is best met by calling into question the putative universalism of the English term and the assumption that "emotion" names a natural or ontological category. Increasingly, philosophers and neuroscientists are casting doubt on the notion that emotion is a natural kind (Rorty 2004; Griffiths 2004; Barrett 2006, 2017). That emotion is not easy to distinguish from feelings, motives, moods, and propositional attitudes, and that lists of emotions, when elaborated, seem hardly to fall into a generic family of phenomena, suggesting that its boundaries and borders are not carved in nature. This has implications for how "emotions" are to be studied in the lab, as Lisa Feldman Barrett suggests; the natural-kind view "underlies the major questions, the experimental designs, and the interpretation of empirical findings that characterize emotion research as a domain of scientific inquiry," even while the empirical evidence increasingly suggests that this view is the "result of an error of arbitrary aggregation" (Barrett 2006). For reasons piling up in the empirical literature, it is coming to look less and less likely that the English term emotion carves nature at the joints.2This situation can help us shake free of "emotion" early on, even if we may not be able to part entirely with it. A special issue on "the philosophy of emotion" gestures toward the kinds of phenomena these papers take up, even if they vary in the extent to which they find "emotion" to be analytically useful when interpreting Buddhist texts. Indeed, stepping away from assumptions of English-language universalism clears the deck for looking at very different, but no less meticulous and reflective, ways of carving up experiences of the very sort we do get in Buddhist texts. The way forward, in my view, is to permit English words like emotion, affect, and feeling to open the door to the kinds of phenomena we might want to investigate. We can at the same time resist tightly defining what these English terms mean, defending the borders around them, or closely tethering Buddhist conceptions to them. Working with Buddhist categories and meta-categories suggests ways to treat experiences that are, from the ground up, different than the modern West. These in turn can interrupt its supposed universalism and offer fresh questions and interventions.For example, Emily McRae's paper in this issue on kleśas—dysfunctional mental states—offers a Buddhist intervention for how philosophers might reconfigure and aggregate experience differently... (shrink)

This work provides an analysis of the basic cognitive components of envy. In particular, the roles played by the envious party's social comparison with, and ill will against, the better off are emphasised. The ill will component is characterised by the envier's ultimate goal or wish that the envied suffer some harm, and is distinguished from resentment and sense of injustice, which have often been considered part of envy. The reprehensible nature of envy is discussed, and traced back to the (...) analysis of its components. Finally, we explore both points of overlap and distinguishing features between envy and other emotions such as jealousy or emulation, and make a few general remarks, pointing to the necessity of overcoming conceptual looseness in the notion of envy. (shrink)

Following a previous article where I defined how a concept becomes a weapon of ideological wars, this article seeks to clarify why there are semantic connections of the actual concept of ‘populism’ with the semantics of the concept of crisis. My key argument is to focus on how actors use the concept of populism on the public sphere with the goal to inspire fear instead of allowing citizens and theorists to understand what is behind our present political–economic crisis. In my (...) view, both theorists and politicians should be aware how a concept that lacks any precision does not help us to understand our present moment of crisis. We must use other tools and the help of historians to understand why has neo-liberal politics unleashed this present crisis. (shrink)

This volume also includes "Metaphysics and Ethics," a classic essay by Iris Murdoch.

This work proposes an analysis of the cognitive and motivational components of hope, its basic properties, and the affective dispositions and behaviors it is likely to induce. In our view current treatments of hope do not fully account for its specificity, by making hope overlap with positive expectation or some specification of positive expectation. In contrast, we attempt to highlight the distinctive features of hope, pointing to its differences from positive expectation, as well as from a sense of successful agency, (...) optimism, trust, and faith. Fear and anxiety are also addressed, and the latter is analyzed as a state of mind implying both fear and hope. Finally, the relationship between hope and motivation is explored, and “active” hope is compared with “passive” hope. Some concluding remarks summarize the results of our analysis, and stress the role of hope in fostering the individual’s well-being. (shrink)

The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism pursues distinct theoretical orientations and empirical analyses, bringing together mainstream discussions ...

