In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martha Nussbaum on Dickens's Hard TimesPaulette KidderAt the heart of Martha Nussbaum's work in capability ethics is a rejection of utilitarianism. Nussbaum has repeatedly recounted a pivotal moment in Dickens's Hard Times (1854), in which the young Sissy Jupe delivers an innocent but devastating critique of the utilitarian system.1 Nussbaum's most extended and compelling reading of Hard Times appears in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life.2 Nussbaum (...) convincingly shows that Dickens's novel is a "deep attack" on utilitarianism, going to the heart of the assumption that the human good consists in maximizing the satisfaction of preferences of the greatest aggregate of persons.In what follows, I will review Nussbaum's philosophical reading of the novel and its critique of utilitarianism, and then return to Hard Times to show that Nussbaum has systematically omitted references to the Biblical themes and references that pervade the novel. Arguing that Dickens's attack on utilitarianism draws much of its power from the resonance of these historically rooted symbols of transcendence, I will conclude with a reflection on the reasons for Nussbaum's avoidance of these themes in her own reading of the book.Hard Times, which focuses on a set of characters living in the polluted and class-divided manufacturing city of "Coketown," is known as Dickens's most polemical novel. The novel announces its central theme immediately in the opening speech by Thomas Gradgrind to the young students of the Gradgrind School: "Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach [End Page 417] these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else...."3From the youngest age, the children in Gradgrind's school are taught to avoid wonder and imagination and only to focus on science and mathematics—the study of what is observable and measurable. This education leaves his two eldest children, Tom and Louisa, miserably unequipped for the choices they face as adults. Young Tom Gradgrind grows up to be an undisciplined wastrel, incurring gambling debts that lead him to embezzle money and then to frame a factory worker, Stephen Blackpool, for the crime. Louisa Gradgrind endures a miserable marriage to her father's wealthy friend, Josiah Bounderby.At the moral center of the novel is Sissy Jupe, a girl who proves impervious to Gradgrind's educational system. Sissy, the daughter of a horse trainer who works for Sleary's Circus, is abandoned by her father and taken into the Gradgrind home. Sharing the moral center with Sissy is Stephen Blackpool, a weaver whose honesty and conviction cause him to run afoul of both his employer Bounderby and the demagogic Slackbridge, organizer for the trade union.In her reading of Hard Times, Nussbaum identifies four elements of utilitarianism: commensurability, aggregation, maximizing, and exogenous preferences, all of which are both dramatized in the novel and critiqued by it (PJ, p. 14). Commensurability means that "all the valuable things under consideration [are regarded as] valuable because they contain some one thing that itself varies only in quantity" (PJ, p. 14). Characters that Dickens presents as memorable individuals are seen by Gradgrind's system as "parcels of human nature." Students in Gradgrind's School are called by number instead of name, and the workers of Coke-town are seen as "hands and stomachs," and are likened to "ants and beetles." Individuality is erased by what Nussbaum terms Gradgrind's "abstracting mathematical mind" (PJ, p. 21).Aggregation, the second utilitarian element, means that data about individual lives is pooled, "without regarding the boundaries between lives as especially salient for the purposes of choice" (p. 14). Louisa Gradgrind is taught, for example, to view the working classes as "Something to be worked so much and paid so much, and there ended; something to be infallibly settled by laws of supply and demand; something that blundered against those laws, and floundered into difficulty; something that was a little pinched when wheat was dear, and overate itself when wheat was cheap... But, she had scarcely thought more of separating [End Page 418] [the people of Coketown] into units, than of separating the sea itself into its... (shrink)

