Till today Spinoza's "Ethics" is a standard for enlightened theoretical and practical reasoning.

Relying on the assumption that Spinoza makes a double use of the principle of sufficient reason, Michael Della Rocca has defended a reconstruction of Spinoza’s approach as a metaphysical outlook according to which all particulars vanish in the only and one divine substance. This implies nothing less than a radical attempt to suggest a new and completely revisionary form of metaphysics. After a short discussion of Strawson’s distinction between revisionary and descriptive metaphysics and an exposition of the basic principles (...) of Della Rocca’s interpretation, I critically assess his attack of the use of intuitions in analytic philosophy. After discussing the extent to which the first book of Spinoza’s Ethics is appropriately described as a revisionary project, I conclude with an argument for the necessity of both descriptive and revisionary elements in metaphysics. (shrink)

Depuis quelques années, la philosophie s’intéresse de plus en plus à la notion de forme de vie humaine. D’un côté, quelques philosophes ont avancé que pour décrire l’existence d’un être vivant, il faut faire référence à la forme de vie caractéristique de son espèce. D’un autre côté, plusieurs penseurs ont soutenu la thèse qu’on ne peut pas évaluer une pratique sans la comprendre dans le contexte de la forme de vie humaine. Le présent article discute la question de savoir si (...) l’idée de la forme de vie humaine est présente chez Spinoza. Prenant comme point de départ l’idée d’un bien de l’homme, invoquée dans les Pensées métaphysiques et dans des passages parallèles de l’Éthique, l’article soutient que la pensée philosophique de Spinoza admet effectivement la notion d’espèce humaine. S’appuyant ensuite sur un examen de sa correspondance avec Henry Oldenburg, l’article défend une interprétation de la doctrine spinoziste des modalités qui permet d’admettre des capacités humaines non actualisées. L’article interroge alors la relation entre la doctrine spinoziste des modalités et la doctrine du conatus, avant de s’achever sur quelques remarques sur le rôle de la culture dans le développement de la forme de vie humaine. En somme, l’article défend l’idée que l’on peut trouver la notion de forme de vie humaine chez Spinoza et il montre dans quelle mesure cette notion est importante pour certains aspects de la pensée spinoziste. (shrink)

Vor dem Hintergrund fanatischer religiöser Konflikte und in Kenntnis der im 17. Jahrhundert aufblühenden exakten Wissenschaften entwickelte Spinoza einen der anspruchsvollsten Entwürfe der Philosophiegeschichte: seine in geometrischer Ordnung dargestellte Ethik. Sie handelt von der Ontologie, Erkenntnislehre, den menschlichen Gefühlen und der Freiheit und Unfreiheit Einzelner wie auch der sozialer Gemeinschaften in einem einzigen durchgehenden Argumentationsgang. Das Werk verbindet auf diese Weise die höchsten Ansprüche begrifflicher und begründender Durchsichtigkeit mit von Lebenserfahrung gesättigter Weisheit. Es versteht sich selbst als eine Anleitung zum (...) Glück für die, die bereit sind, sich nur auf ihre Vernunft und nicht auf Autoritäten zu verlassen. Bis heute ist das Buch Maßstab aufgeklärter theoretischer und praktischer Vernunft geblieben. Seine fünf Teile werden in diesem kollektiven Kommentar durch jeweils drei Aufsätze erläutert. Eine Einleitung schildert die Ambitionen und historischen Folgen der "Ethik". Mit Beiträgen von: Francis Aman, Wolfgang Bartuschat, Thomas Cook, Herman De Djin, Christof Ellsiepen, Stephen Gaukroger, Michael Hampe, Thomas Kisser, Alexandre Matheron, Pierre-François Moreau, Michael Pauen, Dominik Perler, Ursula Renz, Michael Della Rocca, Robert Schnepf, Manfred Walther und Jean-Claude Wolf. (shrink)

Davidson claims that the basis for all semantic notions is the successful communication. This paper aims at exploring the consequences that this statement has for the notions of both meaning and language. And as a result, it explains why communication is not grounded on conventions or norms.