It is presumed that there is an opposition between the spontaneous, discovered, personal and natural on the one hand, and the taught, imitated, adopted, and artificial, on the other. The opposition is manifested in different kinds of human activity and its products. It can be evaluated and provides a framework for several theories. It is accepted, for instance that, on the one hand, the most valuable are expressive experiences which harmonize with dispositions and sensitivity of man, and on the other, (...) those which are yielded by obtaining knowledge and expanding one’s culture. In artistic creativity inspiration, creativity, originality, and individual expression are the most respected factors but the meaning of a work and the use made of the available stock of creative means are also evaluated. Considering conception of man, the development of the pertinent dispositions which determine particular uniqueness of human individual, is highly estimated but the meaning of the consequences of socialization and education is as well stressed. If man confined himself to expressive acts only, the development of his personality would manifest just what he is. However, an adoption of the generally accepted external values implies a danger of the unauthentic and imitative life. The adoption of values of culture has to undergo in a specific process called internalization of values. But knowledge of values is not all that matters. They must be experienced and included into individual world, they must be accepted and adjusted to the personal traits of the individual. By internalization of values, what is alien to and inherited by man is transformed into a personal and essential element of his life, enriching him by new possibilities of unfolding dispositions of his nature. We apprehend man as ens per se: he becomes himself, due to his own activity, but essential substance of his personality is mode of objectively existing values. The article stresses the importance of activity and contact of man with reality, which constantly bring to light new possibilities of experiencing and acting. In the contact with the world man comes across the phenomena which are contrary to his natural inclinations: by adopting a conscious attitude to them and including them into accepted system of beliefs, he becomes enriched with new values. These oppositions provide a background to the construction of system of values in the world of man. (shrink)

The starting point of these reflections on the personality-creating function of moral examples is a differentiation between two concepts of man: one, which puts stress on the fact that human nature is predetermined and the man’s task is therefore to develop his talents and endowments in order to become a compete man, and the other, which emphasizes the fact that man is himself a specific and uniquely precious value, and thus he should endeavor to learn about himself and how he (...) should realize himself to his own image. In the first instance we have “an ethics of examples”, in the second, “an ethics of authenticity”. In the first case we have a man who creates himself, in the second, a man who is in search for himself. These two conceptions describe different attitudes toward the world and toward oneself. We can reach for their synthesis, however, if we assume that through the search for himself man creates himself, by finding out what his authentic intentions are, man creates himself, and thereby avoids petrification in the established schemes, functioning in social life. Thus he becomes a more valuable individual in his society. (shrink)

GABRIEL BELLO REGUERA: Emigración y ética. Humanizar y deshumanizar, Madrid, Plaza y Valdés, 2011, 341 pp.

