Andrew Cullison There is one final worry about bringing emotions into a theory of moral perception that might be best drawn out with an analogy to nonmoral perception. Suppose we were beings with a slightly different nonmoral perceptual apparatus. Suppose phenomenal qualia that we typically experience when we observe objects also showed up in our cognitive life when we weren’t experiencing the presence of an object. Basically, we would periodically have apparent perceptions of objects when there were no objects. Furthermore, (...) suppose we could know that this was sometimes the case. I suspect we would feel rational pressure to be a bit more skeptical about our nonmoral judgments based on perception. One might argue that we’re kind of in that situation if our moral perception apparatus includes an emotional component. We often experience emotions when there is nothing moral about the situation we’re in, and so by analogy to the perception case, we might think that we should be a bit more skeptical about moral judgments. A possible virtue of a moral perception view that didn’t make emotions a component of the view might not have to address this worry, but if emotions are indeed an important part of Audi’s moral perception theory, then it is worth asking why we shouldn’t take ourselves to have some defeaters for moral beliefs. Aaron Bronfman The official topic of John Broome’s Rationality through Reasoning is the “motivation question”: How does the belief that you ought to do something cause you to intend to do that thing? And indeed, the parts of the book do combine to offer an answer to that question. But, as Broome himself suggests, much of the interest comes from the steps along the way. The book greatly expands and develops Broome’s earlier work, drawing rich connections throughout ðaddressing how ought figures in requirements of rationality, how reasons may be defined in terms of ought, whether there is reason to be rational, how rationality is connected to the process of reasoning, etc.Þ. This review considers Broome’s account of four main concepts in turn: ought, reasons, rationality, and reasoning. (shrink)

Our goal here is to help identify the contextualist’s most worthy competitor to relativism. Recently, some philosophers of language and linguists have argued that, while there are contextualist-friendly semantic theories of deontic modals that fit with the relativist’s challenge data, the best such theories are not Lewis-Kratzer-style semantic theories. If correct, this would be important: It would show that the theory that has for many years enjoyed the status of the default view of modals in English and other languages is (...) in need of revision. Here we defend the default view by showing how a Kratzer-style semantics is able to make available readings of the relevant utterances that fit with the pretheoretical judgments opponents purport it cannot fully capture. Having established this, we turn to considering the more theoretical grounds proponents have offered for preferring their rival contextualist views. Here the question is to what extent such grounds favor semantic over what Korta and Perry call “near-side pragmatic” explanations of our judgments. In particular, we argue that our favored readings figure in near-side pragmatic explanations of those judgments that possess the methodological and theoretical advantages of systematicity and unity at least as well as, if not to a greater extent than, those of opponents who argue for their revised semantic theories on the basis of these advantages. (shrink)

Consider someone whom you know to be an expert about some issue. She knows at least as much as you do and reasons impeccably. The issue is a straightforward case of statistical inference that raises no deep problems of epistemology. You happen to know the expert’s opinion on this issue. Should you defer to her by adopting her opinion as your own? An affirmative answer may appear mandatory. But this paper argues that a crucial factor in answering this question is (...) the description under which you identify the expert. Experts may be identified under various descriptions . Section 2 provides cases that illustrate how deference to a known expert may be appropriate under some descriptions, but not others. Section 3 proposes that, in these cases, the differentiating factor is self-identification: deference to an expert under a given description is appropriate when the expert self-identifies under that description. Section 4 presents a formal framework that demonstrates the sufficiency of self-identification for appropriate deference within a significant class of cases. Section 5 notes a way in which this phenomenon allows for a form of “agreeing to disagree” in Robert Aumann’s sense. Section 6 illustrates the practical application of these results to the case of testimonials. (shrink)