This essay explores the impact of Kierkegaard’s work on the thought of Stanley Cavell. Cavell identifies two central themes in Kierkegaard’s philosophy: first, rather than concerning itself with problems of logic or with abstract questions, philosophy is concerned with ordinary life and its lived spiritual questions; second, there are things that can only be understood by participating in them. Therefore, the task of the philosopher is not to explain or define ideas but to dramatize for the reader that the choice (...) of one’s inward way of life is of vital importance. These two themes, along with Kierkegaard’s account of repetition, are fundamentally important in Cavell’s own work in the philosophy of film, specifically in what Cavell calls the “comedies of remarriage” and the “melodramas of the unknown woman.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martha Nussbaum on Dickens's Hard TimesPaulette KidderAt the heart of Martha Nussbaum's work in capability ethics is a rejection of utilitarianism. Nussbaum has repeatedly recounted a pivotal moment in Dickens's Hard Times (1854), in which the young Sissy Jupe delivers an innocent but devastating critique of the utilitarian system.1 Nussbaum's most extended and compelling reading of Hard Times appears in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life.2 Nussbaum (...) convincingly shows that Dickens's novel is a "deep attack" on utilitarianism, going to the heart of the assumption that the human good consists in maximizing the satisfaction of preferences of the greatest aggregate of persons.In what follows, I will review Nussbaum's philosophical reading of the novel and its critique of utilitarianism, and then return to Hard Times to show that Nussbaum has systematically omitted references to the Biblical themes and references that pervade the novel. Arguing that Dickens's attack on utilitarianism draws much of its power from the resonance of these historically rooted symbols of transcendence, I will conclude with a reflection on the reasons for Nussbaum's avoidance of these themes in her own reading of the book.Hard Times, which focuses on a set of characters living in the polluted and class-divided manufacturing city of "Coketown," is known as Dickens's most polemical novel. The novel announces its central theme immediately in the opening speech by Thomas Gradgrind to the young students of the Gradgrind School: "Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach [End Page 417] these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else...."3From the youngest age, the children in Gradgrind's school are taught to avoid wonder and imagination and only to focus on science and mathematics—the study of what is observable and measurable. This education leaves his two eldest children, Tom and Louisa, miserably unequipped for the choices they face as adults. Young Tom Gradgrind grows up to be an undisciplined wastrel, incurring gambling debts that lead him to embezzle money and then to frame a factory worker, Stephen Blackpool, for the crime. Louisa Gradgrind endures a miserable marriage to her father's wealthy friend, Josiah Bounderby.At the moral center of the novel is Sissy Jupe, a girl who proves impervious to Gradgrind's educational system. Sissy, the daughter of a horse trainer who works for Sleary's Circus, is abandoned by her father and taken into the Gradgrind home. Sharing the moral center with Sissy is Stephen Blackpool, a weaver whose honesty and conviction cause him to run afoul of both his employer Bounderby and the demagogic Slackbridge, organizer for the trade union.In her reading of Hard Times, Nussbaum identifies four elements of utilitarianism: commensurability, aggregation, maximizing, and exogenous preferences, all of which are both dramatized in the novel and critiqued by it (PJ, p. 14). Commensurability means that "all the valuable things under consideration [are regarded as] valuable because they contain some one thing that itself varies only in quantity" (PJ, p. 14). Characters that Dickens presents as memorable individuals are seen by Gradgrind's system as "parcels of human nature." Students in Gradgrind's School are called by number instead of name, and the workers of Coke-town are seen as "hands and stomachs," and are likened to "ants and beetles." Individuality is erased by what Nussbaum terms Gradgrind's "abstracting mathematical mind" (PJ, p. 21).Aggregation, the second utilitarian element, means that data about individual lives is pooled, "without regarding the boundaries between lives as especially salient for the purposes of choice" (p. 14). Louisa Gradgrind is taught, for example, to view the working classes as "Something to be worked so much and paid so much, and there ended; something to be infallibly settled by laws of supply and demand; something that blundered against those laws, and floundered into difficulty; something that was a little pinched when wheat was dear, and overate itself when wheat was cheap... But, she had scarcely thought more of separating [End Page 418] [the people of Coketown] into units, than of separating the sea itself into its... (shrink)

1. The practice of morality raises the following two closely related questions in semantics and philosophical psychology: What do moral sentences mean? And what does it mean to make a moral judgeme...

According to non-cognitivism, moral sentences and judgements do not aim to represent how things morally are. This paper presents an empirical argument against this view. We begin by showing that non-cognitivism entails the prediction that after some reflection competent ordinary speakers’ semantic intuitions favor that moral sentences and judgements do not aim to represent how things morally are. At first sight, this prediction may seem to have been confirmed by previous research on folk metaethics. However, a number of methodological worries (...) lead us to doubt this interpretation. We, therefore, conducted a psychological study that alleviates these worries as far as possible. It turned out that competent ordinary speakers’ reflective semantic intuitions dominantly fail to favor that moral sentences do not aim to represent how things morally are. This challenge to non-cognitivism is defended and supplemented by considering deflationary theories of moral truth and middle ground theories in the cognitivism/non-cognitivism debate. (shrink)

Persons with dementia often prefer to participate in decisions about their health care, but may be prevented from doing so because healthcare decision-making law facilitates use of advance directives or surrogate decision makers for persons with decisional impairments such as dementia. Federal and state disability law provide alternative decision-making models that do not prevent persons with mild to moderate dementia from making their own healthcare decisions at the time the decision needs to be made. In order to better promote autonomy (...) and wellbeing, persons with dementia should be accommodated and supported so they can make their own healthcare decisions. (shrink)

This reader has been assembled in response to increasing dissatisfaction among a growing number of international relations scholars with the currently dominant theory of realism as well as in recognition of the large number of newly independent states which are having to write new constitutions and develop foreign relations. The book includes excerpts and essays from political theory and international relations which provide a starting point for further study of these subjects. It draws together writings representing two distinct traditions and (...) demonstrates their interconnections. In political theory, excerpts are drawn from classical texts which have an important bearing on problems of international relations. In international relations, the collection includes essays which have had a seminal influence on the development of this discipline. (shrink)

Greek text, english translation and commentary on the surviving fragments of Empedocles (fragments as known in 1981, does not include more recent finds).