Bestrewn with relics of subjugation, the frameworks that hinge on social progress have failed to appraise the plight of the marginalized in the democratic discourse. This is the case in the Philippines, as in other fringed spaces caught in hegemonic world-building. In this setup, emancipation is anchored in salvific attempts – salvaging the marginalized from a messianic standpoint. This tends to produce a pejorative image of the marginalized as incapable of self-determination. I argue in a three-part discussion: (1) reexamine the (...) locus of the margin in critical theorizing; (2) retrace the act of recognition vis-à-vis the emancipative struggle; (3) present that the lifeworld of the marginalized offers redemptive alternatives for emancipation. Further, I argue that this offers a foremost framework in critical theorizing at the margin since their situatedness affords a stance that has not formed a patina of the West but is primarily informed by their rich local periphery. (shrink)

Versucht man die philosophische Entwicklung von Hermann Cohen zu überblicken, so sticht ins Auge, dass er genuin rationalistischen Überzeugungen immer näher rückt. Welche Bedeutung dabei der Philosophie von Leibniz für die Entwicklung einer rein idealistischen Urteilslogik zukommt, ist bekannt. Ich denke aber darüber hinausgehend, dass Cohens Ansatz im Verlauf der Jahre ganz zentralen erkenntnistheoretischen Grundintuitionen des klassischen Rationalismus immer näher kommt.

Theists claim that God can make a causal difference in the world. That is, theists believe that God is causally efficacious, has power. Discussion of divine power has centered on understanding better the metaphysics of creation and sustenance, special intervention, governance, and providing an account of omnipotence consistent with other divine attributes, such as omnibenevolence. But little discussion has centered on what, deep down ontologically, God’s power is. I show that a number of prominent accounts of power fail to model (...) what divine power could be, and then develop an account based on teleological and primitivist accounts of power. (shrink)

The first and greatest commandment according to Jesus, and so the one most central to Christian practice, is the command to love God. We argue that this commandment is best interpreted in aretaic rather than deontic terms. In brief, we argue that there is no obligation to love God. While bad, failure to seek and enjoy a union of love with God is not in violation of any general moral requirement. The core argument is straightforward: relations of intimacy should not (...) be morally imposed upon autonomous beings. We contend that such reasoning applies to human beings’ relationship to God. So, even if our ultimate end is to enjoy communion with God, God has no right that human beings seek a relationship with him. If this is correct, then the command to ‘love God’ is not the sort of moral principle that can be supported by threats of hellfire or other forms of coercion. (shrink)

A number of fairness issues and principles are developed and discussed from the context of personnel selection. It is noted that not too much attention has been paid to these issues and concerns in the past. A distinction is made between justice and fairness having to do with the procedural components and processes of selection, the nature of the information used to make selection decisions, and the resulting outcomes of the selection process. Ideas for future research and exploration are also (...) extended. (shrink)

Research in the field of Empirical Ethics (EE) uses a broad variety of empirical methodologies, such as surveys, interviews and observation, developed in disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Whereas these empirical disciplines see themselves as purely descriptive, EE also aims at normative reflection. Currently there is literature about the quality of empirical research in ethics, but little or no reflection on specific methodological aspects that must be considered when conducting interdisciplinary empirical ethics. Furthermore, poor methodology in an EE (...) study results in misleading ethical analyses, evaluations or recommendations. This not only deprives the study of scientific and social value, but also risks ethical misjudgement. (shrink)

This article considers what the implications of decertification would be for single-sex services such as domestic and sexual violence support. Some reform options attached to decertification could (re)allocate authority away from the state to organisations or individuals to determine gender criteria. What would the consequences of such re-allocation be in determining eligibility to receive or access services or excluding people on the basis of a characteristic protected under equality law? Engaging with this in the context of domestic and sexual violence (...) support service provision raises a number of questions. Firstly, does the existence of gender-based violence and/or of the effects it produces require a stable category in order to address them? What benefits may emerge from providing single-sex spaces that could not be replicated in other settings? And finally, what criteria of exclusion and inclusion are currently used to determine access to spaces beyond legal gender status? (shrink)

In this paper I outline the PAIR account of joint attention as a perceptual-practical, affectively charged intentional relation. I argue that to explain joint attention we need to leave the received understanding of propositions and propositional attitudes and the picture of content connected to it behind and embrace the notions of subject mode and position mode content. I also explore the relation between joint attention and communication.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 7, Page 27-30, July 2012.