The Reflection principle expresses a kind of epistemic deference to one's future self. There is a plausible intuitive argument to the effect that, if one believes one will reason well and gain information over time, then one ought to satisfy Reflection. There are also associated formal arguments that show that, if one's beliefs about one's current and future selves meet certain criteria, then one is committed by the axioms of probability to satisfy Reflection. The formal arguments, however, rely on an (...) assumption that has no apparent relevance to the intuitive argument: the assumption that one has perfect access to one's beliefs. This paper explains why it is advantageous to replace the perfect access assumption with a self-trust assumption. The self-trust assumption is superior from a formal point of view, since it is formally weaker than the perfect access assumption, and from an intuitive point of view, since it leads to an improved formulation of the intuitive argument. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate backward-looking accounts of death's badness. I begin by reviewing deprivationism—the standard, forward-looking account of death's badness. On deprivationism, death is bad for its victims when it deprives them of a good future. This account famously faces two problems—Lucretius’s symmetry problem and the preemption problem. This motivates turning to backward-looking accounts of death's badness on which death is bad for its victim (in a respect) when it involves a decline from a good life. I distinguish three (...) different backward-looking accounts of death's badness in terms of decline, and I argue for the attractiveness of one in particular. I conclude by considering how the backward-looking consideration of decline might factor into our overall account of death's badness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Politics and the Earthly City in Augustine's City of God by Veronica Roberts OgleAaron C. EbertPolitics and the Earthly City in Augustine's City of God by Veronica Roberts Ogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), x + 201 pp.Politics is not a word in Augustine's lexicon—at least, it's not something he speaks of, in the abstract, in his great work of political theology, the City of God. This curious (...) omission from Augustine's late magnum opus et arduum has given rise to many a divergent reading of his political thought. Lacking an express account of the very term in question, his politics can seem to admit of a wide range of interpretations. On one side of the spectrum, it has been described as anticipating the religious neutrality of modern liberalism. On the other side, it has been interpreted as consolidating politics into religion by transposing political philosophy into the key of ecclesiology and making the Church the new realm of politics.1 In her elegantly written and insightful new book, which builds on the work of her 2014 dissertation at the University of Notre Dame and on a few published articles, Veronica Roberts Ogle charts a new interpretive path for reading Augustine on politics. She does this by means of two principal interventions.The first is by elucidating City of God's rhetorical purpose, what Ogle calls its "psychagogic character" (6). Psychagogy, "the art of leading [agô] souls [psychai] to a state of health," was the rhetorical aim and genre of much ancient philosophy (3). It took its cue from the philosopher's perception that his readers were sick with the disease of unhealthy attachment to the things of the world. Philosophers were physicians of the soul: they applied "the medicinal art of contraries" to their sick patients. This meant that their literary curatives often met patients/readers with the bitter taste of a poison (4). But—and this is the crucial point for Ogle—the poison was given for the purpose of health. What this means for Augustine's City of God, Ogle argues, is that we ought not take the work's biting and at-times-venomous rhetoric as evidence that Augustine is trying to poison his reader's vision of politics. Rather, he is trying to cure them of their attachment to the myths and delusions of politics-according-to-Rome and, instead, "to help us see the world, even the political world, anew: as part of a created order that is good, but that points beyond itself all the same" (4). Augustine's descriptions of Rome—indeed his frequent equations of Rome with the civitas [End Page 1426] terrena—are indeed meant to shock. But, so Ogle argues, they are meant to shock us out of destructive attachments so that we can learn to make the right attachments, first to Christ, and then, through Christ, to our earthly communities as pilgrims. City of God's pessimistic rhetoric is not Augustine simply denouncing the natural project of politics. It is a bitter medicine for a people deathly ill with an addiction to earthly glory.The second intervention of Ogle's book lies in its attention to what she calls City of God's "sacramental ethos" (5). This, I would argue, is the book's most important contribution. It is also the insight on which the heart of the book's argument depends. Sacraments, for Augustine, are signs that point us to God. Understood in this broad sense, the whole created order—that is, everything that is not God—has the quality of a sacrament by virtue of its very existence. This is connected closely to Augustine's understanding of evil as privatio boni: all that exists, to the extent that it exists, is good; and all that exists is, by nature, a sign (signum) pointing beyond itself to the Lord.These are not new insights into Augustine's doctrine of creation, but Ogle's application of them to the question of politics and the earthly city is suggestive. For what emerges is a new account of the relationship between politics and the earthly city. The whole created order... (shrink)

