Since Saul Kripke’s influential work in the 1970s, the revisionary approach to semantic paradox—the idea that semantic paradoxes must be solved by weakening classical logic—has been increasingly popular. In this paper, we present a new revenge argument to the effect that the main revisionary approaches breed new paradoxes that they are unable to block.

I provide an account of feeling revengeful and I do so while rejecting the view that anger is ‘the emotion’ of revenge and that to be angry, conceptually, is to have a desire for vengeance. My aim is to challenge us to see the complex dimensions of revenge as feeling(s), which will also disprove the above views. I also make a case for precision in the ways we describe our affective states and trouble the tendency to necessarily link (...) anger to revenge, anger’s action tendency to vengeance, and view angry people as ‘the avengers.’ -/- . (shrink)

In contrast to the vast literature on retributive theories of punishment, discussions of private revenge are rare in moral philosophy. This paper reviews some examples, from both classical and recent writers, finding uncertainty and equivocation over the ethical significance of acts of revenge, and in particular over their possible resemblances, in motive, purpose or justification, to acts of lawful punishment. A key problem for the coherence of our ethical conception of revenge is the consideration that certain acts (...) of revenge may be just (at least in the minimal sense that the victim of revenge has no grounds for complaint against the revenger) and yet be generally agreed to be morally wrong. The challenge of explaining adequately why private revenge is morally wrong poses particular difficulty for purely retributive theories of punishment, since without invoking consequentialist reasons it does not seem possible adequately to motivate an objection to just and proportionate acts of revenge. (shrink)

In the last few years, many countries have introduced laws combating the phenomenon colloquially known as ‘revenge porn’. While new laws criminalising this practice represent a positive step forwards, the legislative response has been piecemeal and typically focuses only on the practices of vengeful ex-partners. Drawing on Liz Kelly’s pioneering work, we suggest that ‘revenge porn’ should be understood as just one form of a range of gendered, sexualised forms of abuse which have common characteristics, forming what we (...) are conceptualising as the ‘continuum of image-based sexual abuse’. Further, we argue that image-based sexual abuse is on a continuum with other forms of sexual violence. We suggest that this twin approach may enable a more comprehensive legislative and policy response that, in turn, will better reflect the harms to victim-survivors and lead to more appropriate and effective educative and preventative strategies. (shrink)

The vast majority of putative solutions to the liar paradox face the infamous revenge problem. In recent work, however, Kevin Scharp has extensively developed an exciting and highly novel “inconsistency approach” to the paradox that, he claims, does not face revenge. If Scharp is right, then this represents a significant step forward in our attempts to solve the liar paradox. However, in this paper, I raise a revenge problem that faces Scharp's inconsistency approach.

The paper offers a solution to the semantic paradoxes, one in which (1) we keep the unrestricted truth schema “True(A)↔A”, and (2) the object language can include its own metalanguage. Because of the first feature, classical logic must be restricted, but full classical reasoning applies in “ordinary” contexts, including standard set theory. The more general logic that replaces classical logic includes a principle of substitutivity of equivalents, which with the truth schema leads to the general intersubstitutivity of True(A) with A (...) within the language.The logic is also shown to have the resources required to represent the way in which sentences (like the Liar sentence and the Curry sentence) that lead to paradox in classical logic are “defective”. We can in fact define a hierarchy of “defectiveness” predicates within the language. Contrary to claims that any solution to the paradoxes just breeds further paradoxes (“revenge problems”) involving defectiveness predicates, there is a general consistency/conservativeness proof that shows that talk of truth and the various “levels of defectiveness” can all be made coherent together within a single object language. (shrink)

The Liar paradox raises foundational questions about logic, language, and truth (and semantic notions in general). A simple Liar sentence like 'This sentence is false' appears to be both true and false if it is either true or false. For if the sentence is true, then what it says is the case; but what it says is that it is false, hence it must be false. On the other hand, if the statement is false, then it is true, since it (...) says (only) that it is false. -/- How, then, should we classify Liar sentences? Are they true or false? A natural suggestion would be that Liars are neither true nor false; that is, they fall into a category beyond truth and falsity. This solution might resolve the initial problem, but it beckons the Liar's revenge. A sentence that says of itself only that it is false or beyond truth and falsity will, in effect, bring back the initial problem. The Liar's revenge is a witness to the hydra-like nature of Liars: in dealing with one Liar you often bring about another. -/- JC Beall presents fourteen new essays and an extensive introduction, which examine the nature of the Liar paradox and its resistance to any attempt to solve it. Written by some of the world's leading experts in the field, the papers in this volume will be an important resource for those working in truth studies, philosophical logic, and philosophy of language, as well as those with an interest in formal semantics and metaphysics. (shrink)