Theories of discourse bring to realism new ideas about how knowledge develops and how representations of reality are influenced. We gain an understanding of the conceptual aspect of social life and the processes by which meaning is produced. This collection reflects the growing interest realist critics have shown towards forms of discourse theory and deconstruction. The diverse range of contributions address such issues as the work of Derrida and deconstruction, discourse theory, Eurocentrism and poststructuralism. What unites all of the contributions (...) is a sense that it is essential to provide a realist alternative to the hitherto dominance of social constructionism, hermeneutics and postmodernism, over many of the issues discussed. By developing a realist perspective the different authors attempt to embed discourse within the structured nature of the reality of the world. Realism can situate language, discourse and ideology within context specific, or 'causally efficacious' circumstances. Realism can help to uncover issues of power, representation, and subjectivity and how discursive and other social practices produce real effects. This can help us understand the manner in which social structures are reproduced through various forms of ideology and discourse. And by knowing this, we can start to address questions concerning human emancipation and how the world is to be transformed. (shrink)

Morals from Motives develops a virtue ethics inspired more by Hume and Hutcheson's moral sentimentalism than by recently-influential Aristotelianism. It argues that a reconfigured and expanded "morality of caring" can offer a general account of right and wrong action as well as social justice. Expanding the frontiers of ethics, it goes on to show how a motive-based "pure" virtue theory can also help us to understand the nature of human well-being and practical reason.

The guiding inspiration of this book is the attraction and distance that mark the relation between anthropology and philosophy. This theme is explored through encounters between individual anthropologists and particular regions of philosophy. Several of the most basic concepts of the discipline—including notions of ethics, politics, temporality, self and other, and the nature of human life—are products of a dialogue, both implicit and explicit, between anthropology and philosophy. These philosophical undercurrents in anthropology also speak to the question of what it (...) is to experience our being in a world marked by radical difference and otherness. In The Ground Between, twelve leading anthropologists offer intimate reflections on the influence of particular philosophers on their way of seeing the world, and on what ethnography has taught them about philosophy. Ethnographies of the mundane and the everyday raise fundamental issues that the contributors grapple with in both their lives and their thinking. With directness and honesty, they relate particular philosophers to matters such as how to respond to the suffering of the other, how concepts arise in the give and take of everyday life, and how to be attuned to the world through the senses. Their essays challenge the idea that philosophy is solely the province of professional philosophers, and suggest that certain modalities of being in the world might be construed as ways of doing philosophy. Contributors. João Biehl, Steven C. Caton, Vincent Crapanzano, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, Michael M. J. Fischer, Ghassan Hage, Clara Han, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, Michael Puett, Bhrigupati Singh. (shrink)

Eldred offers a remedy to the consequences of ancient Greek misconceptions of time that are also entrenched in today’s mathematized physics. Here time is spatialized as the one-dimensionally linear ‘arrow of time’ for the sake of predicting and controlling movement. But such spatialized time distorts the phenomenon of time itself. An alternative, hermeneutic-phenomenological path begins with a pre-spatial concept of time that is genuinely three-dimensional. This paves the way for recasting who we are as humans in belonging, first of all, (...) to the free openness of 3D-temporality. This belonging enables temporally 3D-vision of the psyche that empowers us to see movement at all and reconcile its inherent contradictoriness. We are then also able to conceive ourselves no longer merely as internally cogitating, self-conscious subjects, but as engaged existentially in temporally 3D-interplay, mutually estimating and esteeming who we are. This unpredictable interplay is constrained, however, by being played out in the sociating medium of thingified value, the accumulative movement of thingified value having gained the upper hand in dictating our life-movements as well as our interplay with the earth. (shrink)

Der private, sehr gefahrdete Bucherbestand Friedrich Nietzsches gilt als ein besonders interessantes Beispiel einer Schriftstellerbibliothek des 19. Jahrhunderts.

We ordinarily suppose that there is a difference between having and failing to exercise a rational capacity on the one hand, and lacking a rational capacity altogether on the other. This is crucial for our allocations of responsibility. Someone who has but fails to exercise a capacity is responsible for their failure to exercise their capacity, whereas someone who lacks a capacity altogether is not. However, as Gary Watson pointed out in his seminal essay ’Skepticism about Weakness of Will’, the (...) idea of an unexercised capacity is much more difficult to make sense of than it initially appears. The aim of ’Rational Capacities’ is to provide the needed explication of this idea. (shrink)

Hylomorphism is the Aristotelian theory according to which substances are composites of matter and form. If my house is a substance, then its matter would be a collection of bricks and timbers and its form something like a structure that unites those bricks and timbers into a single substance. Contemporary hylomorphists are divided on how to understand forms best, but a prominent group of theorists argue that forms are emergent powers. According to such views, when material components are arranged appropriately, (...) a novel substance emerges with the power to impose unity on its components through time. I argue that these accounts of form fall prey to a bootstrapping problem, and so, suffer from issues of redundancy, given plausible assumptions about inherence. In their place, I suggest an ontologically minimalist conception of forms as collective manifestations of the powers of matter. (shrink)

This will be the best way of explaining ‘Paris is the lover of Helen’, that is, ‘Paris loves, and by that very fact [et eo ipso] Helen is loved’. Here, therefore, two propositions have been brought together and abbreviated as one. Or, ‘Paris is a lover, and by that very fact Helen is a loved one’.

