This paper argues for the proposition that there is fundamental incoherence in the idea of a divine designer. Such a being would have to have intentions and thoughts prior to designing and making a world. But it is a necessary truth that thought – of the complex and articulated kind necessary for the design of a cosmos – presupposes possession of language. It is further necessarily true that language is impossible, save for beings who inhabit a public world containing other (...) linguistic subjects. The divine designer would be the impossible exemplar of the private language, whose incoherence was demonstrated by Wittgenstein. Objections to this line of argument are noted and rebutted. Even God can't whisper in His own ear.Isaak Babel (Published Online February 17 2004). (shrink)

Chinese and Greco-Roman ethics present highly articulate views on how one should live; both of these traditions remain influential in modern philosophy. The question arises how these traditions can be compared with one another. Comparative ethics is a relatively young discipline; this volume is a major contribution to the field. Fundamental questions about the nature of comparing ethics are treated in two introductory chapters, and core issues in each of the traditions are addressed: harmony, virtue, friendship, knowledge, the relation of (...) ethics to morality, relativism, emotions, being and unity, simplicity and complexity, and prediction. (shrink)

In this paper we reach back to an earlier generation of discussions about both linguistic meaning and moral language to answer the still-current question as to whether and in what way some special non-descriptive feature comprises part of the semantics of identifiably ethical terms. Taking off from the failure of familiar meta-ethical theories, restricted as they are to the Fregean categories of Sense and Force (whether singly or in combination), we propose that one particular variety belonging to Frege’s humble semantic (...) category of Farbung –– what Dummett calls Tone –– holds the key. Specifically, the kinds of expressions that Dummett dubs “expressives”, when properly understood as representing a speaker’s sentiment, solve the mystery not only of moral discourse, but of evaluative language, broadly construed. On this basis we account for moral language’s special relation to action motivation in ways that avoid Moore’s paradox and honor, in unasserted contexts, what Geach calls ‘the Frege point’. Commitments to the public and social character of natural language are also respected. (shrink)

This article examines the extent to which diversity characteristics and stakeholder role influence individuals’ corporate social orientation (CSO). Our findings indicate that one’s relationship to the organization as well as diversity, gender, and race influence one’s CSO. Specifically, we found that employees’ greatest concern was economic whereas customers had a stronger ethical orientation. The results also suggest that women as well as Black employees and customers place more emphasis on whether an organization is fulfilling its discretionary responsibilities than do males (...) and Whites. A model using the concept of value congruence is presented to guide future research. (shrink)

Comparisons of indirect measures with direct measures can help elucidate the relationship between nonconscious and conscious perception. We report three experiments on masked word priming in which we observed a negative correlation between prime discriminability and priming , i.e. where priming decreased with increasing prime visibility. While such observations are rare , they may indicate a conflict between conscious and nonconscious processing when primes are shown close to the subjective visibility threshold for the priming-relevant information. For instance, such a conflict (...) could occur between nonconscious processing of a prime’s meaning and conscious perception of prime letters. Theoretical accounts that discuss similar conflicts assume that the conflict is resolved either by automatically prioritising conscious processes or by discounting the estimated confusion caused by a prime-target pair . In both cases, priming is predicted to decrease when prime visibility increases from below threshold to perithreshold levels. Therefore, we suggest that negative priming-d’ relationships are most likely observed when the d’ measure assesses prime visibility at a level of representation that is below the level of representation at which priming arises, in terms of a putative hierarchy of word processing. (shrink)

In the legal domain, ontologies enjoy quite some reputation as a way to model normative knowledge about laws and jurisprudence. This paper describes the methodology followed when developing the ontology used by the second version of the prototype Iuriservice, a web-based intelligent FAQ for judicial use. This modeling methodology has had two important requirements: on the one hand, the ontology needed to be extracted from a repository of professional judicial knowledge (containing nearly 800 questions regarding daily practice). Thus, the construction (...) of ontologies of professional judicial knowledge demanded the description of this knowledge as it is perceived by the judge. On the other hand, due to the distributiveness of the environment, there was a need for controlled discussion and traceability of the arguments used in favor or against the introduction of a concept X as part of the domain ontology. This paper presents the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK), extracted manually from the selection of relevant terms from judicial practice questions and modeled according to the DILIGENT methodology. We will show that DILIGENT has proved to be a methodology that facilitates the ontology engineering in a distributed environment, although appropriate tool support needs to be developed. (shrink)