The affective sciences are essential to research regarding sustainable transition towards renewable energy. We focus on important questions that should be addressed by affective science in relation to the siting of large-scale renewable energy projects like wind and solar. Considering the recent acceleration of the transition, a more holistic understanding of negative and positive emotional responses to energy development will be essential. This is particularly important as the least controversial sites begin to dwindle in number. We break this commentary down (...) into four primary question categories for future research. These are the causal relationships between emotional elicitations and their sources, dual processing through cognitive and affective response, affect and its relationship with place, and how all of these elements change over time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Vessel of Honor: The Virgin Birth and the Ecclesiology of Vatican II by Brian A. GraebeAaron Pidel S.J.Vessel of Honor: The Virgin Birth and the Ecclesiology of Vatican II. By Brian A. Graebe (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2021), 351 pp.Though Mary's undiminished virginity in giving birth (virginitas in partu) was long understood to be an event as miraculous and a teaching as authoritative as her virginity in conceiving (...) (virginitas ante partum), virginitas in partu underwent a kind of existential reinterpretation in the middle of the twentieth century. Authors such as Albert Mitterer and Karl Rahner suggested that, physically speaking, Jesus's birth might have happened like any other, rupturing the hymen, distending the birth canal, and causing Mary pain, albeit not in the spiritually disintegrating way common to postlapsarian humanity. These arguments effectively "unsettled" the traditional understanding of virginitas in partu, leading theologians of the highest stature to distinguish between the doctrine itself and the anatomical aspects attached to it over time. Fr. Brian Graebe has written a fine book arguing that the bodily dimensions of the virgin birth, including the physical "seal" of virginity, belong to the substance of the doctrine. This more inclusive understanding not only does better justice to the data of tradition, he argues, but illuminates the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council. The book impresses by its theologically reflective method, its clarity of exposition, [End Page 1106] and its depth of research—especially into the archival and antepreparatory sources of Vatican II.Vessel of Honor responds in effect to Rahner's argument that physical intactness is peripheral to the dogmatic core of Mary's virginity in partu. To show otherwise, Rahner contended, one would need to show that such a doctrine can be found directly in the apostolic teaching, or that it, "being implicitly contained therein, has grown out of the apostolic doctrine, by a legitimate historical, logical, and theological process, as its authentic development" (68–69). If the bodily aspects of this doctrine really belonged to the deposit of faith, in other words, one would need to show how they are implied in the traditio divino-apostolica, as well as how they cohere organically with the rest of the deposit. The two major parts of Vessel of Honor respond in turn to each aspect of Rahner's challenge.The first three chapters argue that Mary's bodily integrity in parturition belongs at least implicitly to the traditio divino-apostolica. Turning first to the postapostolic tradition, Fr. Graebe shows that—apart from the early exceptions of Origen and Tertullian—patristic sources either affirm or strongly imply a miraculous delivery. This constant witness culminates in the Lateran Council (649 AD), which, while not itself an ecumenical council, was received into the magisterium of Pope Martin and affirmed by the Third Council of Constantinople (680 AD). Its teaching that Mary "gave birth without corruption" (incorruptibiliter... genuisse) would be defended by Paschasius, Ratramnus, Thomas Aquinas, and others. This consensus remained undisturbed until the eve of Vatican II.Even at Vatican II, Fr. Graebe argues in the next chapter, the Council Fathers intended to reaffirm the more inclusive idea of virginitas in partu against those who would marginalize its bodily dimensions. Here he really breaks new ground, delving deep into the antepreparatory, preparatory, and conciliar drafting history. He shows convincingly that many of the chief drafters of the final formula—"Our Lord, who did not diminish his mother's virginal integrity but sanctified it..." (Lumen Gentium §57)—saw it as excluding Rahner's and Mitterer's minimalizing interpretations. Drawing on material from the Vatican Apostolic Archives, Fr. Graebe shows that some of the very theologians who voted to omit the pointed phrase "in the birth itself" (in ipsomet partu) did so for tonal rather than substantive reasons.The third chapter argues that Mary's physical integrity in birth is to be believed with divine and Catholic faith, despite the ongoing confusion introduced by Rahner and others. Admittedly, Vatican II did not define but merely reaffirmed the traditional understanding of virginitas in partu. But there are other reasons for including it in the traditio divino-apostolica. [End Page 1107] Drawing heavily... (shrink)