Le problème central des Recherches logiques est de déterminer le rapport entre deux types d’actes : les actes de signification et les actes d’in­tuition (perception et imagination), donc entre d’un part des actes dont les objets sont de l’ordre du langage et, d’autre part, les actes qui « accèdent » à la réalité, dans lesquels l’objet réel est présent lui-même. Ce rapport est introduit dans la I re R echerche logique sous le nom de « remplissement » mais sa vraie (...) nature deviendra claire seulement dans la VI e R echerche logique . Le remplissement sera alors la synthèse d’un acte de signification et d’un acte d’intuition visant un même objet. Ce modèle d’une intention vide qui se remplit par la suite pose cependant certains problèmes. Premièrement, les significations peuvent-elles jouer le rôle d’objets et, si oui, quelle est la nature de ceux-ci ? Deuxièmement, peut-on vraiment isoler des intentions de signification, dont l’objet ne serait ni réel (comme dans la perception) ni même possible (comme dans l’imagination), mais d’une tout autre nature ? Puisqu’une imagination peut aussi jouer le rôle d’intuition remplissante, toute intention de signification doit se remplir (aboutir à un objet réel ou, au moins, possible), sans quoi elle ne serait pas une signification du tout, elle n’aurait aucun sens. Enfin, si nous acceptons cette thèse de l’universalité du remplissement, ou au moins de sa possibilité, comment penser le cas des objets idéaux, dont le remplissement ne va pas de soi ? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 24.1 (2004) 278-283 [Access article in PDF] The Voice of God on Mount Sinai. Rabbinic Commentaries on Exodus 20:1 In Light of Sufi and Zen-Buddhist Texts. By Reinhard Neudecker. Rome: Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 2002. 157 pp. Reinhard Neudecker's study of the central event of the first five books of the Bible, namely the revelation of God on Mount Sinai to Moses and the Israelites, is an important (...) contribution to interfaith studies that should be of interest to both the scholar and layperson alike. The clarity of purpose and treatment makes this study very accessible; each chapter is thoughtfully structured, with rich footnotes that provide documentation, further explanation, and information. The appendixes contain the relevant rabbinic texts in the original Hebrew; indices of terms, subjects, and Bible citations; as well as a helpful list of consulted works.The stated purpose of the study is to shed light on enigmatic rabbinical interpretations of Exodus 20:1, the verse that introduces the TenWords (commandments) [End Page 278] that form the basis of the complete Torah by taking into consideration analogous passages from the Sufi and Zen Buddhist traditions. In explaining his methodology, the author makes three important distinctions. First, Neudecker is "not dealing with Judaism, Islam and Zen Buddhism as such, but with the views and experiences of some rabbinic Jews, some Sufi Muslims and some Zen Buddhists" (p. x). Second, the chosen texts are offered for their spiritual and mystical insight, not for their historical context or content, because "the mystic has learned to convert the great events recorded by tradition into symbols which express the ongoing inner revelation to which he has been exposed" (p. 6). Because spiritual and mystical writers generally refrain from explaining deep experiences openly (especially because of the impossibility of putting them into words), the author refrains from adding his own interpretations and instead invites the reader to a meditative encounter with the texts. Third, the author does not intend to offer simple parallels or to readily claim correspondences between the rabbinic, Sufi, and Zen texts, but leaves it up to the reader to judge what the "different traditions may have in common and to what degree and where one tradition may go a step further than the others (p. 11, n. 30). His main purpose, as stated above, is to understand the rabbinic comments better by using the method of "intercultural reading" in drawing upon Sufi and Zen Buddhist texts.After the introductory chapter, which offers the methodological considerations and basic information about the Rabbinic sources and Buddhist terminology, the author presents Exod. 20:1 in its rabbinic translation: "And God spoke all these words to say." This short verse has become the stumbling block for the rabbinic interpreter, just as much as a Zen koan becomes a stumbling block for the Zen student or an obscure verse in the Koran for the Sufi. What these stumbling blocks have in common is that they open up a new way of nondiscursive understanding of the text that leads to profound insights and a deep spiritual experience.Chapters 4-9 of the book are devoted to unraveling the mysteries of these insights. The reader is drawn into an engaging process that opens up layer upon layer of meaning, comparable to the peeling of an onion. A short exposition of the themes of each chapter as introduction to the texts proves very helpful for orientation in this process. Chapter 4 addresses the question of how the people at Sinai heard the Ten Words. The rabbis differ on whether the people heard all of the commandments or only the first two of them, but the important point of comparison is the enigmatic statement that God pronounced all the Ten Words, including the entire Torah, "in one single sound, as the (human) mouth cannot speak and the (human) ear cannot hear" (p. 35). This statement implies that God's revelation exceeds the limits of human speaking and hearing, and that God communicates in... (shrink)

From his 1920s black-and-white street scenes to the color photographs of signs and letter forms from his final years, the images made by photographer Walker Evans are icons of national identity that have shaped Americans' views of themselves and directly influenced important currents of modern art. 141 duotones, 53 color plates, 171 halftones.