This paper investigates the link between (radical) evil and the existence of God. Arguing with contemporary atheist thinkers, such as Richard Dawkins and Victor Stenger, I hold that one can take the existence of evil as a sign of the existence of God rather than its opposite. The work of Immanuel Kant, especially his thought on evil, is a fertile source to enliven this intuition. Kant implicitly seems to argue that because man is unable to overcome evil by himself, (...) there is a need for God to bridge the gap. Si Deus est, unde malum? Si malum est, Deus est! (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 43 Heft: 1 Seiten: 200-212.

A recent dispute between Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson concerning fundamental concepts in sociobiology is examined. It is argued that sociobiology has not fared well since the 1970s, and that its survival as a ‘scientific’ perspective has been increasingly tenuous. This is, at least in part, because it has failed to move forward in the ways its developers anticipated, but also because it has not seen the developments in natural history, genomics and social science it was relying upon. (...) It is argued that sociobiology has become a purely utilitarian perspective, a way of looking at things, reliant increasingly on studies of the behaviour of social insects for its scientific credentials. The dispute between Dawkins and Wilson is then reconsidered in this light, and it is argued that – regardless of which position prevails – sociobiology’s parlous state as a means of explaining action is now difficult to disguise. (shrink)

Interview with Richard Rorty, April 1997, Amsterdam. Occasion for the interview was Rorty being the occupant of the Spinoza Chair in 1997. The interview is mostly about Rorty's paper 'The Intellectuals and the Poor', in which he criticises the politics of left-wing academics.

The paper is a response to Richard De George's essay, Theological Ethics and Business Ethics. It defends the possibility of theologically oriented approaches to business ethics by pointing out certain deficiencies in business ethics narrowly based on the premisses of analytic moral philosophy. In particular it argues, in a manner consistent with Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981), that such a program of business ethics is insufficiently critical of its own roots in the social fiction of bureaucratic rationality. After showing (...) how this ideology governs De George's negative judgments on theological approaches to business ethics, the author outlines a program of critical reflection that would draw from the intellectual traditions of both theology and philosophy in order to facilitate a dialogue in business ethics that no longer is captive in the Iron Cage of bureaucratic rationality. (shrink)

I have two aims. I want to show first that a proper understanding and use of irony can enrich the aesthetic imagination and, second, that Søren Kierkegaard's description of irony rather than Richard Rorty's better explains how irony enriches the aesthetic imagination. The paper's central claim is that aesthetic imagination springs from experiencing the necessary tension between appearances and reality and that irony, correctly employed, accentuates in our thinking the imagination required to keep this tension in our representations, thereby (...) enabling the aesthetic imagination to grow.Immanuel Kant claims that the aesthetic judgment is an act of the imagination, not of the understanding: In order to distinguish... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Ted Bundy and Dennis Rader Psychopaths versus Psychotics The Psychopath Language and the Emotional Brain Empathy, Lack of Shame, Insincerity Fantasies The Serial Killer and Nietzsche.

In reading biographies or accounts of figures with which one agrees and sympathizes, there is a tendency that needs to be avoided, that is, of over -identifying with the figures in question and of too closely mapping one's own life and aspirations onto them.As such, there is some risk involved for a person like me in reading about the friendship between David Hume and Adam Smith. Dennis C. Rasmussen's excellent new volume, The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam (...) Smith, and the Friendship that Shaped Modern Thought, chronicles that friendship in an engaging and compelling narrative. The work is thoroughly researched and entertainingly written. Rasmussen uses the extant correspondence between Smith and... (shrink)