Religious healing specialists such as shamans often use magic. Evolutionary theories that seek to explain why laypersons find these specialists convincing focus on the origins of magical cognition and belief in the supernatural. In two studies, we reframe the problem by investigating relationships among ethnomedical specialists, who possess extensive theories of disease that can often appear “supernatural,” and religious healing specialists. In study 1, we coded and analyzed cross-cultural descriptions of ethnomedical specialists in 47 cultures, finding 24% were also religious (...) leaders and 74% used supernatural theories of disease. We identified correlates of the use of supernatural concepts among ethnomedical specialists; incentives and disincentives to patronize ethnomedical specialists; and distinct clusters of ethnomedical specialists that we label prestigious teachers, feared diviners, and efficacious healers. In study 2, we interviewed 84 Maasai pastoralists and their traditional religious and non-religious healing specialists. We found that laypersons relied on medicinal services based on combinations of efficacy, religious identity, and interpersonal trust. Further, laypersons and specialists largely used abstract concepts that were not conspicuously supernatural to describe how local medicines work. We conclude that religious healers in traditional societies often fulfill a practical and specialized service to local clients, and argue that supernatural theories of disease often reflect abstract cognition about rare phenomena whose causes are unobservable (e.g., infection, mental illness) instead of a separate “religious” style of thinking. (shrink)

Kant’s moral philosophy both enjoins the acquisition of self-knowledge as a duty, and precludes certain forms of its acquisition via what has become known as the Opacity Thesis. This article looks at several recent attempts to solve this difficulty and argues that they are inadequate. I argue instead that the Opacity Thesis rules out only the knowledge that one has acted from genuine moral principles, but does not apply in cases of moral failure. The duty of moral self-knowledge applies therefore (...) only to one’s awareness of one’s status as a moral being and to the knowledge of one’s moral failings, both in particular actions and one’s overall character failings, one’s vices. This kind of knowledge is morally salutary as an aid to discovering one’s individual moral weakness as well as the subjective ends for which one acts, and in this way for taking up the morally required end of treating human beings as human beings. In this way, moral self-knowledge can be understood as a necessary element of moral improvement, and I conclude by suggesting several ways to understand it thereby as genuinely primary among the duties to oneself. (shrink)

We present a new axiomatization of classical mereology in which the three components of the theory—ordering, composition, and decomposition prin-ciples—are neatly separated. The equivalence of our axiom system with other, more familiar systems is established by purely deductive methods, along with additional results on the relative strengths of the composition and decomposition axioms of each theory.

Guideline 20 of the updated International Ethics Guidelines for Health‐related Research Involving Humans (2016) by the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) provides guidance on research in disasters and disease outbreaks against the background of the need to generate knowledge quickly, overcome practical impediments to implementing such research, and the need to maintain public trust. The guideline recommends that research ethics committees could pre‐screen study protocols to expedite ethical reviews in a situation of crisis, that pre‐arrangements be made (...) regarding data sharing and biomedical sample sharing, and that sponsors and research ethics committees seek to minimize risk to researchers conducting research during a disaster. This paper critiques these recommendations against the background of the findings of a survey of public health officials and chairs of research ethics committees in the Caribbean during 2016, which sought to determine the best template for the expeditious ethical review of research proposals in emergency and epidemic situations in the Caribbean, and whose findings can serve as a model for other low‐ and middle‐income countries. (shrink)

Only 19 new molecular entities and 3 biologics were approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2007, the lowest rate in 24 years. This disappointing output occurred despite steady clinical trial and regulatory review times, the FDA maintaining high approval rates, and the pharmaceutical industry consistently reporting increasing revenues. A government report suggests that fewer new drug applications have been submitted to the FDA by the pharmaceutical industry in recent years. These data have rekindled the debate as to (...) the origins of pharmaceutical innovation and the comparative importance of public and private sources in contributing to drug discovery. The pharmaceutical industry contends that its research is responsible for most new medicines, and that the primary public institution supporting U.S. biomedical research, the National Institutes of Health, supports medical innovation “distinct from the process of drug development.”. (shrink)