Minimizing the costs that others impose upon oneself and upon those in whom one has a fitness stake, such as kin and allies, is a key adaptive problem for many organisms. Our ancestors regularly faced such adaptive problems. One solution to this problem is to impose retaliatory costs on an aggressor so that the aggressor and other observers will lower their estimates of the net benefits to be gained from exploiting the retaliator in the future. We posit that humans have (...) an evolved cognitive system that implements this strategy – deterrence – which we conceptualize as a revenge system. The revenge system produces a second adaptive problem: losing downstream gains from the individual on whom retaliatory costs have been imposed. We posit, consequently, a subsidiary computational system designed to restore particular relationships after cost-imposing interactions by inhibiting revenge and motivating behaviors that signal benevolence for the harmdoer. The operation of these systems depends on estimating the risk of future exploitation by the harmdoer and the expected future value of the relationship with the harmdoer. We review empirical evidence regarding the operation of these systems, discuss the causes of cultural and individual differences in their outputs, and sketch their computational architecture. (shrink)

Revenge has been a subject of concern in most intellectual traditions throughout history, and even when social norms regard it as permissible or even obligatory, it is commonly recognised as being more counterproductive than beneficial. In this book, Kit R. Christensen explores this provocative issue, offering an in-depth account of both the nature of revenge and the causes and consequences of the desire for this kind of retaliatory violence. He then develops a version of eudaimonistic consequentialism to argue (...) that vengeance is never morally justified, and applies this to cases of intergroup violence where the lust for revenge against a vilified 'Them' is easily incited and often exploited. His study will interest a wide range of readers in moral philosophy as well as social philosophers, legal theorists, and social/behavioural scientists. (shrink)

_The Revenge of History_ is a frontal assault on the widely accepted idea that the East European revolutions of 1989 mark the death of socialism. Alex Callinicos seeks to vindicate the classical Marxist tradition by arguing that socialism in this tradition can only come from below, through the self-activity of the working class. Stalinism from this standpoint was a counterrevolution, erecting at the end of the 1920s a state capitalist regime on the ruins of the radically democratic socialism briefly (...) achieved in October 1917. Callinicos argues that the collapse of Stalinism at the end of the 1980s is one aspect of a worldwide transition from nationally organized to globally integrated capitalism. The result is likely to be greater economic and political instability. Against this background socialism—in Marx's sense—is all the more necessary. Callinicos contends that Marx's vision of a classless communist society would be both practically feasible and profoundly democratic. He concludes that the collapse of Stalinism should be less the moment to abandon socialism than to resume unfinished business. (shrink)

Minimizing the costs that others impose upon oneself and upon those in whom one has a fitness stake, such as kin and allies, is a key adaptive problem for many organisms. Our ancestors regularly faced such adaptive problems. One solution to this problem is to impose retaliatory costs on an aggressor so that the aggressor and other observers will lower their estimates of the net benefits to be gained from exploiting the retaliator in the future. We posit that humans have (...) an evolved cognitive system that implements this strategy which we conceptualize as a revenge system. The revenge system produces a second adaptive problem: losing downstream gains from the individual on whom retaliatory costs have been imposed. We posit, consequently, a subsidiary computational system designed to restore particular relationships after cost-imposing interactions by inhibiting revenge and motivating behaviors that signal benevolence for the harmdoer. The operation of these systems depends on estimating the risk of future exploitation by the harmdoer and the expected future value of the relationship with the harmdoer. We review empirical evidence regarding the operation of these systems, discuss the causes of cultural and individual differences in their outputs, and sketch their computational architecture. (shrink)

In this paper I revisit an important response to the Moral Twin Earth (MTE) challenge: The Common Functional Role strategy (CFR). I argue that CFR is open to a revenge problem. MTE-cases allegedly show that two linguistic communities can be in genuine disagreement even when they are regulated by distinct families of properties. CFR provides a way to reconcile the intuition that the two communities are in genuine disagreement with the claim that the use of moral terms by both (...) communities is causally regulated by different families of properties. This is done by identifying a functional role that those families of properties both fulfill. Still, even if CFR is successful, its proponents need to face a serious revenge problem. Roughly, it could be that the families of properties that regulate each community are equally perfect realizers of the relevant higher-order functional state. I suggest that the proponent of CFR faces a dilemma: either CFR has controversial implications about first-order moral theory, or CFR needs to be coupled with substantive and parochial empirical/metaphysical assumptions to avoid those implications. (shrink)