This article provides background material to help readers appreciate three speeches printed in this issue, given by Stefan Morawski, Dennis Smith and Hans Joas on the occasion of the presentation to Zygmunt Bauman of a Festschrift in March 1996 in Leeds. The article describes: relevant details of Polish history concerning cultural patriotism, anti-state attitudes, the role of Jews in the communist state apparatus and anti-Semitism, focusing on post-1945; the peculiarities of the indigenous British sociology tradition and the part played (...) by exiles in shaping it; a profile of the `successful outsider'; and the implications of Bauman's recent work on the Holocaust for the Sonderweg thesis about German history and the Historikerstreit, which are also sketched. It concludes that far from being a `homeless intellectual', Bauman has two homes, perhaps reflecting the wider integrating process of Eastern and Western Europe, until recently separated by a gulf. (shrink)

Dennis C. Rasmussen has produced an excellent account of “the greatest of all philosophical friendships” between two of the great thinkers of the underappreciated “Scottish Enlightenment”, Adam Smith, Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, and, in his The Wealth of Nations, often seen as the founder of capitalism and creator of the modern science of economics, and David Hume, who never became an academic but who took “British Empiricism” to its logical sceptical conclusion and is often (...) seen as the most influential philosopher ever to write in the English language. -/- The book covers the span between Smith’s and Hume’s first meeting in 1749 until Smith’s eulogy upon Hume’s death in 1776. It describes how they commented on each other’s work, supported each other’s careers and literary ambitions and advised each other on personal issues. They had many of the same friends, joined the same clubs, and were interested in many of the same subjects beyond philosophy, including psychology, history, politics and Britain’s conflict with the American colonies. -/- Each chapter focuses on an historical episode and theme, beginning with an introduction to Hume and his works (Chap. 1), Smith’s discovery of Hume’s writings and acquaintance with Hume (Chap. 2), their developing friendship (Chap. 3), Hume’s conflict with the Church of Scotland (Chap. 4), Smith’s work on The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Chap. 5), Hume’s fruitful sojourn in France (Chap. 6), Hume’s friendship and eventual conflict with the moody paranoid Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chap. 7), the last years of Hume’s and Smith’s friendship (Chap. 8), Smith’s publication of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chap. 9), the dispute over Smith’s reluctance to publish Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Chap. 10), Hume’s final days (Chap. 11), Smith’s Eulogy to Hume (Chap. 12), and Smith’s final years in Edinburgh (Epilogue). (shrink)