The “demos paradox” is the idea that the composition of a demos could never secure democratic legitimacy because the composition of a demos cannot itself be democratically decided. Those who view this problem as unsolvable argue that this insight allows them to adopt a critical perspective towards common ideas about who has legitimate standing to participate in democratic decision-making. We argue that the opposite is true and that endorsing the demos paradox actually undermines our ability to critically engage with common (...) ideas about legitimate standing. We challenge the conception of legitimacy that lurks behind the demos paradox and argue that the real impossibility is to endorse democracy without also being committed to significant procedure-independent standards for the legitimate composition of the demos. We show that trying to solve the problem of the demos by appeal to some normative conception of democratic legitimacy is a worthwhile project that is not undermined by paradox. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Peirce on Realism and Idealism by Robert LaneAaron B. WilsonPeirce on Realism and Idealism Robert Lane. Cambridge UP, 2018.Robert Lane's Peirce on Realism and Idealism is the ultimate secondary source for those who wish to engage the forms of realism and idealism that Peirce develops over the course of his writings. Lane could not have given his monograph a more concise and descriptive title. He never strays from (...) the topics of realism and idealism, and it is remarkably complete. It includes extensive discussion on Peirce's basic realism (Lane's term) as well as his extreme scholastic realism (Peirce's term), his basic idealism (Lane's term), and his objective idealism (Peirce's term). It might not be the best resource for those interested in the historical influences on Peirce's forms of realism and idealism. For instance, if one is interested mainly in Peirce's extreme scholastic realism and its roots in scholastic philosophy, Mayorga (2007)1 might still be a more useful resource. Also, Lane leaves much to be said about the epistemological underpinnings of Peirce's forms of realism and idealism. Peirce's theory of perception and his critical common-sensism do not get much attention. Also, there is much in Peirce's later semeiotic writings that could have been brought to bear on the issues.However, I do not see any of these omissions as failures of Lane's work. As I read it, the book's central aims are to determine the following: (1) what metaphysical views did Peirce hold, (2) when did he hold them, (3) are they consistent with one another, and (4) what is the textual evidence that he held them as such. With respect to these aims, Peirce on Realism and Idealism exhibits the gold standard of Peirce scholarship: it is remarkably sensitive to dates, different writings, and contexts of writings, and the reader gets a strong impression that Lane has not left any stone unturned—that he had at least skimmed every word in every lecture, published writing, letter, and unpublished manuscript that Peirce produced.Although the book contains some interpretations about which I have some reservations, which I describe further on, I agree with most of its central claims. This includes the claim that, despite various developments, Peirce had always subscribed to "basic realism": the thesis that there are things independent of what anyone thinks about them. A whole chapter is dedicated to showing that Peirce's 1868–1869 "anti-Cartesian" papers are consistent with basic realism, and I found that chapter very helpful. Another thesis that Lane defends, and that I strongly agree with, is that Peirce held a representationalist view of truth. Truth as "correspondence" with reality is one of two [End Page 107] key aspects of Peirce's account of truth (the other being, as Lane calls it, an "investigative aspect"). After works by Christopher Hookway, Cheryl Misak, and others that attempt to de-emphasize or obscure Peirce's representationalism, perhaps to make him more appealing to contemporary analytic "neopragmatists," it is absolutely refreshing to read a book that embraces Peirce's representationalism without apology.However, in the remainder of this review, I will focus on parts that I found troubling. Some of this trouble is probably due more to Peirce himself than to Lane's interpretation of Peirce. But some of it directly concerns Lane's interpretation. In particular, the parts of chapter 6 concerning Peirce's modal realism, while stimulating and enlightening, are also problematic. Further, I do not think that Lane's account of Peirce's idealism appropriately recognizes its similarity to Hegelian or Absolute idealism.To begin with Peirce's modal realism, Lane's discussion of it sets out by addressing the fact that, as Peirce recognizes, the conditionals comprising "pragmatic clarifications," or what result from applying the "pragmatic maxim" to a concept, must be in the hypothetical or subjunctive mood. This is in order to make sense of the truth of even indicative non-conditional propositions such as, to use Peirce's and Lane's example, "the diamond is hard." If the conditionals into which a concept is pragmatically clarified are in the indicative mood... (shrink)

In this article, I assess the current state of neuroaesthetics by reviewing 10 recent books on neuroscientific and evolutionary aspects of aesthetic cognition. These books largely continue the main thrust of this genre since its inception. Virtually all are insightful and thought-provoking, though their individual strengths vary. Among them, Shimamura and Palmer's edited book, Aesthetic Science, provides the most useful and balanced interdisciplinary framework, making philosophy and psychology equal partners with neuroscience. This pluralistic mode, dethroning neuroscience from its usual hegemony, (...) seems best poised to address heretofore neglected issues in neuroaesthetics research. I address several dichotomous tensions—high versus low art, the drive for creative innovation versus evolutionarily canalized aesthetic biases, and explicit versus implicit aspects of aesthetic cognition—to identify promising future research directions, which can best be fulfilled though interdisciplinary cooperation and debate, with a continued emphasis on evolutionary theory. (shrink)

Wonderful reflections on the history of Western thought.

Professor Beatrice Longuenesse draws our attention to the most important aspect of Kant's Critical Philosophy, namely that it is a system of logic.

Professor Phillipp H. Wiebe draws our attention to what aspects of our religious tradition is understandable by every human being on this planet.