Scientific literacy is an essential aspect of an undergraduate education. Recipes for Science responds to this need by providing an accessible introduction to the nature of science and scientific methods appropriate for any beginning college student. The book is adaptable to a wide variety of different courses, such as introductions to scientific reasoning, methods courses in scientific disciplines, science education, and philosophy of science. -/- Recipes for Science ​​was first published in 2018, and a thoroughly revised second edition was published (...) in 2024. Special features include contemporary and historical case studies from many fields of physical, life, and social sciences; visual aids to clarify and illustrate ideas; text boxes to explore related topics; plenty of exercises to support student recall and application of concepts; suggestions for further readings at the end of each chapter; a glossary with helpful definitions of key terms; and a companion website with course syllabi, PowerPoint presentations, additional exercises, and original short videos on key topics. (shrink)

This book addresses the interrelation between theological thinking and the complex and diverse realms of human ideals. What are the ideals appropriate to our moment in human history, and how do these ideals derive from or relate to theological reflection in our time? In Theological Reflection and the Pursuit of Ideals internationally renowned scholars from a range of disciplines engage with these crucial questions with the intention of articulating a new and historically appropriate vision of theological reflection and the pursuit (...) of ideals for our global times. (shrink)

In this essay, I analyze pregnancy loss from a feminist phenomenological perspective. I draw upon relational accounts of personhood wherein a person's status and identity are formed through a lived history and the activity of “calling into personhood” a being a woman may seek to know or become. I draw upon the work of Simone de Beauvoir, who advances a feminist phenomenology that grounds the status and identity of women within embodied situations. Her important work sheds light on the varied (...) perceptions and processes that inform experiences of pregnancy and pregnancy loss. (shrink)

This chapter develops an account of epistemic nihilism—roughly, the rejection of truth’s intrinsic or instrumental value in favor of statements that reject or obscure truth to secure an advantage for the speaker—by examining three instances of such nihilism: lying, bullshit, and trolling. It further argues that epistemic nihilism, exacerbated by changes in the media landscape, can pose a significant threat to liberal democratic institutions and ideals by undermining the democratic ideal of good faith engagement on a level playing field, while (...) also encouraging undemocratic actions (e.g., terrorism) among interlocutors who take the nihilist’s claims seriously. Finally, this chapter argues that in extreme cases, we are justified in denying epistemic nihilists a platform from which to speak by drawing a parallel with vexatious litigant laws that deny individuals the right to petition courts for redress on the grounds that abuse of that right results in significant harm to both individuals and the legal system itself. (shrink)

In this article I contrast 17th and 18th explanations of hysteria including those of Sydenham and Willis with those given by Plato and pre-modern medicine. I show that beginning in the second decade of the 17th century the locus of the disorder was transferred to the nervous system and it was no longer connected with the womb as in Hippocrates and Galen; hysteria became identified with hypochondria, and was a disease contracted by men as well as women. I discuss the (...) purely mechanical explanation of hysteria given by Robert Boyle who attributed its cause to corporeal ideas as well as overly sensitive disposition of the nervous system. I relate this the mechanical theory of the nervous system prominent in Descartes' writings on physiology. The paper closes with a discussion of the contrast between early modern explanations of hysteria and the nature of man with those of Freud in the early 20th century. (shrink)

In order to entertain the argument to be presented here, you have to begin by casting away a presupposition. The ultimate aim will be to restore it again as a presupposition, but the immediate aim will be to test for and make clear its undoubted worth and usefulness by imagining what happens to our knowledge-system when we remove it.

§I. Anti-realism of the sort which Michael Dummett has expounded takes issue with the traditional idea that an understanding of any statement (here, declarative sentence) is philosophically correctly analysed as involving grasp of conditions necessary and sufficient for its truth. Many kinds of statement to which, as we ordinarily think, we attach a clear sense would have to be represented, according to this tradition, as possessingverification-transcendenttruth-conditions; if true that is to say, they would be so in virtue of circumstances of (...) a type transcending our range of possible awareness. Exactly where to draw the boundaries of our possible awareness might be controversial; but there is clearly no being aware, in the relevant sense, of the kind of state of affairs which would make true a generalization of theoretical physics, an assertion about James II weight on his twenty-eighth birthday, a claim about what would have happened if Edward Heath had not sought a fresh mandate during the miners' strike, or—from your point of view—the statement that my left ear aches. In each of these kinds of case the traditional view, while granting that we (or you) cannot experience the truth-conferring states of affairs as such, would nevertheless credit us with a clear conception of the type of thing they would be. To be sure, there is then no possibility of a straightforward construal of this conception as a recognitional capacity. But the traditional view tends to conceal from itself the problematic status which the alleged grasp of truth-conditions therefore assumes by working with the picture that the ‘conception’ isindirectlyrecognitional, that itissues ina cluster of unproblematic recognitional capacities; in particular, the ability to recognize what is or is not good evidence for the relevant statement and the ability to recognize its logical relations to other statements. (shrink)