Somewhere between hagiography and debunking lies truth. Or so we may think: the biographer’s sources are almost always tipped one way or the other, and it is his or her job to establish, or divine, the way of authentic fact and, if facts fall short, then of sturdy sober hypothesis. In general the debunker has more fun, especially when the weight of tradition favors the ennobling, if not the beatification, of its subject.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.1 (2000) 106-123 [Access article in PDF] The (Mis)Uses of Cannibalism in Contemporary Cultural Critique C. Richard King At least since 1979, when W. Arens demystified what he termed "the man-eating myth," cannibalism, once a fundamental feature of the anthropological imagination and a primary trope for interpreting cultural difference, has become subject to serious debate and lingering doubt [see Osborne]. Even as some anthropologists have sought to (...) recuperate anthropophagy as a tangible symbolic, ideological, and ritual complex [Brown and Tuzin; Conklin, "'Thus are our Bodies'"; Forsyth; Harris, Good to Eat 199-234; Sanday], a constellation of scholarly projects and popular works has complicated cannibalism by relocating it in the West. Perhaps most visibly, Hollywood cinema has reclaimed cannibalism. Although a handful of films have revived well-worn clichés of dark-skinned savages preparing to consume Westerners, as in King Solomon's Mines and Crocodile Dundee, others have cast the Western subject as cannibal to grapple with the horrors of reluctant cannibalism, as in Alive! [see Fiddes 121-31], to work through the transgressive and terrifying desires associated with psychopathic cannibalism, as in The Silence of the Lambs [Fuss; Halberstam], and importantly to parody the normative beliefs and behaviors of white, middle-class, heterosexual EuroAmericans, as in Eating Raoul and Parents. At the same time, an array of scholars, artists, and activists have invoked cannibalism to fashion critical perspectives on Western cultural practices. In his film Cannibal Tours (1987), Dennis O'Rourke encourages his audiences to think critically about tourists who travel to the Sepik River Valley to encounter reformed cannibals, asking implicitly who the cannibals are, the Melanesians who formerly (were thought to/claim to have) practiced anthropophagy or the tourists who travel to New Guinea to consume them [see Bruner]. Others have pushed the metaphor. Michael Ames, borrowing explicitly from O'Rourke, uses the cannibal to reframe ethnographic museums and their practices. Similarly, Jane Tompkins asserts that "Museums are a form of cannibalism made safe for polite society" [533]. More generally, Crystal Bartolovich playfully glosses consumerism as the cultural logic of the late cannibalism; bell hooks speaks of the EuroAmerican desires for and incorporation of things ethnic as "eating the other"; and Rosalind Morris suggests that cannibalism is the essential metaphor for late capitalism. More telling, however, are a set of overlapping critical projects that offer detailed theorizations [End Page 106] [Begin Page 108] of contemporary anthropophagy. Here, I will examine three that have had an important impact on discussions of tourism, museums, cultural appropriation, and consumption. Dean MacCannell, in an exciting exploratory review of the documentary Cannibal Tours, makes explicit what O'Rourke left unsaid: we are cannibals, and contemporary capitalism is neocannibalism. Perhaps more radically, Jack Forbes argues that Western civilization fosters cannibalism as an embodied, psychosocial condition or psychosis rooted in exploitation and consumption. Inspired at least in part by Forbes, Deborah Root rethinks Western civilization as cannibal culture.Although I am terribly sympathetic with these perspectives, particularly their political commitments and theoretical creativity, I am disturbed by the practices and effects that animate them. Indeed, as powerful as this critical field promises to be, it is at the same time troubling and dangerous. Although it defamiliarizes practices of cultural production and consumption, it does not enhance understanding of the contexts in which individuals and institutions deploy them and does less to effectively challenge or undermine them. In reframing beliefs and behaviors to accentuate productivity and power, it reinstates and reaffirms binaries and, worse, often turns on the same forms of appropriation.* * *Arguably, flesh eating has always promoted the elaborations of differences. Works central to the Western canon mobilize cannibalism to make (sense of) the world. Herodotus offers an early anthropophagic distinction:These Scythian husbandmen then occupy the country eastward for three days' journey.... Beyond this region the country is desert for a great distance; and beyond the desert Androphagi dwell.... The Androphagi have the most savage customs of all men; they pay no regard to justice, nor make use of any established law. They are nomads and wear a dress like a Scythian; they... (shrink)

Urbicius' Epitedeuma is a short pamphlet offering military advice during the reign of the emperor Anastasius (491–518). Although it is included in some of the manuscripts of Maurice's Strategikon, it was not printed by Dennis and Gamillscheg in their recent edition. The only modern text we know of was published by Mihăescu in his 1970 edition of Maurice's Strategikon, along with a Romanian translation. The next most recent text of Urbicius is in Scheffer's 1664 edition. Furthermore, the most easily (...) accessible English discussion of Urbicius, in PLRE 2, contains several errors. Here we present an introduction to, a text and English translation of, and commentary on, this neglected work. (shrink)

What is intellectual humility? In this essay, we aim to answer this question by assessing several contemporary accounts of intellectual humility, developing our own account, offering two reasons for our account, and meeting two objections and solving one puzzle.

This paper extends several themes from recent work on norms of assertion. It does as much by applying those themes to the speech act of asking. In particular, it argues for the view that there is a species of asking which is governed by a certain norm, a norm to the effect that one should ask a question only if one doesn’t know its answer.

The compatibility of evolution with Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics is defended in response to Fr. Michal Chaberek’s thesis of incompatibility. The motivation and structure of Darwin’s theory are reviewed, including the roles of secondary causality, randomness and necessity. “Randomness” is an analogous term whose evolutionary use, while challenging, is fully compatible with theism. Evolution’s necessity derives from the laws of nature, which are intentional realities, the vehicle of divine providence. Methodological analysis shows that metaphysics lacks the evidentiary basis to judge biological theories. (...) Species are entia rationis whose immutability does not conflict with the evolutionary succession of biological populations. While Darwin’s theory was unknown to Aquinas, he endorses the possibility of new species immanent in the initial state of the universe, nor does his understanding of exemplar ideas offer ground for objection. Finally, five arguments given by Fr. Chaberek are answered. (shrink)