Liberal government, as analysed by Foucault, is a project of measured, utilitarian political activity, that takes ‘population’ as its object, dating back to the late 17th century. The rise of nationalism, authoritarianism and populism directly challenges this project, by seeking to re-introduce excessive, gratuitous and performative modes of power back into liberal societies. This article examines the relationship and tensions between government and sovereignty, so as to make sense of this apparent ‘revenge of sovereignty on government’. It argues that (...) neoliberalism has been a crucial factor in the return of sovereignty as a ‘problem’ of contemporary societies. Neoliberalism tacitly generates new centres of sovereign power, which have become publicly visible since 2008, leading to a dramatic resurgence of discourses and claims to ‘sovereignty’. (shrink)

Dissertation Summary—Mark Taylor My dissertation explores forgiveness and revenge within a narrative conception of human lives. In Chapter One, I lay out an account of human life stories and argue for its advantages in understanding the value of redemption. In particular, I suggest that the goods we care about in our lives depend on their integration into the way we see ourselves as persons who exist through time. Forgiveness and revenge can recontextualize moments from our past and infuse (...) them with a new meaning. Building on Peter Goldie’s work, I identify unity, purpose, direction, and truth as qualities of life stories toward which forgiveness contributes. I examine some of the psychological literature to understand the role our internal narrative plays in making sense of the world (and the lack of sense when that narrative fails). I conclude by defending against a well-known objection from Galen Strawson against narrative analysis. In Chapter Two I take up a qualified defense of the rationality of revenge. My motivation in doing so is a link in the logic between revenge and forgiveness. If revenge is always straightforwardly irrational, forgiveness is undermined. My strategy to defend revenge is to give a taxonomy characterizing it and then pick out its most justifiable form. I argue that revenge at its best is a form of caring about one’s past, or the past of a loved one. I defend this form of revenge against various objections, especially that it is pointless or involves a rational error about one’s own untouchable value as a person. I argue that the point of revenge is to ‘change the ending’ of the offender and victim’s relationship. I also argue that focus on objective value misses the point: what is threatened is not the victim’s objective value as a person, but the value of a life story worth having. In Chapter Three I lay out my own account of forgiveness. I first provide several characteristic features of forgiveness, and then describe two camps in the literature that disagree about whether forgiveness is primarily a private matter of the heart or a public matter of treatment. I then argue for what I call ‘inaugurated forgiveness’ as a synthesis between these emotional and behavioral views. I suggest that forgiveness begins with a commitment toward the offender, but takes time to come to its emotional culmination. The nature of that commitment is a second-order endorsement of the desires of love over the desires of resentment. I also highlight the importance of hope as the operative forward-looking virtue rather than trust. Forgiveness involves committing oneself to openness to eventual redemption and reconciliation, but does not require the unjustified trust that the offender can be redeemed or reconciled at the moment of forgiveness. In Chapter Four I examine the underlying reasons for forgiving and avenging. I argue that personal reasons have a legitimate role to play in these practices, rather than merely impersonal considerations. Impersonal reasons, such as generic respect for personhood, or desert, play a dominant role in the literature where a major concern is to find a justification of forgiveness within a moral justice conception. Personal reasons are tied to the basic cares and commitments of a life, and these projects are what the life is about as a whole. There is thus an important connection between the narrative direction of a life and its ground projects. Forgiving for personal reasons is a way of giving appropriate weight to the particular life one has. I argue that personal reasons give us a way of understanding how forgiveness is elective and generous. I conclude by using this analysis to briefly outline some strategies for arguing for forgiveness over revenge. For example, I suggest that arguments against revenge need to begin from the victim’s ground projects, such as each person’s commitment to seeing the world truly, or the desire for one’s community to flourish; I suggest that forgiveness usually allows better epistemic access, and better protects one’s intimates. (shrink)