In this article, I assess the current state of evolutionary aesthetics by reviewing four recent books by scholars in art history, literary studies, and psychology. Each book is humanistic in a broad sense. They all address evolutionary themes and share a commitment to understanding aesthetic experience via methodological pluralism, but they differ substantially in perspective and tone. That of Cupchik, a psychologist, expansively discusses the aesthetics of emotion. That of Rampley, an art historian, is the most polemical, with a strong (...) critique of the encroachment of biology into questions of cultural history. Those of Hogan and Aldama, both literary scholars, deal primarily with literature and are the most personal and ultimately the most thought-provoking. The collective humanistic perspective is a departure from more neuroscience-intensive recent volumes, and it highlights the importance of themes like the emergence of aesthetics from the interaction between nature and culture—potentially in different ways at different times throughout the phylogenetic history of our species. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer's Theological Recovery of the Cosmos by Keith LemnaAaron WilliamsThe Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer's Theological Recovery of the Cosmos by Keith Lemna (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico, 2019), xxx + 488 pp.Keith Lemna has done the theological world a great service. In The Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer's Theological Recovery of the Cosmos, he offers the English-speaking world for the first time a monograph (...) on the thought of the Oratorian Louis Bouyer. Bouyer is undoubtedly one of the theological giants of the twentieth century. Born in Paris in 1913, he was ordained a Lutheran pastor in 1936. After only three years as a Lutheran clergyman, he was received into the Catholic Church at the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Wandrille. Then ordained as an Oratorian priest in 1944, he taught from 1946 to 1962 at the Institut Catholique de Paris and abroad for the three decades following.1 He is most well-known for his work on the liturgy both before and after the Second Vatican Council. With fifty books to his name, including a nine-part synthesis on Christian doctrine, the breadth of his theological vision and work is astounding. In France he is considered one of the four preeminent theologians of the post-World War II era, and his theological contemporaries in Europe, such as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI, always held the Oratorian in high regard.2 Yet, in the English-speaking world, much of his work has gone without comment.3 Thankfully, into the void steps this excellent work by Lemna. [End Page 1353]Anyone familiar with the Bouyerian corpus knows the challenge of approaching it. With its vast array of subject matter, ranging from biblical to liturgical to historical to spiritual to speculative theology, one wonders whether there is any one thread woven throughout the varied strands, a single theme around which the whole sprawling corpus can be understood. In fact, there is, and Lemna has deftly identified it. For Bouyer, the fundamental question of theology is the world's relation to God.4 The structure of the first six books of his nine-part treatise on systematic theology attest to the priority of the question with the first three works addressing the question of the world, or the economy of creation and salvation, and the latter three works addressing the question of God, or theology properly speaking: the doctrine of the Trinitarian God. Interestingly, though Bouyer's work on theological cosmology, Cosmos, is the third book in the series, it was, in fact, the last of the six to be written. In this sense, as Lemna points out, "Cosmos is a capstone monograph... summarizing in important ways the decisive first six volumes" (xiv). Theological cosmology fully illuminates the God–world relation as Bouyer sees it, and since this relation sits at the heart of his thought, Cosmos is for Bouyer both his "most personal, as well as most speculative work" and indeed, "opens up the meaning of his other writings" beyond the dogmatic sphere (25). One could, then, scarcely choose a better entry point into the wide theological world of this "mind with a very special character," as Joseph Ratzinger saw him.5The Apocalypse of Wisdom is an expansive commentary on Bouyer's cosmology at the heart of which is a liturgical, even nuptial, vision of the whole of creation known and loved in the mind of God from all eternity, as the uncreated Wisdom of God. In creation God freely gives existence to the world ex nihilo, so that it might return to him in a liturgical song of praise and thanksgiving, as the Bride of his eternal Son, the eschatological and cosmic Church, created wisdom now made glorious and radiant through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. As Lemna puts it, "Bouyer shows that cosmology should be a pursuit of wisdom, but that Wisdom is ultimately a gift revealed or uncovered by means of apokalypsis in the re-creative interventions of the divine Word and Holy Spirit in history" (xvii). The wisdom of man seeking a unified vision of the whole of reality [End... (shrink)