Hylomorphism is the Aristotelian theory according to which substances are composed of matter and form. If a house is a substance, then its matter would be a collection of bricks and timbers and its form something like the structure of those bricks and timbers. It is widely agreed that matter bears a mereological relationship to substance; the bricks and timbers are parts of the house. But with form things are more controversial. Is the structure of the bricks and timbers best (...) conceived as a part of the house, or is it related to the house in some non-mereological fashion? Kathrin Koslicki argues that substances have formal parts, that forms are best conceived as bearing a mereological relation to substances. This paper shows that her argument fails, given the traditional and plausible distinction between substances and accidental unities. I close with a brief suggestion for a non-mereological construal of forms. (shrink)

British equality law protections for sex and gender reassignment have grown fraught as activists tussle over legal and social categories of gender, gender transitioning, and sex. This article considers the future of gender-related equality protections in relation to ‘decertification’—an imagined reform that would detach sex and gender from legal personhood. One criticism of decertification is that de-formalising gender membership would undermine equality law protections. This article explores how gender-based equality law could operate in conditions of decertification, drawing on legal thoughtways (...) developed for two other protected characteristics in equality law—religion and belief, and disability—to explore the legal responses and imaginaries that these two grounds make available. Religious equality law focuses on beliefs, communities, and practices, deemed to be stable, multivarious, and subject to deep personal commitment. Disability equality law focuses on embodied disadvantage, approached as social, relational, and fluctuating. While these two equality frameworks have considerable limitations, they offer legal thoughtways for gender oriented to both its hierarchies and its expression, including as disavowal. (shrink)

This article considers what the implications of decertification would be for single-sex services such as domestic and sexual violence support. Some reform options attached to decertification could (re)allocate authority away from the state to organisations or individuals to determine gender criteria. What would the consequences of such re-allocation be in determining eligibility to receive or access services or excluding people on the basis of a characteristic protected under equality law? Engaging with this in the context of domestic and sexual violence (...) support service provision raises a number of questions. Firstly, does the existence of gender-based violence and/or of the effects it produces require a stable category in order to address them? What benefits may emerge from providing single-sex spaces that could not be replicated in other settings? And finally, what criteria of exclusion and inclusion are currently used to determine access to spaces beyond legal gender status? (shrink)

Wegen des großen Erfolgs der gebundenen Ausgabe wird dieses Handbuch nun in einer günstigen Broschurausgabe neu aufgelegt. Emotionen sind in den letzten Jahren als zentraler Gegenstand der Ethik, philosophischen Anthropologie und Philosophie des Geistes wieder entdeckt worden. Dieser Band stellt die wichtigsten Emotionstheorien von Platon bis Wittgenstein vor. Für die aktuelle Philosophie der Gefühle soll er neue Anschlussmöglichkeiten aufzeigen.

The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics offers the most authoritative and compelling guide to this diverse and fertile field of philosophy. Twenty-four of the world's most distinguished specialists provide brand-new essays about 'what there is': what kinds of things there are, and what relations hold among entities falling under various categories. They give the latest word on such topics as identity, modality, time, causation, persons and minds, freedom, and vagueness. The Handbook's unrivaled breadth and depth make it the definitive reference work (...) for students and academics across the philosophical spectrum. (shrink)

This thought provoking book uncovers a crisis in the political imagination, a wide-spread failure to provide the passionate sense of community "in which our need for belonging can be met." Seeking the answers to fundamental questions, Michael Ignatieff writes vividly both about ideas and about the people who tried to live by them—from Augustine to Bosch, from Rosseau to Simone Weil. Incisive and moving, The Needs of Strangers returns philosophy to its proper place, as a guide to the art (...) of being human. (shrink)

Virtually all philosophers agree that for a belief to be epistemically justified, it must satisfy certain conditions. Perhaps it must be supported by evidence. Or perhaps it must be reliably formed. Or perhaps there are some other "good-making" features it must have. But does a belief's justification also require some sort of awareness of its good-making features? The answer to this question has been hotly contested in contemporary epistemology, creating a deep divide among its practitioners. Internalists, who tend to focus (...) on scientific or theoretical beliefs as the ideal, insist that such awareness is required for justification. Externalists, who think children's ordinary beliefs in obvious facts are paradigm cases of justified belief, say it isn't required. Michael Bergmann's book offers a decisive refutation of internalism and a sustained defense of externalism. (shrink)