According to the paradigm of adaptive rationality, successful inference and prediction methods tend to be local and frugal. As a complement to work within this paradigm, we investigate the problem of selecting an optimal combination of prediction methods from a given toolbox of such local methods, in the context of changing environments. These selection methods are called meta-inductive strategies, if they are based on the success-records of the toolbox-methods. No absolutely optimal MI strategy exists—a fact that we call the “ (...) class='Hi'>revenge of ecological rationality”. Nevertheless one can show that a certain MI strategy exists, called “AW”, which is universally long-run optimal, with provably small short-run losses, in comparison to any set of prediction methods that it can use as input. We call this property universal access-optimality. Local and short-run improvements over AW are possible, but only at the cost of forfeiting universal access-optimality. The last part of the paper includes an empirical study of MI strategies in application to an 8-year-long data set from the Monash University Footy Tipping Competition. (shrink)

It is an assumption widely shared by both retributivists and anti-retributivists that revenge is a morally impermissible basis for inflicting harm. Retributivists have thus exercised great ingenuity in demonstrating that retribution is fundamentally different from revenge. But this is, I argue, to misconstrue the problem. The problem is rather to recognize the essential continuity between revenge and retribution, and to address the question whether there is a moral basis for the very idea of inflicting harm in response (...) to moral wrongdoing. I argue that the only plausible such moral justification is the defense of honor, and that the debate needs to be focused on the legitimacy of honor as a moral basis for punishment. (shrink)

The problem of punishment -- Punishment as crime prevention -- Can retributive punishment be justified? -- The mixed theory of punishment -- Retribution and revenge -- What is the purpose of retribution? -- Making sense of honor -- Is punishment justified?

The Liar paradox raises foundational questions about logic, language, and truth. A simple Liar sentence like 'This sentence is false' appears to be both true and false if it is either true or false. For if the sentence is true, then what it says is the case; but what it says is that it is false, hence it must be false. On the other hand, if the statement is false, then it is true, since it says that it is false.How, (...) then, should we classify Liar sentences? Are they true or false? A natural suggestion would be that Liars are neither true nor false; that is, they fall into a category beyond truth and falsity. This solution might resolve the initial problem, but it beckons the Liar's revenge. A sentence that says of itself only that it is false or beyond truth and falsity will, in effect, bring back the initial problem. The Liar's revenge is a witness to the hydra-like nature of Liars: in dealing with one Liar you often bring about another.JC Beall presents fourteen new essays and an extensive introduction, which examine the nature of the Liar paradox and its resistance to any attempt to solve it. Written by some of the world's leading experts in the field, the papers in this volume will be an important resource for those working in truth studies, philosophical logic, and philosophy of language, as well as those with an interest in formal semantics and metaphysics. (shrink)

Despite its common use in both literature and popular discourse, the concept of “poetic justice” in which a wrong-doer is harmed by his own crimes has been completely ignored by both literary and philosophical scholars. We can learn more about it by comparing its charms to those of its more popular cousin, revenge. Each can assuage our resentment at the wrong-doer’s contempt of human suffering, promises to teach a moral lesson, and can borrow some moral justification from the golden (...) rule. Their satisfactions are often deceptive, but it behooves us to understand the attractions of each. (shrink)

"To some people, life is very simple . . . no shadings and grays, all blacks and whites. . . . Now, others of us find that good, bad, right, wrong, are many-sided, complex things. We try to see every side; but the more we see, the less sure we are." —Sir John Talbot, The Wolf Man (Universal Pictures, 1941).

In certain respects, contemporary thought treats the politics of revenge with disdain while celebrating and employing a politics that is decidedly nostalgic. And yet, following Nietzsche’s work regarding the inherent vengefulness of nostalgic political programs, one is led to an impasse. This article attempts to make plain for politics what is at stake in Nietzsche’s account of revenge, and how political and social action might navigate the distance between revenge and nostalgia. The article brings the thought of (...) Nietzsche and Heidegger together in a new way by asking whether and how Heidegger’s thought could suffer from a hidden vengefulness by adopting a nostalgic pose, one that haunts Nietzsche’s own drive for overcoming. Through an elucidation of the difference between nostalgia and revenge, the article gestures towards the nostalgic and vengeful possibilities that politics holds. (shrink)

Revenge appears among a of social interactions that includes competition, alliance building (a prerequisite for tribal revenge raids), and so forth. Rather than a modular directly reflecting evolutionary fitness constraints, revenge may be (another) social cost-benefit calculation involving potential or actual aggression and proximately controlled by individual personality characteristics and beliefs that can work against fitness.