Surprisingly often Kant asserts that it is possible to behave in such a degrading way that one ‘throws oneself away’ and turns oneself ‘into a thing’, as a result of which others may treat one ‘as they please’. Rather than dismiss these claims out of hand, I argue that they force us to reconsider what is meant and required by ‘respect for humanity’. I argue that to ‘throw away’ humanity is not to lose or extinguish it, but rather to refuse (...) or otherwise fail to claim the respect that it authorizes one to claim. If I refuse or fail to make this claim, there is a sense in which I become a thing, and I leave others no choice but to treat me as such. This is compatible with their respect for humanity in my person. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Wilhelm Griesinger”Aaron L. Mishara (bio)Arens situates Wilhelm Griesinger in a historical context with which we are no longer familiar. In doing so, she has performed an important task for contemporary clinicians, philosophers, and historians. We find ourselves working and thinking (both in everyday clinical practice and in the construction of our models of mental disorder) with the same categories that Griesinger struggled to sort out and (...) redefine; we often do so, however, without awareness of their history or lack of permanence. Ackerknecht writes that all the dominant trends in modern psychiatry can be traced back to Griesinger; he states that Griesinger is the “founder of neuropsychiatry,” a “merging of the two disciplines” neurology and psychiatry. Griesinger presents us with a “systematic synthesis of the anatomical, physiological, psychological and clinical points of view” (Ackerknecht 1959, 63). Somewhat contrarily, Karl Jaspers, in his General Psychopathology, groups Griesinger with the great observers and describers of clinical experience rather than among the systematic analyzers (Jaspers 1963, 849–50). Although Griesinger is best known for his identification of mental disorders as a subset of brain diseases, Karl Bonhoeffer, a successor to Griesinger as director of the Charité Clinic in Berlin, cautions that Griesinger “continued to see in psychological causes the most frequent and abundant source of mental disorders” (Bonhoeffer 1911, 53). Kales, Kales, and Vela-Bueno, however, write, “Griesinger was representative of a clinical movement that minimized the value of psychological concepts in the understanding of mental diseases” (Kales, Kales, and Vela-Bueno 1990, 15). Precisely because of his importance, contention surrounds his legacy.If Griesinger is the pioneer of empirical approaches in biological neuropsychiatry (as Ackerknecht and others claim), he is also precursor to philosophical criticisms of their limits. It is not so easy to lump Griesinger to one side of the oppositions with which we think today: Griesinger’s scientific psychiatry (formed on the basis of the newly emergent empirical physiology) was meant to steer between the Scylla of the previously reigning overspeculative romantic medicine and the Charybdis of the antitheoretical and “positivistic” materialism of Magendie. As Arens suggests, even during the same generation of university psychiatry which Griesinger was critical in forming, he was posthumously denounced as belonging to the Hegelian idealists; later, he was proclaimed to be an empiricist. Griesinger’s work contained both idealism and empiricism in a fragile synthesis that soon broke asunder.Hermeneutic theory points out that we inevitably interpret an author, in this case, Griesinger, in terms of the prejudices of our own present context of understanding and our current problems of application to clinical practice (Gadamer 1993). On the one hand, we benefit from the advantage of seeing all that follows Griesinger’s work and are able to “understand the author [End Page 165] better than he understood himself.” We are able to see what he only anticipates but is still not able to explicitly articulate as the unpredicted effects of his work. On the other hand, our interpretations are encumbered by the sedimentations of the views of his successors: his work lies buried under the subsequent interpretations and vicissitudes of a reception with its own agendas, contexts of interpretation, and realms of application. It would be easier if we could simply assign him to one side of our current debates concerning mind/body, individual/culture, and explanation/understanding rather than seeing that our present quandaries in understanding, classifying, and treating mental disorder result precisely from a reading of Griesinger that is not careful enough. It is here that Arens can help us develop our present views further by reviewing their past.Although Griesinger is heralded as the pioneer of an empirical physiological approach which employs a natural scientific concept of mechanism (Ackerknecht, O. Marx, Verwey), Arens situates him in the tradition of Kant and German idealism. It is perhaps this solution of being both philosophical and empirical which seems hard for us, today, to understand. We have come to view these directions as contradictory, to be necessarily in a mutually exclusive relationship. (But that is rather the expression of the present impasse and not the way that Griesinger originally approached these problems.) Arens ambitiously retraces the genealogy of Griesinger’s model... (shrink)