McCullough et al. argue that revenge has a future-oriented function, that is, to deter future harms by changing other individuals' incentives toward the self. Recent research has shown that people seek revenge even when harms are unintentional. This commentary reports these results and proposes that revenge may also serve to reduce the immediate psychological pain resulting from unfair treatment.

Although there has been a recent swell of interest in theories of truth that attempt solutions to the liar paradox and the other paradoxes affecting our concept of truth, many of these theories have been criticized for generating new paradoxes, called revenge paradoxes. The criticism is that the theories of truth in question are inadequate because they only work for languages lacking in the resources to generate revenge paradoxes. Theorists facing these objections offer a range of replies, and (...) the matter seems now to be at a standoff. I aim, first, to bolster the revenge objections by considering a relation, internalizability, between languages and theories of truth. A theory of truth is internalizable for a language iff there is an extension of that language in which the theory is expressible and for which the theory provides an accurate and complete assignment of semantic values. There are good reasons to think that acceptable theories of truth are internalizable for any language. With this internalizability requirement in hand, I argue that properly formulated revenge objections are decisive and that the replies to them are inadequate. Second, I show that the internalizability requirement can be met by a certain theory of truth. The central claim of this theory is that truth is an inconsistent concept and should be replaced with a pair of consistent concepts that can then be used to provide a semantics for our truth predicates. This theory is compatible with classical logic, does not give rise to revenge paradoxes of any kind, and satisfies the internalizability requirement. (shrink)

Empirical results suggest that defocusing attention results in primary process or associative thought, conducive to finding unusual connections, while focusing attention results in secondary process or analytic thought, conducive to rule-based operations. Creativity appears to involve both. It is widely believed that it is possible to escape mental fixation by spontaneously and temporarily engaging in a more divergent or associative mode of thought. The resulting insight may be refined in a more analytic mode of thought. The question addressed here is: (...) how does the architecture of memory support these two modes of thought, and what is happening at the neural level when one shifts between them? Recent advances in neuroscience shed light on this. It was demonstrated that activated cell assemblies are composed of multiple ‘neural cliques’, groups of neurons that respond differentially to general or context-specific aspects of a situation. I refer to neural cliques that would not be included in the assembly if one were in an analytic mode, but would be if one were in an associative mode, as ‘neurds’. It is posited that the shift to a more associative mode of thought conducive to insight is accomplished by recruiting neurds that respond to abstract or atypical subsymbolic microfeatures of the problem or situation. Since memory is distributed and content-addressable this fosters remindings and the forging of creative connections to potentially relevant items previously encoded in those neurons. Thus it is proposed that creative thought involves neither randomness, nor search through a space of predefined alternatives, but emerges naturally through the recruitment of neurds. It is suggested this occurs when there is a need to resolve conceptual gaps in ones’ internal model of the world, and resolution involves context-driven actualization of the potentiality afforded by its fine-grained associative structure. (shrink)

A powerful and moving philosophical reflection on revenge and forgiveness in our contemporary, conflict-fuelled world.

Recent developments in astrophysical cosmology have revived support for the design argument among a growing clique of astrophysicists. I show that the scientific/mathematical evidence cited in support of intelligent design of the universe is infected with a mathematical sharp practice: the concepts of two numbers being of the same order of magnitude, and of being within an order of each other, have been stretched from their proper meanings so as to doctor the numbers evidentially. This practice started with A. S. (...) Eddington and P. A. M. Dirac in the 1920s and 1930s, but it is still very much alive today. 1 Introduction 2 The birth of a sharp practice 3 High tide for the anthropic principle 4 How not to do things with numbers 5 The recalcitrant sloppiness of crud 6 How excited can excited carbon-12 be? 7 Is a pile of doubts a doubtful pile? 8 Conclusion. (shrink)

This commentary discusses dozens of ecologically powerful social-psychological experiments from the1960s and 1970s, which are highly relevant especially for predicting the consequences of revenge. McCullough et al. omitted this work catharsisni's anger-aggression bidirectional-causation (AABC) model and can be usefully incorporated in an adaptationist view of revenge.

ABSTRACTThis paper analyses Daybreak 138 closely line by line in order to examine whether Nietzsche's conclusion that ‘there is something degrading in suffering and something elevating and productive of superiority in pitying ’ truly holds. I shall argue that it does not. By way of objection to Nietzsche's conclusion, I am offering a counter example and also examine what, in the context of Daybreak 138, gratitude, revenge, and Mitleid have in common so that they can be used by Nietzsche (...) to pursue together a common goal. I suggest that the feature gratitude, revenge and Mitleid have in common is their usefulness to establish or maintain equality. (shrink)

The first half of this paper defends the claim revenge is a personal good. That is, it is the sort of thing, the pursuit of which, for oneself, always provides a reason for action. This makes trouble for the dominant philosophical view of the relation between morality and practical reason: a view held by theorists we can call ‘Angels’. Angels hold that moral requirements are also rational requirements. Devils, on the other hand, hold that immoral behavior is at least (...) sometimes rationally required, so that one would have to act against reason to do what is right. The position in the largely undefended space between the Angels and the Devils is occupied by those we can call ‘Humans’. Humans acknowledge that immoral behavior is sometimes rationally permissible, but they also hold that it is never rationally required. The second half of the paper explains how one can endorse the view that revenge is a good without becoming a Devil. It also argues that the goodness of revenge supports the existence of a theoretically interesting kind of reason: a purely justifying reason. (shrink)

A depraved conscience is the most destructive force in political life. J. Budziszewski incisively demonstrates that modern ideologies all deny the fallen nature that is the source of the three great problems of public life; we do wrong, our thinking about the wrong we do is clouded, and our efforts to rectify that wrong are themselves deformed by sin. Blinded to this truth about ourselves, we habitually suppress our conscience until it is corrupted and, taking its revenge, leads us (...) to cultural calamity. Describing the political effects of Original Sin, Dr. Budziszewski shows how man's suppression of his knowledge of right and wrong corrupts his conscience and accelerates social collapse. The depraved conscience grasps at the illusion of "moral neutrality", the absurd notion that men can live together without a shared understanding of how things are. The revenge of conscience is horrifically manifest today in abortion, euthanasia, and suicide, evils brought about by the pollution of good impulses such as pity, prudence, honor, and love. The way out of this confusion, he concludes, is a return to Christianity, whose troubling memory men now suppress along with their knowledge of natural law. (shrink)

By 1999, the Falun Gong religious movement had spread widely and broadly throughout China. While on the surface its ideology of spiritual and physical cultivation did not seem threatening, the Chinese government felt otherwise. That year, the government cracked down hard on the movement, and its successful repression of it over a six year period is a textbook example of how the Chinese state operates in the face of perceived internal threats. Its success in containing the movement speaks volumes about (...) the regime's resilience as well. Revenge of the Forbidden City is the definitive account of China's response to Falun Gong. As James Tong shows, the episode also tells us a great deal about the Chinese state's political institutions, its media apparatus, and its formidable ability to crush dissent. The result is a book that will be essential for any scholar interested in how the Chinese state actually operates. (shrink)

Davidson advocates a radical and powerful form of anti-conventionalism, on which the scope of a semantic theory is restricted to the most local of contexts: a particular utterance by a particular speaker. I argue that this hyper-localism undercuts the explanatory grounds for his assumption that semantic meaning is systematic, which is central, among other things, to his holism. More importantly, it threatens to undercut the distinction between word meaning and speaker’s meaning, which he takes to be essential to semantics. I (...) argue that a moderate form of conventionalism can restore systematicity and the word/speaker distinction while accommodating Davidson’s insights about the complexities and contextual variability of language use. (shrink)

Note: This is a "pre-review" version, not the final version that will be published. -/- In “Nothing is True,” Will Gamester defends a form of alethic nihilism that still grants truth-talk a kind of legitimacy: an expressive role that is implemented via a pretense. He argues that this view has all of the strengths of deflationism, while also providing an elegant resolution of the Liar Paradox and its kin. For the alethic nihilist, Liar and related sentences are not true, and (...) that is the end of the story. No contradiction arises because it does not thereby follow that any of these sentences are also true, since nothing is. Gamester concludes that the simplicity of this response to the semantic paradoxes makes alethic nihilism an attractive approach. We disagree. In addition to providing insurmountable obstacles for his form of alethic nihilism, we contend that a certain form of non-nihilist deflationism is better placed to deal with the paradoxes and to account for truth-talk more generally. (shrink)

We question whether the postulated revenge and forgiveness systems constitute true adaptations. Revenge and forgiveness are the products of multiple motivational systems and capacities, many of which did not exclusively evolve to support deterrence. Anger is more aptly construed as an adaptation that organizes independent mechanisms to deter transgressors than as the mediator of a distinct revenge adaptation.