The Radical Behavioral Challenge (RBC) contends that due to normal human cognitive biases, many standard prescriptions of business ethics run afoul of the principle that ‘ought implies can.’ Von Kriegstein responds to this challenge by arguing that those prescriptions are wide-scope obligations that can be fulfilled by recusing oneself or by establishing appropriate safeguards. I argue that this solution falls short of fully resolving the RBC because individuals will often be incapable of recognizing when they are biased and incapable of (...) establishing appropriate safeguards. (shrink)

This thesis, titled ‘Across May ’68; Reading friendships in Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination and Glas’, challenges the claims of a ‘political turn’ occurring for only the first time in Jacques Derrida’s writings in the 1980s, with many citing his ordeal in Prague in 1981 as catalysing this turn. While his writings may be thought to become more explicit in the 1980s and 1990s—a turbulent decade that indeed encompassed polemics against and, even within, the coterie of Deconstruction, over the Paul de Man (...) and Martin Heidegger revelations —Politics of Friendship, and Spectres of Marx being examples, this leaves much of his earlier work unconsidered in terms of its impact on Derrida’s later political outlook. The thesis rereads and contextualises two texts, 1972’s Dissemination and 1974’s Glas, in conjunction with a selection of contemporaneous essays, reading these retrospectively through Politics of Friendship and Spectres of Marx, and traces Derrida’s diverging relationships with Philippe Sollers and the journal Tel Quel, against the intense political period in France now known as ‘May 1968’. My thesis reads in chronological order each essay from Dissemination as representing stages of a developing written praxis Derrida will call ‘dissemination’, arguing that, in the context of his relationship with Sollers and Tel Quel, the text Dissemination marks the political hinge in his writings, constitutive of a radical supplementary political praxis that, ultimately, did not finish even with his departure from Tel Quel in early-1972 but continued some years after in his work in providing a vital impetus to the writing of Glas. My thesis provides a socio-historical and political context to Derrida’s philosophy—from the time of his working in tandem with Sollers, through to writing as a supplementary political praxis to Tel Quel following his departure. In ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. My thesis traces, in the Polis, a link between writing and political friendships and ‘phallogocentrism’. The thesis connects ‘Double Session’ and its discussions of Mallarmé’s ‘mimicry without referent’ to Derrida’s interrogation into then-current modes of philosophico-literary writing; especially those of Tel Quel. The thesis then reads ‘Dissemination’ and its review/rereading of Sollers’ 1968 novel Numbers—which is itself a text informed by the intellectual reactions and reflections to the politicised context of 1960s Paris. Derrida ‘opens’ Numbers, dissipating its ideological fervour for a political community that is inherently homogeneous and closed to the ‘other’, by placing key motifs in the text under chiasma, opening up its writing to the infinite ‘otherness’ of metaphysics. My thesis reads ‘Outwork’ as a discussion of writing that unravels demarcations and limits between inside and out. In doing so, I argue, Dissemination anticipates the multi-surfaces and margins of Glas and its discussion of stratified politics limits. My thesis reads Glas as a culmination and perpetuation of the praxis developed in Dissemination that proposes a political encounter of the ‘other’ based upon distance as well as proximity, and dialogue through its paratextual and symbolic typography. Glas is read as antecedent of a deconstructed political community, an ethics, and a responsibility that gestures an openness to dialogue with Sollers and Tel Quel, while also disproving Derrida’s purported political silence around May 1968. My thesis argues Glas is open to futurity, hopeful for a renewed political encounter, even if this involves a betrayal of the very notion of friendship for the sake of an-other friendship not tied by bonds of political solidarity, and ultimately reactionary aspirations for a shared communitarian project that, inevitably, represses difference. The thesis argues that this period initiates the emergence of a deconstructed politics by Derrida based upon a profound understanding of the structures underpinning the popularist riots—particularly as a re-evaluation of the Marxist and Maoist discussions that were prevalent in the intellectual reactions to the period. (shrink)

Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 0, Issue 0, Page 1-4, Ahead of Print.

Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s (2000) brings fast food under poetry’s interrogational gaze, revealing a strange world of idealized hamburgers and erotically infused Frosties. Through a close reading of four poems and aided by Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964) I explore the implications of a mechanized repetition and idealized imagery which asserts itself at every stage in Western capitalism, from production to consumption. Poetry, in its engagement with the ambiguities of language, has the ability to question this process not by (...) denying it, but rather by assuming the claims which arise out of this method of production and displaying their incongruities from within. Therefore poetic works like Letters to Wendy’s serve as important critical texts where no critique currently exists. (shrink)