Forgiveness and Revenge is a powerful exploration of our attitudes to serious wrongdoings and a careful examination of the values that underlie our thinking about revenge and forgiveness. From adulterous spouses to terrorist factions, we are surrounded by wrongdoing, yet we rarely agree which response is appropriate. The problem of how to respond realistically and sensitively to the wrongs of the past remains a perplexing one. Trudy Govier clarifies our thinking on this subject by examining the moral and (...) practical impact of revenge and forgiveness, both personal and political. Forgiveness and Revenge offers much-needed clarity and reason where emotions often prevail. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the ethics of attitudes to wrongdoing. (shrink)

Is there a notion of contradiction—let us call it, for dramatic effect, “absolute”—making all contradictions, so understood, unacceptable also for dialetheists? It is argued in this paper that there is, and that spelling it out brings some theoretical benefits. First it gives us a foothold on undisputed ground in the methodologically difficult debate on dialetheism. Second, we can use it to express, without begging questions, the disagreement between dialetheists and their rivals on the nature of truth. Third, dialetheism has an (...) operator allowing it, against the opinion of many critics, to rule things out and manifest disagreement: for unlike other proposed exclusion-expressing-devices (for instance, the entailment of triviality), the operator used to formulate the notion of absolute contradiction appears to be immune both from crippling expressive limitations and from revenge paradoxes—pending a rigorous nontriviality proof for a formal dialetheic theory including it. (shrink)

What if language was an autonomous historical being? What if language’s use was not solely dependent on the intentions of the one who speaks? In this text I will test these provocative statements. Specifically, I will investigate whether language’s proclaimed historical independence can be traced in the usage of the concept of ‘secularisation’, and I will try to unveil the consequences of this operation.Contribution: Has Christianity abandoned the public stage in the ‘secularised’ and industrialised world? In this article I intend (...) to demonstrate that this is not the case. The continuous operative presence of Christianity in our socio-political language is used as the model to prove this argument. (shrink)

Nietzsche's thinking on justice and punishment explores the motives and forces which lie behind moral concepts and social institutions. His dialogue with several writers of his time is discussed here. Eugen Dühring had argued that a natural feeling of ressentiment against those who have harmed us is the source of the concept of injustice, so that punishment, even in its most impersonal form, is always a form of revenge. In attacking this theory, Nietzsche developed his own powerful critique of (...) moral concepts such as responsibility and guilt. He borrowed his ‘historical’ approach to moral concepts from Paul Ree, who suggested that the utilitarian function of punishment had been obscured by its practice, which appears to be directly linked with moral guilt. Nietzsche responds that punishment has quite different purposes and meanings at different times, so that any single explanation or justification is inadequate. In this way, he rejects the pre-suppositions common to the retributivists and utilitarians of his time. (shrink)

Barton’s view in Getting Even: Revenge as a Form of Justice (Open Court Chicago, 19991 is that revenge -- in the form of victim participation in trial. sentencing, and punishment -- should have a large place in criminal justice. I argue that what he suggests in the way of reform has no essential relation with criminal justice.

In this article, I argue that revenge fantasies such as those found in the Oracles Against the Nations in Jeremiah 45-51 underscore the necessity for responsible Bible reading practices. I argue that to protect us from our own worst selves, the very human tendency to resort to revenge that inevitably leads to violence, one needs to read these biblical texts in terms of contemporary hermeneutical approaches that may play some role to bring an end to violence. A first (...) such approach that serves as an important tool to help us understand these revenge fantasies as found in the OAN is the relatively new field of inquiry of trauma hermeneutics that is particularly helpful in order to mitigate the violent aspects of these revenge fantasies. Moreover, I propose that recent approaches such as feminist and postcolonial biblical interpretation are also vital for nurturing ethical, just communities that actively pursue justice. (shrink)

McCullough et al. present a compelling case that anger-based revenge is designed to disincentivize the target from imposing costs on the vengeful individual. Here I present a contrast between revenge motivated by anger and revenge motivated by hatred, which remains largely unexplored in the literature.

: Bodies and Pleasures has been characterized as a confessional discourse that manages to subvert confessional practice. Here it is characterized and discussed as an askesis that works to transform confessional practice as it transforms the writer/reader. Two questions emerge through that transformation: (1) How is race (in particular, whiteness) to be lived? (2) What are the possibilities for political subjectivity in the absence of dualism and the intensification of awareness of our normalization?